The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
As the planet gets more and more ravaged, the mind can begin to glaze over at the cumulative general statistics — so much rainforest lost, so many glaciers melted, so much less oil left. Joseph Zárate’s masterly new book reminds us that when it comes to fighting on the front line of the environmental wars,
Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced in the early modern period, was that birds flew to the Moon for winter, and barely more credible was a notion, which haunted the patron saint of British naturalists Gilbert White, that swallows buried themselves
In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel, a loquacious Turkish civil servant who tells her that ‘the only good thing about a border is that you can cross it’. These words speak to an inherent contradiction. Borders stand as overt manifestations of
Most of the grander 20th-century diarists had a sniffy air about them, looking down their noses at everyone, particularly each other. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, so snippety in his own diaries, was sniped at in others’. James Lees-Milne thought him ‘a flibbertigibbet’; to Nancy Mitford, he was ‘vain and spiteful and silly’. Kenneth Rose confided to
It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji in the Midlands and the refusal of the authorities to pay him compensation, even though he was later pardoned. In a case tainted by racism, class prejudice and plain stupidity, Edalji was accused of mutilating
Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to a full-grown cow. As she sat cross-legged, strumming away not very well on a guitar, the cow lay down beside her and gently nudged her with its huge head as adoringly as any puppy. The
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of modern British art. Among his contemporaries are Edward Bawden, Richard Eurich, John Piper, Eric Ravilious and Graham Sutherland. Some of these have been over-praised (Sutherland’s reputation was unhelpfully inflated for many years, then suffered a
In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels, plus a couple of early efforts under his birth name, G.E. Armitage. I must have read two thirds of this shelf-distending oeuvre, but in none of them have I ever detected the faintest whiff of
The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is arranging traumatic memories into comprehensible order. She is a robot, an Artificial Friend or AF, purchased as a companion for an ill teenager named Josie. Klara’s speaking voice, in a C3PO-ish way, is endearingly off-kilter:
Churchill was wrong: Russia is neither a riddle nor an enigma. Russians themselves concoct endless stories to glorify their country’s achievements and minimise its disasters and crimes. But the rest of us do much the same, as we try to explain Britain’s imperial history or the impact slavery still has on America’s revolutionary ideals. Russia
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and the other is that they are, perversely, far too coherent. The pieces are pulled from their original contexts — newspapers, magazines — and thrown together with others they have no relation to beyond a common
A while ago, Samantha Markle declared that her forthcoming book would be about ‘the beautiful nuances of our lives’. Was it a misprint for beautiful nuisances? Or did she have a change of heart? Either way, there isn’t a beautiful nuance in sight. Instead, it is like a blunt object found at the scene of
In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled Al-gé-rie Fran-çaise. In the early 1990s, I slunk into a rally held by Jean-Marie Le Pen in Nice to find that for the ranks of cropped, thickset pieds noirs in leather jackets, the bloodbaths and
Wheat flour, and the bread made from it, has been a recurring cause of concern for the British for centuries, with parliament passing laws to control the size of loaves and quantity of additives. The 1758 Act required bread to contain ‘genuine meal or flour, common salt, pure water, eggs, and yeast or barm, or
Lauren Oyler is viral and vicious. A critic with a reputation for pulling no punches, she is known for delivering refreshingly sane judgments of overhyped, commercially successful books. She is not alone in her ruthlessness — there are a number of critics who are at least equally ferocious about deflating promotional balloons, among them Merve
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory built during the reign of Queen Anne in a secluded Dorset village. Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Edward Sackville-West were highly influential music critics, while Eardley Knollys, a former gallery owner, was now assistant secretary to the
In the summer of 2014, David Hargreaves was invited by Robert Cottrell, the editor of The Browser, to write a series of articles shadowing, week by week, the course of the first world war. Over the next four years Hargreaves and his researcher and co-author, Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, brought these out online, and they have now
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country’. It is a neatly punning definition. An ambassador is a messenger, who has to live (lie) abroad long enough to understand the interests, the preoccupations and the driving emotions of the people he deals
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs with young girls and his travels to the Philippines in search of pre-pubescent boys — insert Gallic shrug here — but he still won literary prizes and enjoyed a state stipend. He was celebrated by
In the early hours of 28 May 2014 the bodies of two young girls were found hanging from the branches of a mango tree in the small village of Katra in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Their deaths caused outrage locally and attracted attention worldwide, as domestic and foreign media descended on Katra, the
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it be poeticised? Has the oh-my-oh-me-ism of recent nature books got out of hand? Can one not see a blackbird now without considering the nature of consciousness and the tragedy of existence? In short, shouldn’t the
Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood isn’t one of them. She is straightforwardly hit-the-rubber-nail-on-the-head funny. There are punchlines, there are callbacks. On Twitter she is known for her zany ‘sexts’: ‘I am a living male turtleneck. You are
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named el supplies several stream-of-consciousness paragraphs about a ritual dance featuring ‘big Birds runnin round Pole and fyr and mam and mother and all womyn and these big things all hummin’. Dystopian, or by the time
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The Estonian capital of Tallinn crawled with Russian money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’). The television in my hotel room was detuned from capitalist Finnish to Soviet channels, but I was able to pick up Miami Vice
‘Why, Elizabeth, did you not tell me when we first slept together that you were a virgin?’ This is one of the most peculiar letters in English literary history, written in 1934 by the writer Humphry House to Elizabeth Bowen, now widely recognised as one of the major novelists of the 20th century. Bowen was
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich? is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was first published in France in 2017 as Cochonneries, a play on words that better reflects the nuanced nature of his argument. Cochonnerie means rubbish, or junk. Derived from cochon — pig — it’s a
At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic, the village of Armenia, the town of Dover, the country of Dutchess, the state of New York, the country of America. His land had originally been inhabited by the Mohicans, who grew corn and squash
When police were called to a block of flats in north London at the beginning of 2002, they expected to find a routine dispute between neighbours. What they actually discovered was the body of a woman, Rose White, in the locked bedroom of one of the apartments. The officers suspected foul play and the tenant,
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp in 2007, when the critic James Wood had declared in favour of realism, and Steven Hall published his debut, The Raw Shark Texts. It was a British metafictional novel that created a big splash. Noted