Books
Boyd Tonkin
Stopped in the street for a vox pop by a BBC interviewer keen to “fill your air” with strife and bile, a character in Spring retorts that “there’s a world out there bigger than Brexit, yeah?” Newshound critics, take note. The symbolically named Brit (short, originally, for Brittany) works as a guard at a migrant detention centre. In its hellish corridors, people driven by suffering, abuse and terror out of regions much less favoured than navel-gazing Europe endure routine contempt and cruelty in a “kind of underworld”, a “place of the living dead”. As in the two preceding volumes of Ali Smith Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Around the works canteen, a dozen huge wall-paintings depict, in bright cheerful colours spread across radically stylised forms, happy scenes of women and men at work and play beside a sunlit sea. They till, pick, dance, chat, dream, wander or water flowers. In their shapes and shades, all play their harmonious part in this beautiful, neutral world of elements and creatures and objects which (as Karl Ove Knausgaard puts it) “doesn’t care about us, which doesn’t care about anything, which merely exists”. And that indifference of the universe makes you want, not to scream, but to smile.Painted Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Record Store Day is now a fixture on the calendar, a key element in “the vinyl revival”, and this year – 13 April – it’s possible to buy a special Rega Planar Plus 1 Turntable, one of a limited edition of 500 costing £299. A novelty to many – but not to those of us who still have proper hi-fi systems which in my case includes not only a turntable and CD player but also cassette player and recorder and its mini-disc equivalent. It seemed like a good idea at the time – I planned to transfer all my bootleg cassettes. It was my third “proper” system and its selection was the result of many hours Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus (literally, “Building House”) art school is on us, prompting publications and exhibitions worldwide. Subtitled “Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus”, Fiona MacCarthy’s revelatory biography of the figure instrumental in establishing it, the upper-middle-class Walter Gropius (1883-1969), will be a major contribution, strikingly readable and elegantly designed as it is. Based on five years of exhaustive research, her book expands our understanding of Gropius as well as the cultural history of the 20th century.For nine years Walter Gropius was the first Read more ...
David Nice
Forty years ago this July, Simone Veil gave her inaugural speech as first President of the European Parliament. She had many issues to include. Peace came first; as a survivor of Auschwitz and the "death march" just before liberation, she well understood why "our Assembly has, whatever its differences, a fundamental responsibility" to maintain it. She also saw the difficulties ahead in holding the centre of European solidarity over and above the immediate national concerns of the Union's members. Austrian Robert Menasse's novel is the first I've read to bring to life the complexity of such a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having put his artistic aspirations on ice. Typical millennials. They’re in love. Or rather, we’re told they’re in love. In fact, we’re told rather a lot of things - it seems to be the book’s mode. Dan is mixed-race, was brought up in Peckham by his mum and hasn’t been abroad all that much: “I’m a city boy, aren’t I? And I don’t speak French.” Bea, on the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of 1975 in the outer London suburbs where she lived. The fate of the woman born, as Magda Nussbächer, to a Hungarian Jewish family in Romania in 1924 has shadowed earlier sequences of poems by Szirtes. They dramatised, and imagined, scenes from his family history. Not until now, more than four decades after his loss, has the vast emptiness she left behind resolved into a prose memoir. Certainly, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam Bourne’s thrilling novel is the existence of a conspiracy to annihilate all the evidence of historic atrocities through the millennia. Books, of course, must go, and in a neat twist even the biggest book distribution centres, Amazon included, are targeted. Bourne’s great gift is to take reality and give it a good shove, a what if? that we are persuaded Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is an astonishing book: in its breadth, depth and detail and also in its almost palpable, and sometimes unpalatable, admiration of its subject, the controversial, long-lived Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012). But if you want to immerse yourself in the course of changing views of history, the newly minted social and contextual narratives of the post-war period, and meet the vast and entertaining spectrum of 20th century academic life among historians, and even encounter the history of the past century, this is it. The intricate personal details of the life of Eric Hobsbawm, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A Tana French crime novel is never just a thriller. Probably more acclaimed in the USA than the UK (she gets rave reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times) French always transcends the genre, stylistically, emotionally, atmospherically.Her Dublin Murder Squad series, with its detailed police procedurals, is addictively many-layered: in the chilling Broken Harbour, the collapse of the Irish housing boom forms a menacing backdrop to family crack-ups, a multiple murder and a detective who feels the presence of evil as a “high hum” in his skull; in The Secret Place, a girls’ boarding Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s more than a little ironic when journalists who grew up in the upstart world of digital media, with all its mash-ups, plagiarism and (yes) theft, accuse a print journalist with a distinguished career of playing fast and loose with her attribution of quotes in a book that takes an in-depth look “Inside the News Revolution”.Jill Abramson, who spent nine years on the Wall Street Journal and 17 on the New York Times, latterly as Executive Editor, has agreed to review the published text against her notes, admitting that she “fell short” in the attribution of certain quotes and passages. She’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With books including Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks, Robert MacFarlane has established himself as one of the leading writers on landscape in the English language, continuing a literary tradition that contains talents as diverse as John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Thomas and Laurie Lee. His 2017 collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris on a large-format book of poems for children called The Lost Words: A Spell Book has now been adapted for stage, with Morris creating brand new art works for a UK tour, beginning on Friday 8 February at Snape Maltings, Read more ...