The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Early on in his introduction of nearly 60 pages, Owen Hatherley writes: ‘I find the Britain promised by Brexiters quite terrifying — xenophobic, paranoid, enclosed, pitifully nostalgic, cruel. But in much of the country that landscape never went away.’ One’s heart sinks. This isn’t even polemical; it’s just silly. The introduction, subtitled ‘What is a
The humble title of Seymour Hersh’s memoir is somewhat at odds with the tone of the book. He says the celebrated New York Times Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam once wrote to him saying: ‘You are, my friend, a national treasure. Bless you.’ Another New York Times star, Harrison Salisbury, is quoted in reference to
‘Help!’ I thought, when I read the Author’s Note. ‘It’s about salmon, and I hate fishing.’ But by the first page I was hooked. Adam Weymouth writes well. He is poetic, but also precise. His subject is the return of the ‘king’ salmon to their birthplace and final destination, the north ridge of McNeil Lake
Publication of a debut novel is an experience comparable with the birth of a first child. Literary gestation is normally a longer process, and delivery of a book is more deeply fraught. Here is some evidence that the labour can be worthwhile. Asymmetry (Granta, £14.99) by Lisa Halliday, a young American now living in Milan,
It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me the most beguiling novels that have zipped across the Atlantic in the past half-century or so are mostly about groups, specifically groups on campus, usually a rather classy campus at that. Mary McCarthy’s Group were
In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world. ‘If I had a dollar,’ he mused, ‘for every time I’d heard someone say, “Why aren’t you more well known?…”’ Looking back on his reviews, you can certainly see what he means. For more than
The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated
Asked how he achieves the distinctive realism for which his novels and screenplays are famous, Richard Price, that sharp chronicler of the American underbelly, tends to cite Damon Runyon’s biographer Jimmy Breslin, who said that Runyon ‘did what all good journalists do — he hung out’. Set in the brutal confines of the Stanville Women’s
Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck
Here’s a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the dank, wind-lashed chill of Britain’s moorland for eight of the world’s fieriest deserts, from the Empty Quarter of Oman and Egypt’s Eastern Desert to the Taklamakan in China and an unlikely stint at Burning Man
The first episode of A Very English Scandal (BBC1), the story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair, was brilliant. So often, dramas about the past suffer from the disbenefit of hindsight. They use the dead as mannequins to wear their contemporary thoughts and attitudes. History, in their hands, is a form of what is now called ‘cultural appropriation’,
A most excellent fellow, Roger Allam. On the stage he brings dignity to all he does, in the noblest traditions of the British theatre. Off it he is a fully paid-up member of the human race, admired by his comrades as a man no less than as an actor. Some mummers, eager to let off
Edie tells the story of an 84-year-old woman who wants to fulfil a girlhood ambition by climbing a Scottish mountain. It stars the wonderful Sheila Hancock who has been criminally underused cinematically down the years — ‘I wasn’t considered attractive enough,’ she recently said. As there are anyway too few films featuring older women with
There is no such thing as a moderately good performance of Madama Butterfly, or, to be more precise, it’s not possible to be slightly or rather moved by a performance. As with some of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of Wagner’s music-dramas, one is either shaken and overcome, or refrigerated and indifferent. So it’s sad to
The Royal Ballet’s 2016 Frankenstein was a masterclass in how not to make narrative dance and the news that Liam Scarlett had been chosen to spring-clean and ‘reimagine’ Swan Lake had many balletomanes reaching for the smelling salts (it doesn’t take much, to be honest). It was sighs of relief and trebles all round when
The Bridge’s big summer show is Nightfall by prize-winning newcomer Barney Norris. Widowed Jenny wants her grown-up kids, Lou and Ryan, to help her run their farm in Hampshire following their dad’s death. But Lou’s boyfriend, Pete, has been offered work abroad. That’s the only major snag in this low-wattage rustic melodrama. The back story
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little, so you can imagine how sickened I was by the magisterial TV adaptation of John Preston’s A Very English Scandal (BBC1, Sundays). I’ve known Preston for years. It’s himI have to thank for the compendious collection of CDs rotting in my attic, from the ten years
‘Do you ever imagine your audience?’ was a question thrown at James Ward, creator and presenter of The Boring Talks podcast, at a recent seminar on podcasting organised by the BBC. ‘I try not to,’ Ward replied.‘I wouldn’t want to meet them.’ Such antipathy is all part of Ward’s alternative persona. The Boring Talks’s USP
No wonder we have a problem with classical music in this country. The week started in celebration. The stats are in and it turns out that Radio 3’s breakfast show has enjoyed a rise of some 64,000 listeners — a not-to-be-sniffed-at11 per cent increase on last year. Meanwhile Classic FM’s listenership is also up significantly,
What is the Royal Academy? This question set me thinking as I wandered through the crowds that celebrated the opening of the RA’s new, greatly extended building. After all, there is nothing else quite like this institution anywhere else in the world. It was a terrific party: a mêlée of artists, journalists, politicians and media
We all tell stories about ourselves, every one of us. ‘I’m a useless cook.’ ‘Spiders don’t scare me.’ Not all these stories are true, but then self-perception has never held much truck with truth. Our stories are our own,to hold, repeat and believe in. But what if your story isn’t your own? What if you
In 1983, Soviet spies skulked in our midnight streets to check the lights were out. The Kremlin, convinced the West was planning nuclear war, launched Project RYAN, whereby agents watched for signs of impending attack. One was that lights would burn all night in government buildings, as fiendish mandarins drew up the war plans. It
Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the most unloved and unlovable figures in Israeli politics, a solid finish in a competitive field. Yet when it comes to polling day, his Likud party watches ‘Bibi’ pull off another win. Many consider him venal, duplicitous, arrogant, vain and loutish. His opponents have even worse things to say. Israeli
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon (reproduced right). It is both flattering and enigmatic, which is entirely appropriate, given its contents. Half of Simon’s features are lost in a shadow cast across his face — again, entirely appropriate, as Simon wrestled
‘I didn’t realise we were carbon,’ said a friend to whom I mentioned this book. She was the first of several. It’s odd to think of clever and educated people not knowing that we are made of such stuff. But The Many Lives of Carbon is an odd book to come to grips with. Its
From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to announce their singularity; to be, as Mary Wollstonecraft announced, ‘the first of a new genus’. Each of the women in Michelle Dean’s survey of mostly American essayists, reviewers and novelists had to defend her right
How can you defend a man you hate? John Fairfax, in his Blind Defence (Little Brown, £16.99), explores this dilemma. Diane Heybridge is found dead in her London flat. She was poor, working-class, without much of a future to look forward to. But did she take her own life, or was she murdered by her
This is a biography that begins with a bang, swiftly followed by puddles of blood, shrieks of ‘Murder!’ and a chase through the foggy streets of Victorian London. On 8 December 1854, a French émigré was walking through Fitzrovia, close to the heart of radical London, having recently left a pistol-shooting range in Westminster. He
Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and political lives of the two key Mediterranean civilisations. Their gods, for example, were often represented in avian form, so that the Athenian currency bore an owl image, which was intended as a portrait of the