The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me. I thought, probably like most people, that the world works through official or formal channels, but much of it operates through private phone calls or messaging apps’. Hence his book, written with the journalist Anjana
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus, was thought to possess both male and female sexes and swapped their roles from year to year. As for the hyena, it was believed to acquire an extra anus annually and ‘to make the worst
The other day a friend asked me what a lascar was. Fair enough: it’s not a word you come across in everyday conversation. Perhaps he’d been reading Spike Milligan, where I last met it. A similar question struck me about the ‘unreasonable virtue’ which the American writer Mark Kurlansky sees in fly fishing. I have
November 1974 was the month to disappear. On the 7th, Lord Lucan went missing, and a fortnight later John Stonehouse MP dis-appeared from a beach in Miami. Lucan was never found, so remains prominent in our national mythology. Nothing endures like a mystery. Stonehouse, on the other hand, was discovered in Melbourne six weeks later,
In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously, her name was only three letters away from John Taylor, the world’s most beautiful man, which meant she probably had the best chance of marrying him. I was thinking about this the other day just
Writers of memoirs are often praised for their honesty — but how do we know? I found I did believe Frances Stonor Saunders for readily admitting her ambivalence towards her father, who died in 1997 of Alzheimer’s. She is ‘secretly furious’ with him for ‘not telling his story’. But when his suitcase — almost certainly
During the first lockdown last year, taking my lockdown puppy for our Boris-sanctioned daily walks, I discovered a love of prehistoric hill forts. By the third lockdown I, a hardened medievalist, had even progressed to an unexpected admiration for megalithic stone structures. My former indifference was caused by the perceived lack of people within those
In March 2014 Gabriel García Márquez went down with a cold. The man who wrote beautifully about ageing was approaching his end. As his wife told their son Rodrigo: ‘I don’t think we’ll get out of this one.’ In A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, García, a film director and screenwriter, remembers his father and
It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages both develops and inverts that relationship. It not only tells a story to its readers; it tells the story of its readers. To paraphrase its own words, it accumulates their inner lives. It becomes the
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to the United States in January 1939 and ends with George Orwell dying in University College Hospital in January 1950. Between these two events Loxley explores the often interconnected professional and personal lives of a number
If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But since death is certainly an event in other people’s lives, Damon Galgut’s family saga, shrunk to the moments of passing, is ingenious. That the narrative takes great leaps over time yet also gives a firm
You need to be wary of being too flattering about English churches. As John Betjeman said: ‘Be careful before you call Weymouth the Naples of Dorset. How many Italians call Naples the Weymouth of Campania?’ Even so, the rise of the English medieval church was extraordinary. As early as 1200 there were 9,500 churches in
What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is wearyingly familiar to many of us — but to go properly mad, the sort of madness that involves delusions and police officers and locked psychiatric wards? Horatio Clare didn’t have to imagine what that was
On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant bunny. It’s part of the job: since 1878, presidents have hosted a children’s Easter egg hunt on the south lawn. Usually they rhapsodise abut what fun the kids are going to have. Trump, true to
It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset, its lateen sail spread aslant to catch the wind. It takes us back to the beginnings of ancient Egypt, when the need to manage Nilotic flooding and the imperative to trade along the river’s course
Mountains are humanity’s most comforting topographical feature. Wherever you find them you will also find those who have flocked to them for refuge. The Kurds, the world’s largest stateless people, span the most mountainous areas of their host states, while ‘Lebanon’ referred originally to the mountains in the eastern Mediterranean that for centuries served as
In 2002 I was living in Berlin. One day my upstairs neighbour Peter told me he had just returned from outside the Hotel Adlon, having seen the self-proclaimed ‘King of Pop’ casually dangling a baby from a third-floor window. Peter was not there among the onlookers as a Michael Jackson fan but rather as a
It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health benefits. The mechanism was always a little obscure. But it was a fairly sure thing that reds — or was it all booze? — by virtue of some enzyme or vitamin or whatever, and judiciously
Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation, and its Booker-shortlisted successor, The Year of the Runaways, follows illegal immigrants in Sheffield — where Sahota now lives, having been raised in Derby by Punjabi-born parents. China Room, his most autobiographical work to date,
For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger than myself, had moved with his family to New Mexico. At his desk I managed to write three books, beneath shelves containing editions of his work. I can’t explain why it took me so long
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive to create their own version of a place, their own versions of themselves; the desires of great men, whose improvements are partly intended to secure a better life for their less fortunate fellows, and partly
What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to geographic context’ of the circus? How can we ‘codify’ equestrian performance in the ring? With the publication of The Cambridge Companion to the Circus, this artform has tumbled out of the Big Top and into
Rumours reach me that the libel report for Stephen Bayley’s forthcoming biography of Terence Conran was longer than the book itself, so I’m hazarding a guess that Bayley has siphoned off contentious material into this purported fiction. For as he says here, kidding on the level, ‘all novels are memoirs, all memoirs are novels’, and
Adam Nicolson is one of our finest writers of non-fiction. He has range — from place and history to literature and ecology, from the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the poetics of Homer, from the archaeo-ethnography of his own Hebridean island to the hardy and threatened lives of seabirds. To each he brings a
When Caroline Sheridan married George Chapple Norton in 1827 she ceased to exist. According to the legal status quo, as a wife she no longer had any rights separate to her husband. He could abuse her, claim her work as his own, spend her earnings and prevent her from seeing their children — and still
Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry with the parallels, her subject isn’t Brexit. It’s how long a person should choose to live. Should we allow ourselves to shamble, with gentle optimism, into decades when mental and physical decay are statistical probabilities?
No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ, since I’ve seen one: the handsome monument to the 12th-century scholar-physician Judah ibn Tibbon, ‘patriarch of translators’, beneath the Alhambra in Granada. But if the brokers between languages and cultures still lack many bronze or
Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in its sprawl, but its centre is compact. Like-minded Mancunians have always found one another easily. Cultural life is febrile, which partly explains how, in the pre-digital late-20th century, England’s third city produced such startling bands:
Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no English history’, because everything in England was decided by an elite who spoke French. This, of course, makes it one of the most fascinating and overlooked parts of our national story.By a similar token, the