The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, lies on a marshy bay encircled by mountains. It was founded in 1749 by the colonial French and named after a vessel, Le Prince, which anchored there about 1680 (and not, as the dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier apparently liked to believe, after The Prince by Machiavelli). Thousands subsist in shanties built
In November 1660, on a damp night at Gresham College in London, a young shaver named Christopher Wren gave a lecture on astronomy. In the clearly appreciative audience were 12 ‘prominent gentlemen’, who in discussions afterwards, possibly over a drink or two, decided they would meet every week to talk about science and perform experiments.
William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham was hailed by Victorian schoolboys as the man who made England great. He was the patriot leader, the minister who steered the country through the Seven Years War, climaxing in the Year of Victories of 1759. General Wolfe heroically captured Quebec, British troops helped Frederick the Great of
Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed. Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed. It tackles five generations of the same family, three wars, Mahler’s ninth symphony and contemporary Islamic terrorism. Along the way, it ponders the nature of male courage,
Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is imbued with his preferred subject, homosexuality. Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms
The metaphors that come to us when we are sick, trapped in the no-man’s land bet- ween consciousness and oblivion, are often the most vivid of which our minds are capable. The metaphors that come to us when we are sick, trapped in the no-man’s land bet- ween consciousness and oblivion, are often the most
Any bright schoolchild could tell, from a glance at his or her atlas, where the Allies were going to land next, after they had conquered Tunis in 1943: it would have to be Sicily. The deception service persuaded the German highest command that Sicily was only the cover for an attack on southern Greece, after
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope. Homer was thought to be blind — if indeed he was one person — and Milton of course suffered torture by going blind. Blindness is also associated with special powers of insight and intuition, very useful attributes for a poet. Blind poets had to develop
In this splendid, monumental slab of a book, Desmond Fitzgerald, the 29th Knight of Glin, has made the chronicle of his family epitomise the whole turbulent history of Ireland since the arrival of the Normans. The survey includes chapters by academic genealogists and other historians, with less formal contributions from the Knight himself and his
William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. But since reaching the standard age for retirement, Trevor has produced four further volumes, and now Penguin has brought out a handsome new edition, in two slipcased
Towards the end of 1979, Antonia Fraser gave an interview to the Washington Post in connection with her book Charles II (renamed ‘Royal Charles’ so as not to confuse a sequel-bombarded American public). She records her final exchange with the interviewer in the tersely effective style of the diaries from which this book is adapted:
Last year, at a gathering in a London bookshop, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe read poetry and mused over his long career. The evening was a sell-out, the mood adoring. At the end, a Scandinavian blonde raised a hand to ask whether, if he could do it all again, there was anything about Things Fall
It’s lovely to be the child of a Chinese Revolutionary Martyr. It means your parent died especially heroically for the Communist cause. I had a friend who was such a son; his father, a high-ranking Chiang Kaishek army officer, came over to the Maoist cause and died fighting for it against his former comrades. The
Perry Anderson was an editor of the New Left Review in the days when there was a New Left, and a pro-European Marxist at a time when this seemed a contradiction in terms. Since then, the opinions of this characteristically English rebel have been softened by years passed in the sociology departments of American universities.
Waking Up in Toytown, by John Burnside The Freedoms of Suburbia, by Paul Barker Finding himself in a lunatic asylum, and then at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, John Burnside has an idea. He wants a normal life. His idea is to move to the suburbs, because it is there, he feels, that he might
William T. Vollmann ruined my Christmas. But he also made my year. Like a fisherman scared by reports of mysterious beasts and monsters — Here be dragons! Gryphon! Basilisk! Unicorn! Serpent! — I’d been put off for a long time by Vollmann’s reputation as the great white whale of American fiction, the New Maximalists’ Maximalist,
Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have
Have you ever been on holiday and struggled to choose a guidebook? I mean, where does one start? I imagine in a bookshop. But, if anything, that makes the task even harder. The choice is just too wide. Waterstones sell around 12 guidebooks per major city — far more if you want a whole country
Who can we add to the roster of Great Irish Writers? Why none other than our old chum Patrick Bartholomew Ahern. It seems that Bertie’s autobiography (sadly not titled Dig Outs & Other Fuck-Ups) should be found on the fiction shelves. How so? Well… The granting of tax-free status to former taoiseach Bertie Ahern for
This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title. The suggestion is that the author has been forced to rummage among the wreckage that is England in order to find something, anything, that is still intact. Its origins and intentions are quite the opposite. As Richard Ingrams explains in his short introduction, when
Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. This reflects the secret affection of the Irish bourgeoisie for the
You are celebrated as the architect of one of the most famous buildings in the world, now in your late eighties and living quietly in your home outside Copenhagen. One day a beautiful blonde German girl knocks on your door. She is clutching a folder of her photographs of the extraordinary structure on the other
Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is one of the most interesting artists working in Europe today, a philosophical painter of reality who works and re-works his pictures before he discovers something new, something worth saving. William Feaver, in this grand new monograph, calls Auerbach’s paintings ‘feats of concentration’, and stresses the hard work which goes into
After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three
Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh. A quotation from the latter’s Put Out More Flags, about some shady manoeuvres by Basil Seal, supplies the epigraph to a chapter of Marcus Scriven’s Splendour & Squalor: ‘From time to time he disappeared … and
‘The Axis powers and France,’ declared Marshall Pétain and Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, ‘have a common interest in the defeat of England as soon as possible.’ Why this should have been so is one of the many interesting questions to which this book offers no satisfactory answer. ‘The Axis powers and France,’ declared
What was it about post-war British cinema? Our films were lit up by a collection of wonderfully idiosyncratic performers. Think Alistair Sim, Terry-Thomas and Robert Morley. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of them all was Margaret Rutherford. The drama critic, J. C. Trewin once remarked, ‘When you have seen any performance by Margaret Rutherford you are
In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting a child by an Italian prisoner of war. ‘Why oh why darling did I have to let you down, me who loves you more than
I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it