The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The 90th anniversary of the start of the battle of the Somme falls on 1 July. Several books mark it; it made a scar on the nation’s memory that is still severe, and it is still often called the day when the army suffered its worst casualties. Strictly, this is not true, for General Perceval
Howard Jacobson has called Kalooki Nights ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’. What does this mean? It is a novel whose hero, Max Glickman, is Jewish. It is a history of two Jewish families living in Manchester, the Glickmans and the Washinskys, and a study of the degrees by
The dust jacket of this book shows two heads confronting one another: General MacArthur, aggressive, arrogant, defiantly puffing cigar smoke at the world at large; the Emperor Hirohito, impassive, phlegmatic, quietly obstinate. The subtitle, ‘MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan’, similarly suggests that within the book a double biography will be found. The
An abiding impression of the Victorian period is its mania for being straight-faced to the point of seeming strait-laced, for order and precision, for enumeration and explication. The Times affirmed that ‘just now we are an objective people. We want to place everything we can under glass cases, and stare our fill.’ Gathering the Water tells
Dante has suffered rather too much from his admirers. Barely was he cold in his grave at Ravenna than the process of reinventing him began. The Florentines, who had earlier driven into exile the man they dubbed an instrument of the Devil, hastened to claim him for their own, appointing Giovanni Boccaccio, his earliest biographer,
A screenwriter’s lot is not a happy one. You write all those scripts, most of which never get close to being made; you must deal with dim, philistine producers and deranged, egomaniacal directors who don’t necessarily know what they want but know that what you have written is not what they want; you must watch
I picked a beetle up and let it go,And that was pity;But not the pity that you could not goToday, as you’d been promised, to the ZooBecause you were too sick.So ‘What a pity’ were the words I spoke,And then you asked your question: ‘What is pity?’ I’ve searched and searched, but can’t find out
Seven per cent of zebra finches stutter. So did Moses, Demosthen- es, Aesop, Churchill, Darwin, Nietzsche, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Charles I, George VI, and Lewis Carrroll. So do Margaret Drabble and Marc Shell, the author of this comprehensive, learned, even playful book. And so, declaring an interest, do I. Many
Asked whether a good review would sell a book, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davies replied, ‘No, but a concatenation of good ones may do so.’ One would like to think this true, even while observing that the bestseller lists regularly feature novels which are either not reviewed at all, or have been given brief and sometimes
The Summer Exhibition is like a leviathan, a monster from the deep, that every now and again shows itself to general outcry and occasional consternation. Unfortunately, however, it’s not actually the stuff of myth and legend, but all too often of rather dismal reality. This, the 238th Summer Show, is co-ordinated by the architect Peter
Ken Loach won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last month with The Wind that Shakes the Barley and has since been the object of several abusive articles in the British press. He will be unsurprised (and probably untroubled) — his films usually cause a rumpus. This one is set in Ireland in the 1920s, and
The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was once as familiar to schoolchildren as the battle of Hastings or the Gunpowder Plot. On 20 June 1756, after a fierce battle lasting several days, in which the British defensive force of 515 men had held out against an Indian army numbering tens of thousands, 146
If ever you need to rouse a vineyard owner from vinous slumber, creep up behind him and whisper ‘Parker’. He will leap to his feet, eyes blazing, either with $ signs or with aggrieved Gallic pride. For the name of Robert M. Parker Jr is charged with electricity throughout the world of wine. His is
Audrey Ruston was born in Brussels in May 1929, of a Dutch baroness, Ella van Heemstra, and an English father, Joseph Ruston, some kind of toff, among whose distant ancestors was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots. Ruston soon abandoned his wife and daughter for a long lifetime
This massive study of Hitler’s war economy runs to half the length of War and Peace, partly for the reason that the author shares with Tolstoy the annoying habit of repeating himself frequently and at length. Although I suspect the book will be cited more often than read and perhaps more often read than understood,
The Royal Academy has had the brilliant and brave idea of asking James Fenton to write its history. Fenton is not only a great poet, but also one of Britain’s most interesting writers on art. In his first collection Terminal Moraine (1972) he published a beautiful poem on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and
With her poetry collection The World’s Wife (1999), Carol Ann Duffy provided a voice for the women that have been silenced in the course of history. Jane Harris has done something similar with The Observations, a bawdy tale narrated by Bessy Buckley, a (too) young Irish prostitute turned serving maid. Set somewhere dank and dour
John Constable (1776–1837) is the quintessential painter of rural England. If we carry in our hearts an image of unspoilt countryside it will, more often than not, bear the lineaments of what has become known as Constable Country, that stretch of land along the river Stour in Suffolk that includes Dedham and Flatford, and the
Last time it was cows, this time it’s sheep. I’m not talking about an agricultural show, but about the London Architecture Biennale, which begins today when Lord Foster will be herding sheep across the Millennium Bridge towards Smithfield Market. In 2004 it was cows approaching Smithfield from the opposite direction, down St John Street, and,
An ancient Roman sceptic wondered how, when two augurs passed in the street and caught one another’s eye, they managed not to burst out laughing. A Damien Hirst bisected lamb suspended in a glass tank of formaldehyde was sold for $3.37 million at Christie’s in New York early in May. Works by Donald Judd, who
Opera Holland Park is suddenly fashionable, even people who have never been near it writing about how wonderful they hear it is and vowing to go, while as usual those of us who have been saying that since it started in 1996 ask ourselves what makes us so implausible that we aren’t taken seriously on
Thank You for Smoking is a satirical comedy about the culture of spin, adapted from Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel of the same name. Its hero is the wolfish Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), chief lobbyist employed by cigarette company ‘Big Tobacco’. It is Naylor’s job to defend the company he works for (and its right to
Homage to the Queen is one of two ballets that Frederick Ashton conceived with a special occasion in mind —the other being Birthday Offering. Created in 1953, Homage was a choreographic celebration of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Not unlike the court masques of the 16th and 17th centuries, the ballet draws upon an
The World Cup, and once again people who don’t watch football from one quadrennium to the next manifest an interest in all those surreal pairings: Ecuador v. Poland, Iran v. Mexico, Togo v. Switzerland. I (and many others) have been disobliging about John Motson in the past, but he is perfect for these events, assuming
Every now and then there are surveys in which groups or individuals are asked to name books which have changed their lives. In my life, the publication of John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson when I was a bookish teenager, undoubtedly determined for me the
Any book about the exercise of power that carries a ringing endorsement by Peter Hen- nessy on its dust-cover promises well. Perhaps, therefore, it is the fault of this reviewer that he felt that Professor Mulgan had generated rather less excitement than Professor Hennessy had promised. Hennessy’s own books reflect his own personality: they fizz,
Great writers are never that great close up. Ralph Pite’s revealing biography of Thomas Hardy focuses on the emotional character of the poet and novelist. He comes across as difficult, snobbish, tight-fisted, self-centred, hypocritical, and, worst of all, ungrateful to those who helped him in the early stages of his career. The great champion of
This is indeed a story of war, passion and loss. But those looking for a bittersweet tale of romantic Polish aristocrats stoically facing their doom at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets will get a great deal more than they bargained for. This is Gone with the Wind scripted for the Addams family. The
Summer reads: doesn’t the very phrase conjure up unfortunate images of lobster sunburn? Summer reads: doesn’t the very phrase conjure up unfortunate images of lobster sunburn? But what to do, when a long summer stretches ahead and there are still hours in the day to kill after you’ve finished watching the footie, or the live