Books
Katherine Waters
Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to South America and the southern United States, the most well known of which are the diminutive peyote and the distinctively tubular San Pedro. Dried peyote “buttons” found alongside rock art in the Shumla Caves in Texas have been carbon dated to 4000BCE, rolled cactus skins (believed to be San Pedro) have been found at the sprawling ancient littoral civilisation of Las Aldas in Peru, and a frieze from the mysterious temple complex of Chavín de Huántar depicts a part- Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival between the Famished Road writer and author Colin Grant it’s how to “upwake”.The phrase, coined in his new (11th) novel The Freedom Artist – a post-truth fable set in an imagined future – describes a retaliation state after people find themselves unable or unwilling to think for themselves. He describes it as being the opposite of waking up, which is a slow uprising – being upwake is swift, vertical and immediate. It’s the need to question, and the challenging of blind acceptance.He speaks of how Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is underpinned by distress at the parlous nature of the understaffed and overworked NHS.Medical tales (including Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, Christie Watson’s The Language of Kindness, David Nott’s War Doctor, and How to Treat People by Molly Case) hit a nerve. We are fascinated because we have all been there and the NHS is absolutely central to our culture.What sets Hard Pushed apart is that while not all of us are mothers, but we have all been born.We meet all kinds of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How close should a biographer come to her subject? Clare Carlisle stays by the side, and looks through the eyes, of Søren Kierkegaard at almost every step on his maverick journey. Philosopher of the Heart even closes with a glimpse of Carlisle in tears at a bicentenary celebration for Kierkegaard at the Danish Church in London. She surmises that those tears, prompted by the dramatisation of a work by the Danish writer and thinker, flow because this tribute to the figure she has studied so devotedly is “casting a sideways glance at my life as a whole, and seeing meaning there”. It’s Read more ...
Katherine Waters
By fifteen Ummulbanu Asadullayeva — or Banine, to call her by the name under which she wrote and translated — had already lived more than most of us will in a lifetime. She’d experienced great love, married, been both a refugee and returnee, survived a pogrom, become a multimillionaire, been divested of that fortune by revolution, and read nearly the entire contents of her Aunt Rena’s library. By 1924, she was living in Paris, where she settled. Her life was extraordinary, but so were the times.Days in the Caucasus, the autobiography of her childhood, written in French and published in her Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Primatologist, ethologist, zoologist, biologist, social psychologist, behaviourist – how may ‘ists’ can one person have? Dutch-American scientist Frans de Waal has helped revolutionise how we think about the attributes of fellow animals. He writes for the lay reader without condescension, mixing anecdote with plenty of citations from controlled experiments.De Waal has spent more than forty years studying primate colonies, notably chimpanzees and bonobos, mostly at the National Primate Centre in Georgia, helping to transform and change human understanding of our fellow animals who inhabit this Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Early every evening, Miss Baixiu comes to sit in an isolated café. She is the daughter of Luo Yiming, the respected employee of a successful commercial bank in charge of loans throughout central Taiwan. As a rich man, an aesthete and a philanthropist he enjoys status, power, acclaim. Since leaving his job, the owner of the café, our unnamed narrator, has consciously sought to reduce his life to the smallest confines. He sleeps in a purpose-built mezzanine inside the shop and is lucky to sell two cups of coffee a day. The location of the café was dictated as the being the best spot to wait for Read more ...
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 ...