We all know where to find an index. It’s at the back. The physical form of the book – a bundle of flickable leaves clapped between two covers – has had such an astonishingly long run that it’s hard to imagine its major features arranged any other way. That hasn’t always been the case. The […]
Warren Ellis’s memoir, Nina Simone’s Gum, is about as weird as it sounds. For the last twenty years, Ellis, a rock musician best known for his long-term collaboration with Nick Cave, has acted as self-appointed ‘custodian’ of a piece of chewing gum spat out by Nina Simone during a concert at the Royal Festival Hall […]
Lucky John Lewis. As company histories go, nobody could wish for a more skilful chronicler than Victoria Glendinning, who has a slew of biographies to her name. She calls her work an ‘intimate history’, and indeed it is full of domestic rows, curious relationships and the occasional suspicion of autism. What it lacks in exhilaration […]
What does God look like? For Christians, a ready answer lies in the familiar iconography of Jesus Christ in medieval and Renaissance sacred art. Unlike the other Religions of the Book, Judaism and Islam, Christianity regards Jesus as God incarnate, a deity embodied in human form. To be more technical, he is a person of […]
The last book I read with ‘Freedom’ in the title was a novel by Jonathan Franzen. I read it because I’d been jolted by one of Franzen’s previous novels, The Corrections, in which the protagonist nips out just before lunch, leaving his parents with a poached salmon. Then he gets distracted for a hundred pages, which made me very worried. What about his parents, waiting to eat the fish? His freedom was clearly not theirs; at least, his freedom to wander the streets of New York was
Over the last four decades, Colin Thubron has established himself as the pre-eminent English-language travel writer, a mantle he has earned by both his avoidance of the clichés of the genre and his own distinctive gifts. In place of crass generalisations, snipes at local ‘failings’ and food, and a foregrounding of the writer’s own neuroses, […]
Around Oaxaca in the highlands of Mexico there is a form of maize that reaches six metres in height, with orange, finger-like roots that grow out of the stem and hang in the air, oozing mucus. It seems bizarre, but in the mucus live hundreds of kinds of bacteria that ‘fix’ atmospheric nitrogen and thereby […]
‘Once upon a time…’ The opening words of Henry Gee’s new book give notice that what follows will be a story – and a dazzling, beguiling story it is, told at an exhilarating pace. The scale is apparent from the first of a set of mind-boggling timeline graphics: this runs from the birth of the […]
Summarising the debate between the two most important economists of the second half of the 20th century might seem like a monumental task, best consigned to specialist textbooks. But this brave history of the intellectual duel between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman proves that assumption wrong, with its focus as much on their lives as […]
In the summer of 1952 an event was staged in the dining hall of a small college in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Chairs were arranged in four quadrants around an open space so that the performers could use the aisles and the audience faced one another. The number attending was modest, estimated […]
Stuck in a dentist’s waiting room one morning during the summer of 1962, I read a long article in the New Yorker by Rachel Carson summarising the argument that would shortly appear in her bestseller Silent Spring. Since the magazine was best known for its humour, I naively assumed that her apocalyptic-sounding alert about the […]
It is no easy task to pin a name on an ancient image of an early Roman emperor and make it stick. In the absence of a pedestal or inscription, a face may be identified by turning to two important guides. In his Lives of the Caesars, the antiquarian Suetonius (AD 69–122) describes the appearances […]
In his preface, Richard Overy explains that he has based this monumental reassessment of the Second World War on four assumptions. The first is that the conventional chronology of 1939–45 is no longer useful. The second is that the war must be understood as a global event since the Asian and Pacific theatres were as […]
I always thought WASPs were young women called Missy who dressed in little pink cardigans and pearls and preppie young men called Lowell or Carter, fashion items really. Well, this gigantic volume, conceived on a scale of grandeur to rival the US Capitol itself, has put me right. Rooted in Puritan New England, the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) emerged in the 1860s as a would-be moneyed ruling class pitted against the brutish, vulgar
There is a sketch in Chris Morris’s monstrously unsettling 2000 series Jam in which Morris plays a very posh man who has decided to live outside. The man stands wistful and weather-beaten, deriding the useless comforts of beds and central heating as he describes skinning dead blackbirds and fighting cats for food. Sometimes, he tells […]
In his magnum opus Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1921, the German sociologist Max Weber laid out a famous tripartite theory of stratification. Power in society, he noted, is mediated in three principal ways: through social class, through political parties and through something he called Stand. The word is one of those beguiling Teutonic […]
‘This is the book of the generations of Adam.’ So begins the fifth chapter of Genesis, and it lives up to the billing. Starting with Adam, who ‘begat a son in his own likeness, and in his own image, Seth’, the chapter describes the generations onwards – through Enos, Cainan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah and […]
Very few books about music provide much in the way of flair. Not so Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion, a giddy study of a familiar figure. Considering the great man’s music within the vortex of late 18th-century Europe, Mackie’s cross-cultural book refuses to see its subject in isolation. A poet, commentator and marked stylist, Mackie […]
All In tells the story of a life lived in the public eye, often painfully as well as triumphantly. It’s a cracking read and a well-honed product of the author’s brand (which includes Billie Jean King Enterprises, Team BJK and the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative). The tone is upbeat and the message from this […]
‘The politicians tell me that as a manufacturer I shall be ruined if France has her liberty,’ Josiah Wedgwood wrote to Erasmus Darwin in 1789, ‘but I am willing to take my chance in that respect.’ A year earlier he had written with similar equanimity, indeed enthusiasm, about the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, from which much of the prosperity that fuelled sales of his famous creamware, queensware and jasperware derived. ‘Even if our commerce was likely to suffer from the abolition,’ he insisted to a sceptical friend, ‘I persuade myself that when this traffic comes to be discussed and fully known, there will be but few advocates for the continuance
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Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
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The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner