The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It’s back. And I can’t believe I missed it the first time. Live Theatre’s dramatisation of Chris Mullin’s diaries has returned to Soho for a lap of honour. Richly deserved as well. The show moves unobtrusively between Mullin’s many spheres of interest. We see his home life as a father of two and as MP
Switch is a French action thriller starring that lumbering wooden legend of French cinema, Eric Cantona, and it’s awful, but at least it is one of my favourite kinds of awful film: so awful it’s a triumph. If I were ever invited to lecture at film school — remarkably, I have yet to receive such
I suspect that, when men and women watch Mad Men, they see very different things. Women probably see a witty indictment of male patriarchy. I, on the other hand, see Heaven on Earth. Everything shown on Mad Men is what male dinosaurs like me expect from western civilisation: liquid lunches, beautiful secretaries, exquisite suits and
Imagine a small room, no windows, institutional cream on the walls. Bare of all decoration except for a circle of cheap chairs and the most basic of recording equipment. A gathering of people squeeze into the space — three young men, a strained-looking couple, an official-looking woman with clipboard and notes, a man in jeans
When the late Ken Russell published his autobiography in 1989, he called it A British Picture. That title could just as easily describe The Devils, his 1971 adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, relating the true story of supposed demonic possession among Ursuline nuns in north-west France in 1634. Here is a world-class
The subject here is colossal, covering a substantial stretch of the later Roman empire, the last years of the Persian empire, the conversion of the Arabs, the spread of Christianity and what happened to Judaism. The time span runs, effectively, from the death of Jesus to the moment in the eighth century when the Abbasids
One evening nearly 40 years ago the world’s press descended on Patrick White in Sydney: they rampaged outside his house, pounded its doors, shouted through windows, camped on the lawn. The reason for this hullabaloo was that White had beaten Saul Bellow in the race for the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1973. Yet in
Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has been keenly interested in food for years. Besides being a blogger, scholar and the youngest chess champion in the history of New Jersey, he is also the author of an online dining guide to the Washington DC area and an opinionated foodie. This is
Prunella Clough was a modest and self-effacing artist who nevertheless produced some of the most consistently original and innovative British art of the second half of the 20th century. She was by no means reclusive, enjoying an extensive social and teaching life, but she deliberately kept a low profile, being famously guarded with biographical details.
Take some boiled maize, chew it, spit it out, put the mixture into an urn, bury it, dig it up several days later, and Bob’s your uncle: the Ecuadoran delicacy chicha. It turns out that ‘controlled rot tastes good’; the particular rot you favour will depend on where you come from. In Sardinia casu marzu
The central themes of Russian history have remained constant for over a millennium. Russia’s vast spaces and lack of any natural borders have always made her inhabitants terrified of invasion. And to protect the country against invaders, and to preserve its unity, Russia’s rulers seem always to have felt it necessary to assert their authority
When Ed Smith became a full-time professional cricketer for Kent in 1999 the county side was preparing for the new millennium by shedding anything that smacked of old-fashioned amateurism. Professionalism was to be a state of mind. Players were henceforth required to sign up to a new code of conduct. This Core Covenant consisted mainly
Set in Romania in the 1950s, this is the story of two people, Augustin and Safta, who are both very different and yet very closely linked. Safta is the daughter of the big house, while Augustin is the deaf mute illegitimate son of the cook. Safta’s mother, high-minded, overly religious since the death of a
The authors of this book have attempted a difficult thing: to ‘write about something that could never be known’. Here is a terrific and scary story about a group of American, British and European trekkers kidnapped by jihadists in Kashmir in July 1995 and slaughtered in December. Their wives were allowed to go free, and
Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the body in a sluggish fashion. But then Harvey — who was born 14 years after Shakespeare — noticed that, actually, blood shoots out of the
Azazeel comes to Britain as the winner of the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, inevitably known as the ‘Arabic Booker’. It’s also been both a source of controversy and an unexpected popular hit in Youssef Ziedan’s homeland. According to the translator’s afterword, within months of publication, ‘piles of the novel appeared on the pavements
Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned Buddhist adept until her death in 2007. Aldous Huxley, her husband, had emigrated to America 70 years earlier in search of spiritual solace and the
What happens to a novelist who becomes the conscience of a nation? Nadine Gordimer, who is now 89 and whose writing career began in the 1940s, has represented the progressive white intelligentsia of South Africa through a large corpus of fiction and essays, exploring personal and political morality with passionate lucidity through the apartheid years
In his new book, Wired for Culture, Mark Pagel — a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading — argues that social structures and culture are vital components in human evolution. Human beings are altruistic, helpful, and cooperative in ways that other mammals are not. Pagel says our facility for culture is the
Voldemort was second division as an adversary; Amazon was Harry Potter’s most implacable foe. But the bespectacled wizard has seen off the virtual giant. The major books story this week is the arrival of official eBook editions of the Harry Potter novels. But these books are not for sale through Amazon’s e-commerce system (or Barnes
The man who was probably the greatest banjo player in history has died, aged 88. Steve Martin says everything that needs to be said here. Here he and Earl are performing the immortal Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
There are now thought to be about six million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as 40 years in one London borough. There have also been huge numbers of words written trying to explain their revival. Perhaps the real question is why they ever went away, given the success
Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a
Perhaps one of the best things to come out of Birmingham, Mike Skinner, mastermind behind The Streets, lets us know what he’s reading in this week’s Shelf Life. He reveals an interest in 20th Century history, what he once managed to get 10,000 people to do and a fondness for Philip Marlowe’s bon mots. His
Dr Gregory L Reece’s fascinating book, Creatures of the Night, is an enjoyably macabre stroll through the misty swamps of folklore where myth and religion are intertwined. Why do we create monsters and why is there such a desire and appetite for the darker side of the human soul? Whereas one reader may dismiss the
The march of David Mitchell continues. The author of Cloud Atlas and other acclaimed novels has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E.M. Forster Award, worth a princely $20,000. The prize is intended to assist a ‘young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.’ Every little
Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last
There are concentration camps in North Korea. We can see them clearly, via high-resolution satellite images on Google Earth. There are six of them, according to South Korean intelligence, and the largest is bigger than the city of Los Angeles. Of the six, four camps are ‘complete control districts’ where ‘irredeemable’ prisoners are worked to
As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Britain’s victory is justly recalled. That the war came near to disaster is conveniently forgotten. How well-placed are we to hold the islands today? When the 127 ships of the Task Force — a number that could not be assembled now — returned in triumph