Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Don’t ask a historian what history is

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E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to read it as a teen-ager, and it has prompted multiple reconsiderations over the years — as acknowledged by the editors in their introduction to this book. Reappraisals and conferences on ‘What is History?’ are launched

Folk music is still very much alive and kicking

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As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition’ I say, count me in. It’s a challenging subject, not often trodden with aplomb. I wasn’t even dissuaded when the first line on the inner jacket —

Pink for boys, blue for girls and a worldwide mania for mauve

Lead book review

It would seem, if recent publications are anything to go by, that we have an insatiable appetite for this subject. A quick search of books on colour throws up six titles in just the past three years, a further half dozen published as a set in February this year, another volume in a series by

The delicate business of monitoring the monarchy

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This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on the tin. Although subtitled ‘Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana’, it quite properly begins with Queen Elizabeth I and the intelligence network masterminded by Francis Walsingham, whom MI6 regard as their historical progenitor.

Only time will tell if there’ll be a Great Pandemic Novel

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We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles out of the gate have been in capable hands. Zadie Smith reflected on lockdown in Intimations, a slim volume of personal essays; the virus featured in Ali Smith’s Orwell Prize-winning Summer; and Sarah Moss imagines

As feminists fall out, it’s not just the patriarchy that’s under fire

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UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In a long history of activism that began in the 1980s, campaigning against male violence in Leeds while Peter Sutcliffe stalked the streets, Bindel has always been straight to the point, full of heart and un-interested

The country house is dead: that’s why we love it so

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The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified social order, where Johnny Foreigner had no place unless perhaps as butler in the pantry or mistress in the bedroom. And the focus of the disease is the country house, Britain’s best contribution to the

Mind games: the blurred line between fact and fiction

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Readers of Case Study unfamiliar with its author’s previous work might believe they have stumbled on a great psychotherapy scandal. We’ve all heard of past psychiatric controversies — forced lobotomies, the incarceration of single mothers, false memory syndrome — and of R.D. Laing, whose unconventional techniques were not always beneficial to the patient. Well, here

How 19th-century gold rushes led to a distrust of China

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For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary Festival had become tainted with the smoke and soot of Nuremberg. Here was Thomas Friedman, bloviator-in-chief to America’s chattering classes, standing before a rally of thousands, delivering a powerful philippic about the ascent of the

The magic of manuscripts

Lead book review

Manuscripts have something of the appeal of drawings. They bring you closer to the creative process. Even a copy adds something special to the text: an editorial twist, a decorated initial, a margin full of beasts or just a beautiful script in which every letter is fashioned by hand like no other. Manuscripts do more

Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding obsessions of our times — identity, gender, the meaning of truth — play out through six maddeningly detailed, curiously compelling autofictions. It’s the kind of work that casts a long shadow; any fiction that follows,

How does David Sedaris get away with saying the unsayable?

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These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the

Kate Andrews

China and the WHO are given an easy ride in the Covid blame game

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Are you ready to relive 2020? That’s what Adam Tooze is offering as he tells the story of Covid-19 through the spectacular and terrifying economic consequences created by the global health crisis. For many, the answer will be a simple no. But for others looking to make sense of an utterly surreal year, Shutdown might

From salivating dogs to mass indoctrination: Pavlov’s sinister legacy

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When two post-Soviet supermodels committed suicide in the noughties, both throwing themselves off high buildings in New York and Kiev, the trail into what made them so depressed led to a ‘personality development’ organisation in Moscow that offered ‘trainings’ that would help ‘find your truer self’. The moment you entered the dark Stalinist gothic theatre,

T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain

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In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction, and that compared with letters and first-hand material, biography is like canned vegetables compared with fresh fruit. We read the letters of writers because they are informal, unguarded, unbuttoned, intimate and candid, revealing not only

Cindy Yu

How China’s economic revolution created billionaires overnight

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In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited warning to his communist successors: ‘Whoever doesn’t reform will have to step down! We must let some people get rich first!’ These words were the starting-gun for the country’s opening, and its intense economic reform.

No Samuel Beckett play is set in stone

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It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the former chairman of Faber, handed me a volume, published in 1992, of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. He told me that the series was no longer in print and therefore difficult to get hold