Books
Stephanie Sy-Quia
October 5th in the United States is a day for righteous rage. In 2016 it marked the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape in which Donald Trump made his now-infamous “grab them by the pussy” comment. In 2017, it was the date the New York Times published their first story on Hollywood king-pin producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2018 it was the date on which the Senate saw fit to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s work concerns Weinstein, but is bookended by Trump and Kavanaugh. She Said tells the story of their investigation for Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Over the past four decades Martin Gayford, The Spectator’s art critic, has travelled the world, been published in an amazing range of print and digital publications and written more than 20 books, many of them involving his fascination not only with looking at art, but also its making.Several, including Looking at Pictures, have been collaborations with David Hockney. Man in a Blue Scarf, his account of sitting 250 hours for his portrait by Lucian Freud, is a classic. He has also published books on Michelangelo, Constable, and Van Gogh. His association with art is deeply personal. His Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a book about experiences that go beyond reading about art. Martin Gayford’s 20 short essays about press trips and self-motivated travel concern meetings – in the flesh, in real time and space – with art that includes murals, sculptures and glacier waters, and with artists through interviews and studio visits. For a book whose title is a riff on Nancy Mitford’s touching novel, The Pursuit of Love, it is also a subtle paean to the enormous variety of objects, buildings and paintings that we deem art, as well as its history and practitioners.The reader is of course at a remove and in a Read more ...
Stephanie Sy-Quia
You will doubtless have seen the protestors who dress as Gilean handmaids to protest anti-abortion legislation from Texas to Missouri. They model their costumes on those of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale: tight white bonnets and red smocks. They appear at courthouses and state capitols as a warning from the near-future or a fiction which feels ever more like the present – and the truth. Thirty-five years and much hype later, Atwood has given us a sequel, The Testaments. “Dear Readers,” she wrote recently on social media, “Everything you’ve ever asked me Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Serious historians don’t much care for counter-factual speculations. Readers, however, often enjoy them. So here’s mine. In 1780, the seemingly invincible forces of the East India Company had suffered a crushing defeat at Pollilur, west of Madras. It was inflicted by the well-drilled Mysore armies of Haidar Ali and his legendary warrior son, Tipu Sultan. Backed by French arms and expertise, the Mysore forces had allied with the rulers of Bengal and Avadh (roughly, today’s Uttar Pradesh) to resist the merchants-turned-conquerors from London. English power and influence in India, until then Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Albertopolis! The Royal Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial and countless Albert Squares, Roads and Streets all commemorate Britain’s uncrowned king. In this mesmerising biography, novelist and historian A. N. Wilson’s admiration and affection for Prince Albert – who spent 22 years as Victoria’s husband – make for an irresistible and informative read.The pace is akin to a novel – brisk and confident – and builds Wilson’s substantial volume on Victoria (2014). Wilson is sometimes criticised for his remarkable ability to popularise the complex. But he has examined a vast array of original sources Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Reality follows dreams in José Eduardo Agualusa’s latest experiment in quixotic political fable. The book opens with journalist Daniel Benchimol waking at the Rainbow Hotel in Angola’s capital, Luanda: “I saw long black birds fly past. I’d dreamed about them. It was as though they had leaped from my dream up into the sky, a damp piece of dark-blue tissue paper, with bitter mould growing in the corners.” The birds seem to have escaped the innards of his dreamworld; they stain the sky with an uneasy, oneiric presence. That, or perhaps these birds – seen but already dreamed – occupy a zone of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the late 1950s, a photo technician from Salford suddenly became “the most famous teenager in Britain”. Shelagh Delaney was 19 when she sent the script of A Taste of Honey to the radical director Joan Littlewood. Within a matter of weeks, in May 1958, Theatre Royal Stratford East had staged it – sensationally, to a welcome that mixed bouquets and brickbats. The fearless youngster from the cosmopolitan slum neighbourhood of Ordsall had already begun “to change the way working-class women are treated and represented in Britain”. With its two generations of single mothers, its relaxed Read more ...
India Lewis
Karl Marlantes’s Deep River is an all-American novel. And why should it not be? Marlantes is an all-American author. He grew up in small-town Oregon, attended Yale (and Oxford), fought and was heavily awarded as a Marine in Vietnam, then settled down to convert his experiences into the well-received Matterhorn and What It Is Like To Go To War. In Deep River, he returns to his childhood to tell the story of his Finnish heritage, loosely basing it on The Kalevala, a collection of tales gathered together in the 19th century into one epic poem by Elias Lönnrot. This explanation, which comes at Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The trend-hopping taste-makers who run British literary publishing have lately decided that “working-class” writing merits a small dole of their precious time and cash. To assess how long this latest patronising fad may last, check out the availability of James Kelman’s fiction: three decades of ground-breaking modernist work by a scrupulous innovator, now all but buried by Penguin, and largely consigned (a couple of titles apart) to second-hand limbo. Born in Liverpool, long settled in his homeland of Wales, Niall Griffiths has, like Kelman, crafted a sophisticated literary voice for the Read more ...
Sarah Collins
Many of the women in this pioneering collection of essays have faced unimaginable hardship in their pursuit of truth – persecution by extremist groups as well as the loss of family members and friends. The tone of this collection is, however, best captured by Amira Al Sharif’s photograph of laundry hanging out to dry across a grocer's family home which has been damaged in a coalition bombing in Yemen. “You can destroy our homes, but the Yemenis will still do laundry,” she writes – ordinary life will continue in the face of terrible circumstances.The essays are grouped around loose themes: Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Jeanne – employment, age and appearance unknown, motives unknowable – is building a collection of penises. In street after street, she feigns dizziness; on the inevitable approach of a man eager to lend his help, she leads him to a hotel room. After the encounter, she does not retain any recollection of this man’s face, body or name; in the intricate interior of her memory palace, only the textured details of the penis, the "shape, the form, the particular warmth, the density, the smell", are carefully preserved. She is the protagonist of Nina Leger’s provocative novel which imagines the Read more ...