The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning
In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. Nothing very dramatic caused this. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb
Those of us who have never endured occupation can find it difficult to judge the behaviour of some who have. The lines between survival, passive cooperation and active collaboration are not always clear. Following the second world war, the myths of resistance, especially in France, were deliberately inflated in order to hide the humiliation and
Experts in urban fauna have apparently discovered a ‘sacred triangle’ between the Parc Monceau and Neuilly in the west of Paris. A short distance from the wind-blasted northern arrondissements with their ‘robust but primitive population’, the leafy avenues and eco-landscaped gardens of private mansions on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne have created a
Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is
No other country, wrote Karl Marx in 1854, was so ripe for revolution as Britain. How wrong can you be? Despite two world wars, innumerable booms and busts, not to mention the extension of the franchise to the lower orders, 170-odd years later Britain’s ruling class are (or were until recently) almost as firmly in
Over the years, I too have regularly been meeting with moths. So far, I have encountered 891 species just in my own garden in Sussex. But most of these moths came to me: I have an ancient metal Robinson trap, inherited from my grandfather, which lures them to a mercury vapour bulb. Katty Baird, how-ever,
It is easy to overlook the importance of Central Europe, writes Martyn Rady at the start of this fascinating book. For some modern writers the region is best typified by similarities, or differences, over postboxes, popular preferences for spirits over wine or ‘the heavy smell of boiled cabbage, state beer and a soapy whiff of
If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity
War has broken out in theatreland. Managements are increasingly at odds with the audiences who fund their livelihoods. A recent stand-off involved James Norton’s new show, A Little Life, which contains a couple of scenes in which the actor removes his clothes. A punter at a preview in Richmond secretly photographed the moments of nudity
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series
‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.’ What’s queer in England is quite normal in Italy, where heated arguments are described as ‘discussioni’, but history has tended to forget that Rossetti was Italian. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites, however, were very conscious
The Secret Life of Bees is a fairy-tale set in the Deep South in 1964. Lily, a bullied white girl, befriends a plucky black maid, Rosaleen, and they escape together from Lily’s tyrannical dad. After various adventures they take sanctuary at a honey farm run by a commune of astonishingly successful African-American businesswomen. This story
Haydn’s The Creation is Paradise Lost without the Lost. True, the words aren’t exactly up there: translated into German by Haydn’s pal Baron van Swieten and subsequently retro-translated into some of the clumsiest, most endearingly rococo English ever set to music. But you get the idea. Near the start some demons get consigned (very efficiently)
Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in September 2018. Why there? Because it’s a hop and a skip from the small town of Lititz in Amish country, where scores of the big arena shows are built – it’s the real rock’n’roll
Sick of Myself is a satire from Norway that skewers the ‘look at me, look at me’ generation addicted to social media and asks: how far will someone go? Too far, is the short answer. Much, much, much too far, is the longer one. Indeed, although this starts out as a dark comedy, it does
Criss-crosses, everywhere: 300 objects covered in them. The exhausting range and depth of the world’s most famous pattern is on full display at the V&A Dundee’s vast new exhibition. Tartan is a more genuine emblem of Scottish nationhood than the famous deep-fried Mars bar, which no one really eats. But it’s not uniquely Scottish. Plaid
Humans live rigidly by the ticking hand of the clock, but few notice the passing of time with such precision as a horologist. Horology is the science of measuring time, and Rebecca Struthers is the first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology. After the Black Death, a wave of memento
‘Now, what I want is Facts…You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ When Dickens begins Hard Times with these words, spoken by the odious, square-faced Mr Gradgrind, we are left in no doubt that, for Dickens, an education should consist of
Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since
The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there
The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and
The Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston is the most recognisable face of the Falklands war. He was terribly burnt when the Guards were bombed while waiting on the RFA Sir Galahad on 8 June 1982. He later became a national figure, talking openly about the difficulties of recovery, and working for burns victims and injured veterans.
The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with
Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations
The chapter headings alone are enough to induce a panic attack: ‘Disrepair – how modern diets harm brain health in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’; ‘How ultra-processed food hacks our brains’; ‘How solving the last crisis in the food system caused the current one’. It’s not a new thing for books examining our food system
War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year. But I doubt many other critics are going to rave about it or even notice it, for some of the very same reasons that I
It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he
I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working my way through Golders Green Library. I guess she came shortly after Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. I only later became aware of her virulent anti-Semitism, and on this count she was not half-hearted