The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The first thing to be said about this combination of history, autobiography and polemic is how heavy it is — not in the literary sense, though it is by no means light reading, but in the literal sense that it is a surprising weight in the hand. Befitting its title, it is printed on unusually
‘Here is a hot potato,’ The Spectator’s book review editor wrote in a note accompanying this book. Radioactive, actually. In 2006 Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt posted a version of an article they had written on the Israel lobby for the London Review of Books on a Harvard faculty website. It was
In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest, not least on the issue of global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. The author — once what he
Worcestershire is England’s most undervalued county. Sauce, Elgar and cricket, not necessarily in that order, are what most people associate with the name. Otherwise it is that place we cross on our way to Herefordshire, its far smarter western neighbour, or the territory glimpsed on either side of the M5 as we whiz northwards to
The war in Iraq cast a long shadow over Minette Walters’ previous novel, The Devil’s Feather, and it also plays a part in her new one. Lieutenant Charles Acland suffers horrific head injuries, including the loss of an eye, when he runs into an ambush while leading a convoy on the Basra-Baghdad highway. The two
Footballers’ wives and girlfriends, pop stars’ and politicians’ sons and daughters, are gilded by proximity to the golden ones, often regardless of their own intrinsic talent (or lack of it). It is unusual to find this phenomenon operating upwards through the generations, however. Jennie Churchill, despite her great beauty, charisma, notorious marriages, and reputed 200
Now Saga’s agony aunt, Katharine Whitehorn, has for more than 50 years been a trail-blazer in British journalism. Starting out as a member of the talented writing team on Picture Post, she went on (stopping off only briefly at Woman’s Own) to found the celebrated ‘Roundabout’ column in The Spectator before being scooped up by
Ever since he could read and write John Betjeman felt himself destined to become a poet. Later he wrote, ‘I have always preferred it [poetry], knowing that its composition was my vocation and that anything else I wrote has been primarily a means of earning money in order to write poetry.’ In so doing he
On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells
There’s more to folk these days than dodgy beards and cable-knit sweaters and it’s clear why Bellowhead, instigators of an outbreak of frenzied folkish foot-stomping at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Wednesday, picked up Best Live Act in this year’s BBC Radio Two Folk Awards. Fronted by the charismatic Jon Boden, and underpinned by a riotous
On holiday I read (not reread I am afraid in my case, as people tend to claim about great classics) The Karamazov Brothers, in a new translation from Penguin. The moment I saw the title I wondered how we had all been persuaded to call it The Brothers Karamazov all these years. Talking about the
It is more than 40 years since the foundation of the Garden History Society signalled that the study of the history of gardens and designed landscapes had become an important subject in its own right, instead of being simply an optional add-on to the study of historic buildings. Since then, our knowledge of the subject
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara: This fictionalised account of the Battle of Gettysburg is one of the best historical novels you’ll ever read. The characterisation is masterful and the plotting so good that you almost forget that you know the battle ended the South’s chances of victory in the Civil War. The individual chapters
Lloyd Evans Zimbabwe – last in the dictionary and too often last on the agenda. The new season of Intelligence Squared debates opened with the motion ‘Britain Has Failed Zimbabwe.’ Moderator Richard Lindley set the scene by taking us back to Salisbury, now Harare, on November 11th, 1965 where, as a young journalist, he reported
On The Courtauld’s 75th anniversary, Robin Simon looks back at its colourful and distinguished history The Tate Gallery …sorry, I’ll start again. ‘Tate’ spent £100,000 a few years back just to lose its ‘the’. Staff are strictly instructed by the gallery’s Oberkommando to refer to it according to the brand name, as in ‘I’m at
This beautiful exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of Lee Miller’s birth in Poughkeepsie, New York State, and it takes place 30 years after her death from cancer. When she died, her only child Antony Penrose had no idea of her achievements as muse and artist, and only learnt about them gradually. As he grew to
It is not surprising that Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is an immensely popular artist. His pleasing deployment of colour and easy-going presentation of the paraphernalia of everyday life give his work an immediate warmth and likeability. His muted palette, careful modulation of hues, and soft-edged precision are a recipe for visual charm. Considered simply as aesthetic
Opera: Iphigénie en Tauride, Royal Opera House; Romeo und Juliet, St John’s Iphigénie en Tauride Royal Opera House Romeo und Juliet St John’s It is astonishing that Gluck achieves such greatness with such limited musical resources. For me he ranks with the top four or five operatic composers, yet he remains a permanently semi-neglected figure.
No idea why, but the hunt is on for lost 20th-century masterpieces. Michael Attenborough is searching for gold at the Almeida and Matthew Dunster has his pan in the stream at the Young Vic. Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding is an adaption of her 1946 bestselling novel. We’re in the Deep South where
Between the towering majesty of Greene King’s brewery and its bottling plant in Bury St Edmunds nestles the Georgian gem of the Theatre Royal. Built in 1819 by William Wilkins (architect of the National Gallery) and now reopening after a £5 million restoration, its survival is something of a miracle. From 1925 it was effectively
At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand. At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their
Jonathan Coe’s gloomy new novel will surprise fans of The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve-Up!, but it need not disappoint them. In taking on the voice of Rosamond, an elderly, suicidal lesbian, Coe shows an admirable refusal to be pigeonholed. Like many contemporary novelists (Penelope Lively, Thomas Keneally, Alan Judd), Coe is concerned with
At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and
On the 9 August 378 AD near Adrianople in Thrace the Roman army of the East was massacred and the Emperor Valens left dead on the battlefield by an army of barbarian Goths. It was, as Alessandro Barbero’s title claims, ‘The Day of the Barbarians’. He gives a highly readable account of the campaign and
Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it
Small Room in a Hotel In this cool cube of marble I am valid but invisible As an image caught in a camera But not yet reproduced. My reappearance from confinement Is that of a lavatory Houdini Except that no one notices And the wonder is reduced to a trickle. How many men have died
Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’ spiralling
Richard Russo is one of those writers, and they are many — indeed, they are most — whose work you may have read and enjoyed and yet whose name you may not instantly recognise. These are the stalwarts, the broad-shouldered, able-bodied men and women of literature, the workers, who for some reason lack that instant
War Words I heard the other day of soldiers back from serving in the fighting in Iraq, not wounded bodily but suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ — ‘bomb- happy’s’ what they called it in the war on Hitler; ‘shell-shock’ in the one before. And then I thought, Ah yes, I can recall D-Day, June the