Books
Boyd Tonkin
With a clownish bully currently installed in the White House, the 2017 Man Booker Prize aptly went to a novel that showed a President who commanded true courage and nobility – Abraham Lincoln – as he grappled with the mysteries of life and death, love and loss, in the wake of his son’s passing. Markie Robson-Scott saluted the “magnificently inventive” Lincoln in the Bardo, one of clutch of stand-out novels that explored power and its abuse in another year of deranged global politics.Unjustly ignored by prize juries, Colm Tóibín returned to mythical Greece to re-tell the tragedy of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem. Anton Sansour, a mathematician, academic and his partner’s father, jokes that all the fruit – from apricots to lemons – grows in his garden, while the seasonings traditionally arrived in town, on camel trains, along the ancient spice route from the East. This calorific symbol of “goodwill and fellow- 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 ...
David Nice
"From drawing, via the theatre, to the cinema". Naum Kleiman's introductory qualification of Sergey Eisenstein's own self-perceived line in his Film Form is one that he follows in a necessarily selective and well-organised biography of the director as graphic artist, acompanied by over 500 previously unpublished illustrations.We follow the phenomenon from the young fantasist of Riga, anthropomorphising creatures as society eccentrics, though stage designs indebted to Meyerhold's example - what one wouldn't give to see realisations of his sets and costumes for Shaw's Heartbreak House and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Jaron Lanier has quite a story to tell. From a teenage flute-playing goat-herd in New Mexico to an “intense dreamer”, and a maths student capable of arguing, about films for example, with “supremacist. Borgesian flair”, then onwards and upwards, there is much to fascinate.With friends he founded the first virtual reality start-up company VPL Research in 1984, and has co-founded three other start-ups – those stories are not told here. He has been involved with Microsoft since 2006 and currently has the title of Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft Research. He is also a musician and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Utopias have a way of going up in flames. Rachel Hewitt’s new book, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, charts the revolutionary fervour and disappointment provoked over the course of the 1790s by looking at the decade through the biographies of five of its optimistic luminaries — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Beddoes, and Thomas Wedgwood.Over the course of this decade, the French Revolution broke out to great enthusiasm before souring into the Terror during which killed thousands; war with France was declared; Beddoes and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is not just the season of holidays and holy days in the monotheistic religions; the art galleries and museums are busy reminding us of worlds beyond, with Imagining the Divine at the Ashmolean in Oxford, and Living with Gods at the British Museum (replete as is now de rigueur with illuminating radio programmes from Neil Macgregor, whose book will follow in March). God and gods are more than ever with us, even in the West’s secular age.As if to emphasise that, God: A Human History is an individual and idiosyncratic compendium of authorial and anecdotal observations on gods and God from the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
One of these years, Javier Marías will probably win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If and when that honour happens, critics may well discuss the Spanish writer’s fiction, in all its “intensity, complexity and power to convince”, in much the same terms as he applies to one of his favourite works of art. This evergreen marvel is “not just extraordinarily complex as regards narrative and time, it is also chillingly ambiguous; and it does not attempt to explain anything about the grave matters it touches upon: identity, being and not being, the real and the hypothetical, memory as not something Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tina Brown’s first Christmas issue of Vanity Fair in 1984 had this to say about “the sulky, Elvisy” Donald Trump: “…he’s a brass act. And he owns his own football team. And he thinks he should negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.”Trump stalks these gripping, funny pages like a virus (and indeed, AIDS is just tightening its grip on New York). In 1990 a damning piece in VF reveals he has a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his office; the last entry of 1991 has him pouring a glass of wine down the writer’s back at a party in revenge and then sneaking away. The diaries – a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him. His journalist’s eye and performer’s hunger made him a natural raconteur, one who could induce synaesthesia so you could taste words.People dear to me loved his writing Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Novelist Jonathan Coe has, for some time, been assuming the role of an Evelyn Waugh of the left. Brilliant early comedies about education, journalism, and power have made way for longer, deeper, but arguably somewhat lugubrious, almost mystical investigations into lost, neglected people and places. With The Broken Mirror, Coe revisits many of these themes, but in the form of a tiny, poignant, crystalline fable.One of the most distinctive – and, in my view, valuable – aspects of Coe’s novels has always been a willingness to take on specific, practical political issues. In the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A year ago, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his work commended by the committee "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". The media response was like no other and we admirers felt vindicated. Still it was often necessary to explain why he deserved it and easy to fall back on the evidence of that mighty handful of great 1960s albums, plus Blood On the Tracks, Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind.Professor Christopher Ricks, long-time Dylan advocate whose vast output includes a fat tome on Dylan’s Visions of Sin, was among the Read more ...