Books
Liz Thomson
Across seven decades, Alan Bennett has revealed a great deal of himself through plays and screenplays. In 1994, with the publication Writing Home, his first volume of diaries, culled from the London Review of Books column he started writing in 1983, he began revealing a good deal more. Enough Said is his fourth collection (leaving aside the 64-page House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries) and likely his final, as the title implies. It's an elegant package, the book's endpapers and tailbands matching the colours of the cushion on which he is shown reclining. Ninety-two next month and physically frail, Read more ...
Jon Turney
Browsing second-hand books is one of life’s reliable gentle pleasures. Nicholas Royle, though, in Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-Hand Books, takes it to the next level. And this is his third book relating the many small adventures he has devised to augment the basic activity of accumulating more and more books.Small? Definitely. Does the book harbour a train ticket? Royle takes the train indicated, if the ticket is affordable, and reads some of it en route. A street map is even better, as it allows Royle to indulge one of his other obsessions: walking. If there’s a house address Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rory Carroll’s previous book, Killing Thatcher, was terrific, and widely praised. It followed the IRA plot to murder the Prime Minister in 1984 and the subsequent police manhunt, telling the story with a journalistic degree of research and a novelistic eye for pacing and drama. For his follow-up Carroll’s gone back further into history to tell the story of the inciting event that ultimately led, along a winding path, to the Brighton bombing: the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA is, in a different way, as gripping as its Read more ...
India Lewis
Birgitta Trotzig’s Queen is a strikingly poetic, persistently grim semi-fairy tale set at one of the edges of Europe: a strange, windswept shore where pregnant women fall through the ice, family farms are barricaded in the winter to keep out the destitute, and their “great barn doors face the coastal wetlands”. This agrarian community ekes out its existence in a merciless, flat land by the Baltic Sea, and the novel focusses on a family of such farmers: Judit (the titular Queen), her brothers Albert and Viktor, Viktor’s widow, and Judit’s troubled parents. The landscape they inhabit is bleak Read more ...
Jon Turney
Two centuries ago, New York City was a tangled collection of streets on the narrowing southern end of Manhattan island. Expansion pointed only one way, and in 1807 a three-person team proposed it be organised on a grid. They sketched ranks of rectangular city blocks reaching eight miles north, up to 155th street. And with a few alterations of detail – Central Park did not appear on their map – present-day New York displays exactly that rectilinear array.That satisfying shift from idea to reality makes the New York Commissioners’ plan “the most courageous act of prediction in Western Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was not a bad man. Nowhere near it. But they said I was anyway.”Makenna Goodman’s second novel (her first, The Shame, a brilliant exploration of motherhood, came out in 2020) is, on the surface, an account of a cancellation, though there’s nothing straightforwardly black or white about any of it. In fact Goodman seems to shy away from binary thought, which is refreshing, if sometimes confusing.It’s also about love, class, nature and the way we relate to it. It is structured like a six-act play, with monologues by four rather abstract protagonists: Man, Realtor, Helen and Wife. Its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Robin Holloway is a composer and, until his retirement in 2011, don at Cambridge, where he taught many of the leading British composers of the last half-century. He has also always written on music, including a long-standing column in The Spectator, previously publishing two collections of “essays and diversions” (which I confess I haven’t read).Now comes his summa, Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, styled as “an invitation to western classical music”. The first thing to say is: it’s very long. Indeed, the proof copy of 1,216 pages didn’t fit through my letterbox Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Into the Groove is Justin Lewis’s follow-up to 2023’s Don’t Stop the Music, in which he traced 40 years of pop history by offering bite-sized facts for every day from January 1st to December 31st, jumping randomly from year to year. I noted in my review for theartsdesk that Lewis was particularly strong on the Eighties, so I was pleased this sequel focuses on that decade, with a similar format, this time going month-by-month through the years that were perhaps the very peak of pop.I am firmly in the ideal demographic for Into the Groove: the 1980s: the Ultimate Decade in Music, having Read more ...
Jon Turney
Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies offered almost unlimited increase in the sounds that could be conjured up on stage or in the studio. And conceptually, the range of sounds some considered musical expanded just as much, abolishing the boundary between music and noise, and even – thanks to John Cage – permitting the composer to propose no sounds at all.Elizabeth Alker dives into this Read more ...
Jack Barron
I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s increasingly unhinged approach to impartiality. Of course, similar sentences can be heard in cafés and pubs across the country, and on social media, and within our homes, as we struggle more and more to negotiate truth’s withering state.Poets have always wondered and worried about this, theirs being a world poised at the edge of meaning. Tom Read more ...
Jon Turney
The slightly overwrought subtitle, "How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future", gives a good indication how computer enthusiast Sam Arbesman treats his subject. Software, written in a variety of programming languages whose elements we refer to as code, is ubiquitous.It underlies many parts of modern life, and current efforts look like extending its reach profoundly. And, while we can try to understand it by reading books like this, it’s not clear that we can influence it. Although it is made by humans, it is easy to get the impression (digital Read more ...
India Lewis
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination of the borderlands of a bellicose nation. Focusing on the Pskov region, which juts out into eastern Europe, his account sympathetically – but honestly – describes the lives of its remaining inhabitants; the area has steadily depopulated since the end of serfdom and the end of the Soviet period.A place that once offered employment and opportunity has become a backwater, not much more than a lonely borderland that supplies troops to the contentious Ukrainian Read more ...