The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘Islands of stone’ would have been a good name for the Orkney archipelago, George Mackay Brown once wrote. The salt Atlantic winds mean that very few trees grow there, so stone provides for the dead – in the burial chamber at Maeshowe, for example – and the living. Less than a century ago, there were
Janet Malcolm’s formulation that a ‘journalist is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ comes to mind on page two of the darkly refulgent One Hundred Saturdays. That’s when the author Michael Frank mentions it was his idea to accompany his new
Most people know something about Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari and the Crimea during the Crimean War, and the ‘kingdom of horror’ that she and her nurses found there: unsanitary conditions in the hospitals, a broken-down supply system and British soldiers dropping like flies from disease rather than battle wounds. However, as Terry Tastard
In this engaging memoir, Natasha Lance Rogoff recounts the experience of bringing Sesame Street to Yeltsin’s Russia. A Russo-phile who changed her name from Susan to Natasha as a teenager, Lance Rogoff had been working in Moscow for more than a decade as a reporter and documentary filmmaker when she was approached to be the
One of Joseph O’Connor’s strengths is his magpie-like approach to history: he plunders it for stories that he can rework as fiction. His new novel is based on the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a senior official at the Vatican, who, together with colleagues, was responsible for saving the lives of 6,500 Allied soldiers and
Did you know that the elephant was the most written about animal in the Roman world? Pyrrhus of Epirus, of victory fame, was the first to introduce it to Italy as an engine of war when he invaded in 280 BC. Roman soldiers could not decide whether it was an animal or a machine. Eventually
At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir? Perhaps around the stage we all realised that, as Stephen Hough puts it, ‘a complete autobiography is usually boring or indecent. It’s the person at the dinner table who just won’t stop talking’. There’s certainly no holding forth (though perhaps
Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it:
It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the
Marion Turner has written a superb biography of a woman who never lived. Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is one of the most famous of all medieval women, even though she has only ever existed on the page. But Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows
Insofar as every reading of a book is a retelling of it, a writer needs a very good reason for doing a ‘contemporary retelling’ of a classic. In giving Becky Sharp the fleshed-out backstory denied her in Vanity Fair, Sarah May more than meets that requirement, though her novel still suffers by its proximity to
Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by
In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag
Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust. Clammy-handed suspense, nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose, each climax held suspended – deferred gratification. What Javier Marías did for the spy story, Laurent Mauvignier does for terror. It begins quietly, with an ominous sense of something waiting to happen. An isolated hamlet in deep
In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all
I have to confess that this book sat on my desk for several months. The words ‘Harvard University Press’ cast a strange and unsettling spell which prevented me from even opening it. Let’s be honest: academic presses are not always synonymous with rollicking reads, nor indeed are academics. They can ask an awful lot of
There is a lot to like about Diane Purkiss’s English Food. It’s a hefty thing, packed full of titbits to trot out down the pub, but also a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time, and of the perils of assuming there has ever been a golden age, or even a very
In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into
One of the more daft but enduring spin-offs of the science fiction genre is steampunk – fiction fashioned with a retrofuturistic love of 19th-century industrial technology. Think of an ironclad of the air, shaped like a fantasy submarine, with six or more propeller engines powered by cogs and levers, funnels pumping out coal smoke from
Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she
The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel of 1767, and of a dramatisation by the sage’s acolyte Jean-François Marmontel, was the very model of a noble Huron. He fought the British with distinction, fell in love with an imprisoned French lady and
In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt (which first appeared from Substack), he admits he began the project wanting to write ‘the best book that has ever been written about writing – about the physical act of writing, and the metaphysical act’.
Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli in New York in the mid-1990s. Her forever best friend Ash is keeping vigil by Eli’s bedside in the Graceful Shepherd Hospice in western Massachusetts, trying to track down that elusive cake and keep Edi
‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said. ‘He’s nota Sidney Reilly you know.’ Sidney Reilly was not really Sidney Reilly either; but he was certainly a James Bond. Born Sigmund or Schlomo Rosenblum (this is a book full of caveats), he spoke
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the century, as the historian Kevin Sharpe wrote, summing up the Whig view, ‘in which the champions of law and liberty, property and Protestantism triumphed over absolute monarchy and popery and laid the foundations for parliamentary government’. It was a century
If you read only the title of Charlie Taverner’s book Street Food you could be forgiven for assuming it was an exploration of the stalls that line the trendier streets of our cities, offering bibimbap and bao, jerk chicken and jian bing. But the author’s focus predates brightly coloured gazebo hoardings and polystyrene packaging and
Explaining how she managed to kick her cocaine habit, the singer Fiona Apple recalled ‘one excruciating night’ she spent trapped in Quentin Tarantino’s home cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson listening to the two Hollywood directors brag competitively, and apparently indefatigably, about their professional achievements. ‘Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre
In the 1964 Hammer film The Devil-Ship Pirates, a privateer of the defeated Spanish Armada escapes the English fleet and puts in for repairs at an isolated coastal village whose inhabitants have not received news of the battle’s outcome. There the Spanish convince the villagers that Spain was victorious, and so impose submission on them.
In Jawaharlal Nehru’s final will and testament he asked for most of his ashes be taken in an aeroplane and scattered ‘over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’. Taylor C. Sherman says this ‘request was