Books
David Nice
Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the historical scope of Judith Herrin’s wide-roving history. From the gem-like “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia (425-50) to the flowery meadows of S Apollinare in Classe’s apse, consecrated in 549, covers little over a century of the nearly five covered here – 160 pages out of 399. For all the beauty of the colour illustrations, Herrin is an historian, not a scholar of art, and her straightforward prose has another objective – to make clear the imperial tergiversations which surround the Read more ...
India Lewis
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy metal, viscera, and hatred. It’s a book in the grand tradition of Kathy Acker and women surrealists everywhere, dancing through space and time into different dimensions.Girls Against God isn’t particularly gripping, and it is confusing at times, but the sense of being unmoored feels very intentional. Its story appears to begin fairly normally, its narrator describing their life in small-town southern Norway in the 1990s, and their overwhelming feeling of hatred, directed towards their Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "watermelon" juices that soil still stirs, the book makes an urgent argument for recognising our uneasy intimacy with the nonhuman. In seven essays, from "On Hospitality" and "On Greenness" to "On Panpsychism", Tamás reckons with the ecological meanings of hospitality, pain and grief, and maps how we might undo the human exploitation of the earth and the teeming lives it sustains. I spoke with Tamás over email in early Read more ...
Daniel Saldaña Paris
Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible collection, scattered around several countries, reconstructed little by little but forever incomplete.I don’t possess one of those personal libraries consisting of 20,000 volumes that writers of past generations could boast of by their early thirties. I live in a 68 square-metre apartment and that fact obliges me to be extremely selective in my curatorship. My parents have moved house dozens of Read more ...
India Lewis
There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely feminism lite, a palimpsest for young women in London who are into yoga and small plates. But that is not to detract from the fact that it is eminently readable, and frequently charming.The narrator and protagonist of Ghosts, 32-year-old Nina Dean, is a very thinly veiled portrait of the author. Alderton has amended some details, but the bare bones are very obvious to any readers of her 2018 Everything I Know About Love. Nina is short where Alderton is tall, dark-haired where Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile times – not least because it unpicks twisted ways of thinking that stretch far beyond the legacy of the Third Reich and its leader. Sir Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian and Hitler-era specialist who supported fellow-academic Deborah Lipstadt in her landmark court victory over the Holocaust-denying writer David Irving, led a five-year research programme on “Conspiracy and Democracy”. It bears fruit in this Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking from positions of immense privilege – ranging from the well-meaning to outright grifters.All too rarely does any of this speak to people’s lived experience of mental suffering, and that goes double in the music world, where perpetual insecurity has increased exponentially with the collapse of the live performance industry and the future looks particularly bleak right now. One new book, however, is Read more ...
theartsdesk
Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes, cottonmouths and copperheads, who were spotted slinking around and through the house her family moved to when she was five: "they were there first, had nature's version of squatters' rights." Instead of becoming accustomed to their silent presence, she developed a deep fear of these long-bodied, scaly creatures. Her book, Snake, is a reckoning with that fear: Wright seeks to understand how and why Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. As a literary artefact, Lee's exhaustive chronicle is a lot of words, and it's tempting to see her achievement as the non-fiction equivalent of, say, The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's grandly conceived, three-part epic about political and intellectual life in 19th-century Russia.The difference here is that Read more ...
Charlie Stone
William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and film-makers, drawn from real life or entirely fictional, are regular patrons of his stories. Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, is no different. Taking place on a film set in Brighton during the summer of 1968, Trio follows the lives of its three protagonists as they encounter the usual – and unusual – challenges of life in showbusiness. Artistic creation is the watchword both for the setting and its inhabitants. Talbot, the film’s producer, Anny, its star, and Elfrida, a struggling Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
What do you do when your phone rings, but you know the person ringing isn’t alive? In many ways, the cleverly named Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of ghost tales. But they are updated for the present day. John Lanchester meets his reader at the point at which the spectral intersects with the digital, all the while dissecting the seemingly simple notion of reality and its contents. The fusion makes for a compelling series of tales.Lanchester’s protagonists are often erudite, logical and attractive. They went to Oxbridge; they are professors, QCs, solicitors; one is an “actress Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has indeed built a wall, one that divides Republicans from Democrats in ways unimaginable even during the psychodrama of the Nixon years; a wall that has divided America in ways that will take a generation or more to heal – as Boris Johnson and his Brexit project has done in Britain.Even though no one I knew personally ever wanted Brexit, I always felt that if ever there was a referendum we would be out, and Read more ...