The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to developers, the countryside is ingrained in our collective consciousness as our unspoiled national haven. It is Albion’s Garden of Eden, with its Holy Trinity of village church, local pub and cricket ground. Englishness itself, as
In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or
Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’. In the
People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that may be true. But the drag of the past is still great, and I can think of only two major works between classical and recent times that celebrate same-sex love openly: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Oscar
I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A racing car is a fearsome environment of engulfing pyroclastic heat, metaphor-testing noise, vision-blurring vibration and nauseating centrifugal forces. Ninety years ago it was even worse. The cars had tyres with little grip, feeble brakes and
In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust now, as the days stretch ahead and the horizons shrink to an hour’s walk a day, when is it going to happen? But it seems much more likely that reading is going to contract, and
In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup told the story of El Salvadorean coffee, from seed to cup. America was the world’s biggest consumer, drinking nearly 60 billion cups a year. It opened with a picturesque image of local Indians in traditional
It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached his four-film contract, preferring to settle out of court. Actors have lodged their public regret at working with him. He is one of Hollywood’s notable sinking stars. In March, following a demonstration by staff, Hachette
Private chefs keep many secrets and are expected to go to their graves without sharing a morsel of gossip about their employers. Whether cooking for a pop star, tycoon or member of a royal family, chefs must guarantee confidentiality. Chatter can be career-ending or lead to lawsuits. For a few such cooks, revelations could even
Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not to’ guide. Within a few pages it’s clear that Tamsin Calidas’s decision to decamp with her husband to a tiny Hebridean island is highly ill-advised. They take on too much: buying a derelict croft, hoping
This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled, it reflects the way we are now living. Inspired by the collective imagination of a Swindon book group, Alice Jolly has written a prophetic story. The narrator is Janey, married to the older Phil and
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to confess to bigamy. A theorist of the fourth dimension, he had looked destined to forge a career that would align him with the most renowned academic figures of the age. Now, with a conviction, a
Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but as humans do not change in certain essentials it seems likely that reactions centuries ago were similar to reactions now — when it is adults who often find many of them gruesome and unsuitable for
In the past year alone, Russia-watchers have been treated to books entitled The Code of Putinism; Putin’s World; Putin vs the People; The Putin System and We Need to Talk About Putin — just to mention the ones with Putin’s name in the title. In addition, Robert Service’s Kremlin Winter, Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of
Seafaring and the rule of the waves — as the song would have it — was an integral part of Britain’s sense of identity for centuries, a fire in the national imagination arguably first sparked by the exploits of Sir Francis Drake and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rising to full flame with the
With its distinctive hilly site and unusually coherent architecture (significantly, most of it domestic rather than civic), Hampstead has always had a singular character. But it is as much a state of mind as an address. Although two of England’s greatest native artists, Keats and Constable, made it their home, over the past three centuries
‘The world,’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have said, ‘is full of ships.’ With this comment, unlike in many other things, she lacked a common touch. I do not know what she thought about planes, still less jump jets, but no doubt she would have shared the sentiment of Rowland White’s Harrier 809 about their
In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing it. ‘No,’ he says. ‘The life of freed instincts is composed of layers. The first layer leads to the second, the second to the third and so on. It leads ultimately to abnormal pleasures.’ A
Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her clothes, and given us some scintillating reading. For despite having edited British Vogue for 25 years, until she retired in 2017, Shulman’s relationship with fashion at times reads less like a love affair than a
The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history.
Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes, travelled to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist militia and one of the main jihadist groups fighting the Syrian army. A dozen more young people from Brighton were also eager to go. Radicalisation had
I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for
Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers
‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains
How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it. Ernest Coleman’s story of his search
We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a
I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and postmodernism. If that makes Jeff Noon’s third outing of the private detective John Nyquist sound like a niche affair I apologise, as it is a rollicking and goose-flesh- inducing novel. Writers such as the late
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient
Michael Arditti has never held back from difficult or unfashionable subjects. His dozen novels, including the prize-winning Easter, as well as Jubilate, The Breath of Night and Of Men and Angels, explore faith in an increasingly secular modern world. Half a century ago he would have brushed shoulders with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but