The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts
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In 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of
In 2018, the ferocious American poet-critic William Logan took time off from routinely, invigoratingly eviscerating contemporary poets to write Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past – a study of classic poems in their historical contexts. It was an informative, interesting exercise, prefaced by this significant reservation: ‘Knowledge of the circumstance
Books about Putin’s war against Ukraine are like the No.11 bus: you wait for ages, then a whole bunch turn up at once. Owen Matthews and Mark Galeotti are among the first. They will eventually be superseded by the scholarly histories. Meanwhile they bring clarity to a picture confused by instant comment in the media.
It’s not often that my tastes are validated by Netflix, but Jonathan Stroud’s brilliant series about teenage ghost hunters, Lockwood & Co., is being turned into a series. If you haven’t read it, give it a go. The mordant talking skull alone is worth it. Stroud has already embarked on another series about a tough
Few places can rival the London borough of Kensington in diversity. In the 19th century, new mansions sat alongside the cholera-ridden slums around the piggeries and brick claypits. A speculative racecourse came and went. More recently, postwar slum clearance created new housing divides and Portobello Road became a key London destination. Racial tensions erupted in
Tony Tetro’s memoir starts with a bang – or, rather, a bust. On 18 April 1989, 25 policemen spilled into his condo in Claremont, California, confiscated the $8,000 he had just been paid in cash and proceeded to search the place, slicing through wallpaper, pulling up carpets and emptying drawers. The scene is pacy, thrilling,
Despite being known as a visually driven town, Hollywood has a rich oral history. This may be due to the fact that it is (like most literary communities) a small, gossipy village in which everybody knows everybody else and what everybody is saying about them. It also testifies to the fact that while Hollywood’s ‘players’
Shirley Hazzard’s ‘untimeliness’ is a recurrent aspect in most descriptions of her, both the writing and the person. She came to represent ‘a vanished age of civility’: there is something Victorian about her novels, despite the last of them, The Great Fire, being published in 2003, by which time she was starting to resemble ‘an
Ruins, shipwrecks and lost cities are endlessly intriguing. I once went to Kolmanskop in Namibia and found myself wondering quite what it was that was so alluring. At one level it’s just a rather dowdy German town out in the desert, abandoned in 1956. But what’s special there is the sand and the way it
In Johanne Lykke Holm’s neo-gothic novel Strega, Rafaela, claustrophobic in her parents’ ‘yellow’ and ‘dusty’ flat, dreams of working as a maid at the mountain-nestled Olympic Hotel. She luxuriates in a bath with a brochure, mesmerised by photographs of ‘girls in pearl-white aprons, girls eating ruby-red apples straight from the tree’. It’s a foreshadowing of
At Goose Green during the Falklands campaign, the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment forced the surrender of more than 1,000 Argentinian soldiers. It was an extraordinary feat of arms. The battalion numbered 650 men, far fewer than the accepted ratio of 3:1 when attacking a defensive position. The Parachute Regiment had upheld the old tradition:
David Hockney once remarked that he wasn’t greedy for money, but was covetous of an interesting life. Then he added that he could find excitement ‘in raindrops falling on a puddle’. There are no puddles in My Window (Taschen, £100), previously only available as a limited edition, but Hockney finds ravishing beauty in such sights
The Weather Woman is the children’s writer Sally Gardner’s first novel for adults under her own name (previously, she used the pseudonym Wray Delaney). Spanning the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, the story describes an England trembling at the French Revolution and haunted by the threat of Napoleon while
In 2005 the photographer Peter Beard invited me to his Thunderbolt Ranch in Montauk on the tip of Long Island. I was writing a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen’s lover, and Beard had known Blixen at the end of her life. When Graham Boynton began this biography he telephoned me, and I told
Despite being awarded a Nobel in economics in 1974, Friedrich Hayek was a great thinker rather than a great economist. He called himself a ‘muddler’. His own attempt to build an economic theory floundered. His major contribution was to emphasise the limitations of economic knowledge, and thus the inevitable frustration of efforts to build economic
One recent estimate claims there are 4.732 billion buildings on Earth, but it’s difficult to establish a credible methodology to count them. Is Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, created out of swaggering pride and ambition, in the same category as a shanty hut in an Algerian bidonville? Unless you live in a desert, buildings are unavoidable, making
I’ve never met John Barton. But reading his books on the Bible I keep thinking of him as an early church father, perhaps St Jerome. Barton has the obligatory beard, he’s an ordained minister in the Church of England, and his writing is sage and measured, scholarly but accessible. Jerome was of course the translator
Of all the European countries that Jews have lived in, none has been so welcoming as Britain. There is a caveat: the first blood libel was in Norwich, of all places, in 1144, and after Edward I expelled us in 1290 we had to wait almost 400 years for Oliver Cromwell to ask us back.
It must be exhausting to live as a barefoot doctor in a Chinese village if Can Xue’s latest novel is anything to go by. Not because of your work as curer-in-chief, but because all your patients are either nauseatingly happy or prone to near-constant weeping. Barefoot doctors emerged in the 1930s, but really hit their
It is our ability to see a single thing in various ways that Lily Le Brun celebrates in Looking to Sea: Britain Through the Eyes of its Artists. Over the course of ten chapters dedicated to individual artworks, one for each decade of the past century, she explores our shifting relationship with the shoreline through
Having long escaped their relegation to the softer margins of the thriller genre, women writers have provided their own take on grimmer themes, including the sexual violence that has become such a staple of crime writing today. In The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (Canongate, £16.99), Cora Berger is a South African painter
There is an island in the Caribbean so small that it doesn’t appear on many world maps. Its name is Redonda; one of its kings, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, died two months ago. It’s an unforgiving place, uninhabited and windswept, basically a large rock a mile long and about a third of a mile
John Lewis-Stempel is nearly as prolific as the natural world about which he writes so well. His voice is distinctive – that of a traditional agriculturist of lyrical articulacy, an observant ecologist who finds mythopoeic magic in everyday animals, who honours his Herefordshire origins but addresses all England. Cattle in a frosty field are transfigured
Craig Brown is responsible for the astonishing late flowering of Anne Glenconner. It was his biography Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret that so enraged her that, in an effort to stick up for her friend, whom she served as a lady-in-waiting for 30 years, Lady Glenconner started writing in her mid-eighties. She hasn’t
The revolving doors of the 1990s’ restaurant scene saw a cast of great characters, sadly now on the wane. One of the so-called ‘modern British’ movement’s greatest champions, Terence Conran, has departed; we have lost Alastair Little and Andrew Edmunds, and only last month Joyce Molyneux, of Carved Angel fame. Who? What? If you never
One day during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Evariste Maherane heard about a Tutsi boy whose parents had been killed in a massacre at a church. The boy had escaped. He was about ten, the same age as Evariste’s son. A family of Hutus, instead of joining the slaughter of Tutsis that many of their
In 1973, in White Plains, New York, Donna Freed was told, in a ‘shroud of shame’ and without any soothing explanations, that she was adopted. The six-year-old’s life was plunged into a dark hinterland of anxiety. Freed spent the next 38 years fearful that the discovery of her birth mother would reveal ‘a terrible or