The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There isn’t another actor alive whom I’d rather watch than Michael Douglas. Just as Pauline Kael once said that the thought of Cary Grant makes us smile, so the thought of Michael Douglas makes me grin, smirk, nod, wink, cackle, cheer – and walk a little taller, too. Even his anti-heroes are heroic in their
In this age of lies and delusions, the trickster may seem to be a peculiarly modern creature, but he or she is almost as old as literature itself. Long before phishing or fake news, stories about cunning foxes, Loki, Anansi the Spider-Man and Odysseus brought delight; Puck, Tom Ripley and Sarah Waters’s fingersmith Sue Trinder
Nathalia Holt’s book begins irresistibly. The year is 1928. Two sons of Theodore Roosevelt called Ted and Kermit – yes I know we’re thinking it’s a Wes Anderson movie – have smoothed a map out on the table in front of them. Let’s imagine the setting is a bit like the Explorers’ Club in New
The Boys, the entertaining debut novel by the literary critic Leo Robson, is set in Swiss Cottage during the 2012 London Olympics. Johnny Voghel is ‘methodically lying about’, home on leave from an admin job in the West Midlands and grieving both for his mother, who died the previous year, and – by extension –
It’s hard to classify this thought-provoking book – part memoir, part philosophical exploration, but mostly a deeply researched family history. And what a history that is. Tim Franks, born in 1968, has been a BBC reporter for almost two decades, and now presents Newshour on the World Service. So he knows how to tell stories
Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian press has been slowly, methodically strangled, which has forced existential choices on newspaper and TV journalists. Twenty-one have been killed – beaten, poisoned or gunned down. Others, such as Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, highly regarded investigative reporters, have been forced into exile. Yet others,
Giorgia Meloni has emerged as one of the most significant politicians in Europe since she became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022. I Am Giorgia, already a bestseller in Italy, is her account of how a short, fat, sullen, bullied girl – as she describes her young self – from a poor, single-parent
Ettore Majorana vanished in March 1938. According to Frank Close in Destroyer of Worlds, the 31-year-old Sicilian physicist ‘probably understood more nuclear physics theory than anyone in the world’, and was hailed by Enrico Fermi as a ‘magician’, in the elevated company of Newton and Galileo. Majorana was also an ardent fascist; yet he was
Exclusive to subscribers, watch our latest event Living with a Politician live. Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake’s Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP’s Wife) as they discuss the losses and
These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family’s prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV’s series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication
Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images… So wrote Frank O’Hara
‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of
We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It’s a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten’s possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru
On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last,
Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP),
The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were
On 3 June 1960, a letter appeared in The Spectator which began: Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act upon the
There is no such thing as a bad friend. The societal expectations and collective imagination of what friendship should look like have, over the past century, set unrealistic expectations, meaning we are all doomed at some point to fail as friends. At least this is what the cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues in her
Alice Mah didn’t enjoy finding her roots. Even though ‘ancestor tourism’ is increasingly popular among westernised descendants of Chinese émigrés like her, she felt a nameless sort of dread when visiting the village in the Cantonese county of Taishan where her great-grandfather came from. It didn’t help that she’d just attended the morbid Qingming festival,
War – huh – what is it good for? According to Duncan Weldon, throughout most of history it’s been fantastic for economic growth and development and has perhaps fuelled technological innovation and more. Blood and Treasure is a delightfully quirky approach to military history. Colonial Spain was thought to be cursed by the gold brought
In 1797, following a written plea for troops to counter an incursion by an American Revolutionary War veteran into Louisiana, Manuel Godoy, minister to the Spanish crown, made a note in the margin: No es posible poner puertas al campo (‘It is not possible to put up doors in a field’). Both literally and metaphorically,
One of the earliest leper hospitals in Britain was built in London near the beginning of the 12th century by Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I. It was a benign combination of housing, hospital and chapel, with patients free to come and go as they wished. Matilda started a fashion among the wealthy, so
Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in
Claire Adam’s compelling first novel Golden Child won the 2009 Desmond Elliot Prize and was also picked as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped Our World’. It told the story of contrasting twins in Trinidad – one an academic high-flyer, the other a misfit. When the latter is kidnapped, the father must act
A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows,
The first time I heard a piece of music by Erik Satie it was on the B-side of a Gary Numan single. Played on a synth that sounds like a theremin sucking on a dummy, ‘Gymnopédie #1’ is so saccharine sweet it actually makes the music seem sorry for itself. And yet. It got me
How did the UK become a place where young people think it’s permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others? A few years ago, when I taught at university,
For several centuries, the word ‘celebrity’ meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by ‘genius’. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds,
In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely