biography
Marianka Swain
It is, perhaps, a tale that suffers from overfamiliarity. Tina Turner’s rags-to-riches story – from humble beginnings as little Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, to her discovery, reinvention and sickening abuse by husband and manager Ike Turner, and finally her rebirth as a solo rock'n'roll star – is the stuff of showbiz legend. This new glossy but pedestrian West End musical adds little to the established narrative.The structure doesn’t help. Starting at the very beginning and racing through the years, there’s only time for broad-brushstrokes storytelling and one-note supporting Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s a Big Reveal that comes right at the end of this new indie movie from first-time writer/producer/directors Scott Elliott and Sid Sadowskyj (whose names, in retrospect, should have given the game away right from the start). For (complete spoiler alert!) this is Elliott and Sadowskyj’s own story, dramatised and put up on the big screen, with two young newcomers playing them as the movie’s leads. The film escorts us through their journey from York sixth-formers to successful young entrepreneurs, guided by a list of dreams they plan to pursue. One of which is – you guessed it – to make a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
All this time La Mer had been brewing. It was almost a year since Debussy had written to Colonne tentatively offering him “some orchestral pieces” he was working on, and to his publisher, Jacques Durand, a fortnight later listing the titles of the three movements: “Mer belle aux îles sanguinaires,” “Jeux de vagues,” and “Le vent fait danser la Mer.” But thereafter the trail goes dead until July 1904, when he writes to Lilly from Paris expressing the (no doubt hypocritical) hope that “La Mer will be so kind as to release me so as to be with you by the 15th August,” though by the end of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A macchiato may never taste the same again. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and history behind your cup of designer coffee, The Monk of Mokha will answer all your questions, and more.This is the prolific Dave Eggers’s third semi-biographical work: What is the What tells the story of one of Sudan’s “lost boys” and his journey to America; Zeitoun is the dramatic story of a Syrian American survivor of hurricane Katrina. In both of these works of reportage, Eggers gets close to his subjects and exposes trauma, injustice and prejudice. And both are page-turners, just as many of his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and immensely energetic life of a polymath artist. She builds her narrative on an enormous plethora of primary sources – his marvellous illustrated letters, his limericks and poetry, his hundreds of paintings, prodigious sketches and watercolours, his travel narratives, and the reminiscences, letters and narratives of his contemporaries.These Victorians, tireless travellers, left behind such copious piles of paper that they can practically write their own biographies (at least in terms of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Everybody’s been talking about Everybody’s Talking About Jamie since its Sheffield Crucible debut earlier this year. It’s unusual to see a musical come steaming into the West End based on word on mouth – not star casting, or association with an existing franchise. Instead, inspired by humble BBC Three documentary Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, Jonathan Butterell’s production is, in every sense of the word, refreshing: a genuine homegrown hit.Jamie New (John McCrea, pictured below right by Johan Persson) has decided he wants to become a drag queen, and to make his grand debut by wearing a dress to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A woman gives birth alone two months early in a frost-bound village in the Korean countryside. In Poland, a solitary woman washes down white migraine pills and concludes she must write. The child that is born dies. The finished book commemorates her death by according her an imagined life.Last year Han Kang won the Man Booker International with The Vegetarian, a slim novella about a woman who decides to give up meat — a deeply subversive action practically unheard of in her home country Korea. In her new work The White Book, also translated by Deborah Smith, she transgresses literary Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted biographer, Claire Tomalin has been at the heart of the literati glitterati all her working life. Here she turns her forensic sharp eye on herself in a life that even her nonagenarian father characterised as hard, although she herself sees it as privileged.Of course, both are right. Her parents – a clever very young Frenchman, Émile Delavaney, infatuated by both the English language and its literature, and her mother Muriel Herbert, a gifted musician and composer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and lensed Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. He was renowned as “the man who makes women look beautiful”, but despite this he didn’t shrink from shooting Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood (Part II).Terry Johnson’s new play for Hampstead Theatre depicts Cardiff in his twilight years, reliving chunks of his past while his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Hamilton is positively in love with his subject, and writes with verve and enthusiasm, yet grounds it on vast research with primary and secondary sources, all impeccably noted.The whole, organised into 40 pithy chapters with titles such as “In the Painting Room”, is like a piece of stage craft come to life. Hamilton sweeps the reader into the world of 18th century Suffolk, smoke-filled Bath – all those coal fires Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Duff McKagan is a survivor. He’s a bass player too, from the fledgling Seattle punk/proto-grunge outfit 10 Minute Warning to the stadium-filling behemoth of Guns N’ Roses, but if you were judging by the narrative weight of this 2015 documentary, you’d have to conclude that he’s mostly survivor. Now, it’s true that drugs and booze burst his rock’n’roll bubble – and very nearly his pancreas – but it seemed odd that the film concentrated so heavily on the effect rather than the cause.Part book reading, part documentary, part animation, It’s So Easy… never succeeded in being any one thing well Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reading the Rocks has a provocative subtitle, “How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life”, indicating the role of geology in paving the way to an understanding of the evolution of our planet as a changing physical entity that was to eventually support ever-evolving forms of life: but this is not so much revealtion of a secret, more a history. In a series of short pithy chapters, we are treated to a fascinating cast of characters who invented a new subject, both academic and practical, with enthusiasm and almost overwhelming energy, embracing those on the other side of the Channel Read more ...