The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Synchronised swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? It’s ‘artistic swimming’ now, of course, though many athletes don’t like that term precisely because it makes the Olympic event sound less like a real sport. But by the end of Swimming Pretty, Vicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronised swimming, it’s difficult to think of it as
It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood
‘The politics of Paul Foot are an extraordinary mixture of first-class reporting, primitive Marxism, family wit and fantasy.’ This judgment is taken from a review of Foot’s first book, The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968). The reviewer was well placed to assess it, and, according to this biography, he ‘tore the book apart’. As well
The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks
‘The House’ in the title of Richard Davenport-Hines’s engaging new book is Christ Church, by any reckoning the grandest of Oxford’s colleges. The place has always been, he notes, akin ‘to an autonomous duchy within a larger federated kingdom’, and thus ‘a separate realm of memory’. Notoriously, its teachers and researchers are referred to not
On reaching the end of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. At 272 pages, the book isn’t particularly large, but the time span it covers, from prehistoric goddess figures to Laure Prouvost’s 2021 cyborg-octopus installation ‘MOOTHERR’, is enormous. The trajectories, practices and obsessions of the artists discussed range far and wide. Written
In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God. Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not
A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a
We are blessed to be living in a golden age of anchovies. They’re everywhere – lacing salads, festooning pizzas, draped across inordinately expensive small plates. In certain circles, there are few more potent social signifiers than the red, yellow and blue of an Ortiz tin. Victory for the umami junkies. How times change. Today the
Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London flat where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident – poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of
‘Ex-wives like us illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men,’ quips Patricia, the flapper heroine of the American novelist Ursula Parrott’s 1929 bestseller, which, republished nearly a century later, reveals striking contemporary resonances. Both timeless and unmistakably of its time, this candid portrait of marital breakdown, and
Over a 40-year career, Sophie Osborn has evolved from a greenhorn volunteer for nature, doing mundane tasks in the wilds of Wyoming, to the manager of a captive-release programme for California condors in Arizona. This post placed her at the heart of perhaps the most sophisticated operation for a threatened bird anywhere in the world.
As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and
Tasty meals and epiphanies: that’s what Banana Yoshimoto mostly deals in. It’s no accident that her most famous book is entitled Kitchen. Sometimes the epiphanies come by way of the tasty meals; at other times they are triggered by effects of light playing over rivers, trees, landscapes, as if we had suddenly found ourselves inside
After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by
One of the first things I was taught in literary theory was to look for supposed rhetorical rather than logical opposites and unravel them. It works well with ‘the opposite of cat’. Cartoons show this can be either mouse or dog. The Book of Elsewhere, based on the comic BRZRKR, poses something similar with metaphysics.
There are other reasons beyond shortage of time (the acclaimed Indian novelist Anita Desai has just turned 87) to write a novella; the genre is as attractive and prestigious as it is fashionable. The deceptively slender format can briskly encompass whole worlds and histories, or alternatively, like the short story, depend on strict excisions and
‘Please don’t let this be a scolding!’ I thought as I moved past this book’s tempting title to read the author’s bio, noting that she is ‘the chair of the Writing Programme at Columbia University’. Sure enough, the very first line of the prologue – ‘The sound of a diva’s voice was how I knew
Although in his later years Norman Maclean was renowned for his nuanced and often lyrical autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (subsequently filmed by Robert Redford, and known in angling circles – with mixed feelings – simply as ‘The Movie’), by all accounts he could be forbidding and ornery in person. He informed one
In 1977, in the wake of the death of the king of rock’n’roll, the American journalist and music critic Lester Bangs said: ‘We will never again agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis.’ The ‘we’ was America. And Bangs was right – until June 1984, when Bruce Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A. The
There are a lot of reasons why something is funny. It’s hard for everyone to agree on those reasons. And it’s virtually impossible to agree on whether something is actually funny or not in the first place. But one thing is incontrovertible: the more you unpick, analyse and dissect comedy, the less funny it becomes.
‘War – what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr on his 1970 single of the same name, before answering his rhetorical question: ‘Absolutely nothing.’ In this, Starr was not only excoriating America’s contemporary folly in Vietnam. He was implicitly endorsing the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s recommendation that humanity could and should trade up from endless
Have literary deceit and spiritual self-invention ever been this entertaining? The question arises on almost every page of this galloping exposé of two men who were exceedingly relaxed about not telling the truth throughout their professional lives. They would have called it ‘storytelling’. Those who questioned the reliability of their often outlandish claims were dismissed
Mary Toft seems to be having something of a moment. The English 18th-century peasant who stunned society with her claim to have given birth to rabbits has been the focus of a suite of recent books, including Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft, or the Rabbit Queen (2019) and Karen Harvey’s The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder (2020). There
Those who remember Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel Netherland, which featured a multicultural cricket club and was set in post 9/11 Manhattan, will assume they know what they’re getting with Godwin, which purports to be about the hunt for the next Messi. A video file of an African teenager with legendary ball skills is circulating far
What makes Joni Mitchell’s music special? The lyrics alone put her on 20th-century music’s Mount Rushmore, alongside her cultural mirror Bob Dylan and her brief lover Leonard Cohen. But for me it’s her phrasing, her tunings and her sense of time. Decades on, her music remains endlessly surprising. Think a line is going in a
Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone,
Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century. Their achilles’ heel is that most were communists, in a few cases Nazis; and nothing kills the life of the mind more thoroughly than preaching. Their saving grace is that many were eccentric characters, and
In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut, browses through a children’s novel during a staff meeting and exclaims: ‘We don’t write stories like this any more. Chronic plot deficiency is our problem.’ The problem for contemporary novelists is that tightly woven plots