Books

It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood. Youth goes: the skin fades, the face slackens, the lower back begins to groan in protest. The world dims and we dim with it. Yet generally speaking, we’re as personally winded by that realisation as we are indifferent to it in others. When everyone suffers, no one cares. Why should I bother with someone else’s wasted youth? I’ve got one of my own right here. Still, I was intrigued by the appearance of Once Upon a Time at… Bennington College, an eight-part oral history of three literary superstars’ time at

It is 40 years ago today since Granada’s masterly adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited first beamed into British homes. This 11-part serialisation of a book originally entitled A Household of the Faith soon gathered millions of faithful householders. The autumn of 1981 was an especially cold and wet one and it was still too soon in the Thatcher premiership for her patron saint, Francis of Assisi, to have worked his magic. So while ITV was not able to deliver harmony, truth, faith or hope, it certainly provided 659 minutes of romantic escapism. It began very soberly with the credits — a simple black screen announcing the first episode’s actors in stark white script — propelled only by Geoffrey Burgon’s majestic score. The opening scene —

All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts, of course. Lowe’s ‘luck’ is that he happens to be friends, neighbours, or have starred, with everyone he interviews Let’s start with Literally! With Rob Lowe. An hour-long conversation between the most swoonable actor in the world who we’ve all forgotten, and everyone he knows and likes, from Alec Baldwin and Oprah Winfrey to St Elmo’s Fire co-star Demi Moore. It’s a wonderful and eye-opening listen. Lowe combines the enthusiasm and curiosity of the best interviewers with a knowledge and experience that makes conversation flow until the cup spilleth over.

You probably won’t have heard about sensitivity readers, but across the pond they are already an essential part of fiction. Sensitivity readers are freelance copy editors who publishers pay to cancel-proof their new books. They read books that feature identities or experiences that are outside of the lived experience of the author. They then critique the writing through the prism of what they claim to be their own authoritative life experience to guide the author toward more authentic representation. For example, the white author Jodi Picoult used a sensitivity reader for her novel about a black nurse who cares for the children of white supremacists. For critics, these individuals are

Ken Burns made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, the justly celebrated 11-and-a-half-hour documentary series that gave America’s proudly niche PBS channel the biggest ratings in its history. Since then, he’s tackled several other big American subjects like jazz, Prohibition and Vietnam; and all without ever changing his style. In contrast to, say, Adam Curtis (another ambitious film-maker whose methods have remained unchanged for 30 years), Burns’s documentaries take an almost defiantly considered approach, forgoing anything resembling self-regarding flashiness in favour of such old-school techniques as knowledgeable talking heads, careful chronology and straightforwardly appropriate visuals. Hemingway, his new six-parter being shown on BBC4, duly fails to mark a

Nina Hamnett is in vogue again. She is the subject of a new pocket biography, no. 7 in Eiderdown Books’s Modern Women Artists series, and her first ever retrospective is now open at Charleston Farmhouse’s gallery space. I confess I didn’t know much about her before this resurrection, but she is now one of my favourite 20th-century artists. In this bucolic gallery space, where cows can be heard bellowing, her portraits are at last hanging together, like a cocktail party finally regrouped. The colours are subtle, beautiful without being decorative; as the co-curator Alicia Foster explains, Hamnett’s use of colour is ‘meaningful, incisive’. Her circus paintings are thick with atmosphere,

There is a famous story about David Storey. It is set in 1976 at the Royal Court where, for ten years, his plays had first been seen before heading away to the West End and Broadway. That same week he had won the Booker Prize with his novel Saville. With unrivalled success across fiction, theatre and cinema, Storey was a giant of postwar English culture. He was also, compared with most writers, an actual giant. This Sporting Life, his novel made into a groundbreaking film, grew out of his experience of playing rugby league for Leeds. Unlike Saville, his new play Mother’s Day was greeted by a raspberry fanfare after

‘The World’s Most Lavish Art Book’ is a pretty big claim, but when two men lugged it through my front door I conceded that The Sistine Chapel is one monster tome. Three, actually. Three hardback volumes, each two feet-tall, each weighing nearly two stone, each in its own calico bag, comprising of digitally perfect photographic recreations of the artwork in the 15th-century chapel. The first volume deals with the masterpieces along the walls, while volumes two and three are a quasi-Greatest Hits, one covering the Sistine ceiling and one the ‘Last Judgment’, both of course by Michelangelo and one of the most famous art sequences on the planet. Lavish, yes,

Many things are now normal that would have seemed unlikely a year ago. But even in this strange new world the sudden rise of the sea shanty is, perhaps, strangest of all. It all started in December when Nathan Evans, a postman from North Lanarkshire, posted a video of himself online — a lone figure filmed in no-frills close-up, hoodie high under the chin, beanie pulled down to the eyes — singing the 19th-century whaling song ‘Wellerman’. A trickle of views became a storm, thousands turning to millions (now billions) and just like that sea shanties went from kitsch, Last Night of the Proms novelty to global phenomenon. The song