This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’
In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Bernard Mandeville,
‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the
The talented military historian Max Boot has published a well-researched life of Ronald Reagan that is fundamentally wrong. First the good parts: he has combed through lots of archives finding new information and has interviewed countless people who worked with or knew Reagan. His style also bears the reader effortlessly along. Yet his claim that
The biggest blockbuster hit of the Elizabethan theatre was not by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson. In fact it wasn’t by anyone. The Spanish Tragedy, a sturdy play of rhetoric, blood and revenge, was published in multiple editions without any attribution at all. Its central figure, Hieronimo, was a cultural phenomenon, but
The tale of Credit Suisse ought to be Buddenbrooks on steroids. A staid Swiss lender enters marriage with a racy Wall Street investment bank and gives birth to a monster. Scandal follows scandal. CEOs come and go. In March 2023, the bank ends up being flogged to its arch rival UBS for a miserly $3
James Baldwin matters. To veteran Baldwin admirers, his renewed prominence comes as a surprise after decades of indifference. This year, in the centenary of his birth in Harlem, Baldwin has seemed to matter more than at any time since his heyday, when he combined the roles of writer and civil rights spokesman. Between 1961 and
I don’t approve of ghosts, from the sublime (I generally just mouth the words ‘Holy Ghost’ in church, as I don’t want to pledge allegiance to something I can’t help but envision looking like the traditional sheet-based model) to the ridiculous (I would charge all ‘mediums’ with fraud). If ghosts were invariably like poltergeists (the
Every Christmas the proportion of money we spend online escalates. This year probably more than a third of all our festive gifts and food will be sourced via the internet. With this will go the usual hand-wringing about consumerism causing neighbourhoods to become clogged up with delivery vans and the death of our high street.
‘Cela me revolte,’ wrote Queen Victoria in her diary in 1894 when her adored granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse announced her engagement to the Tsarevich Nicholas, ‘to feel that she has been taken possession of and carried away by those Russians.’ The sisters all look alike in the photos: uncomfortable dress, priceless jewellery, grimace, hair in
I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather
Many reviewers start work with a peek at the book’s index. Here you find Gladys Goose Lamp, Choo Choo Chain and Dynamite Candles – novelty gifts (the ‘executive toys’ of the title) that made a small fortune for their creators. You might therefore think this a very slight book – so slight that its value
This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein: I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of
How many can you spot? For answers, click here
The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of –
We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist
The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’
Colour, the painter Patrick Heron once proclaimed, is a continent that artists have yet to explore. The mammoth two-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen, £150) catalogues numerous attempts to map this mysterious chromatic domain, from the late 17th century to the mid 20th. It quickly becomes clear that this area is infinitely vast. One
Fans of that beloved British cultural institution Doctor Who are wont to talk about ‘their’ doctor – that is, which iteration of the character was their entry point to the franchise. The same might be said of fans of Neil Innes, the much loved songwriter, musician and comedian who died in 2019, aged 75. Creating
You have been warned. First, David Butterfield has excoriated Cambridge University in these pages, leaving its standing devalued. Now Julian Stannard, a poet and novelist, delivers in fiction a devastating evisceration of other current universities. The University of Bliss belies its title. This is a work of high satire and Stannard vents his frustration with