the hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic programme with a provably hated cultural one. The mystery is why. Janan Ganesh, FT No mystery. They’re terrified of having to implement the (conceivably popular) economic programme. Capitalism is how they get paid.
I like to remind myself every so often that Leopold Bloom was the same age (38) on 16 June 1904 as Cleopatra was in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
I heard small snippets of Burning Bright (1994) when it was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s: enough to grab my attention but not to give me an overall impression of the book’s shape or a reliable sense of its themes. I vaguely intended to read the novel but I didn’t come across a copy till earlier this year, almost 30 years later. I had bought a copy of another of Dunmore’s novels, The…
According to this Guardian headline, Sam Neill filmed role in Legend of Zelda film adaptation before his death . A “dog bites man” story if ever I heard one. How often does an actor film a role after his/her death?
I’ve finally finished reading At Swim-Two-Birds. I first attempted it at least 56 years ago and didn’t return to it till earlier this year. I kind of hate it: it’s bleak and depressing, the humour sour when not merely silly. Heavy going for a mere 228 pages. I’ll reread soon in case I’m wrong 📚
For several years now, I’ve preferred to buy albums on CD. Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan, Io Pur Respiro is available only as a download or on vinyl so I bought the download. Here’s Richard Williams’s review 🎶 🎹
Before he found huge success with the Slough House/Slow Horses series of spy novels, Mick Herron wrote a short crime fiction series: four books known variously as the Zoë Boehm and the Oxford Investigations series. I haven’t yet read any of the books in the main Slough House series, just Nobody Walks (2015) which is set in the same milieu and mentions characters from the main series, and a…
There will be no new additions to Susie Steiner’s series of three novels featuring the Cambridgeshire cop Manon Bradshaw, a detective sergeant in Missing, Presumed (2016) and a detective inspector in the later novels. Steiner died aged 51 of glioblastoma in 2022. In the Acknowledgements to the third book, Remain Silent (2020), she referred to “my year of horrendous illness” and says that she has…
Farrago doesn’t “ find comedy funny ”. That’s all you need to know — though in fact we all know plenty more than that about him by now.
It’s been 14 years since I’ve been in London (or any part of the UK), so obviously I don’t keep up with what’s on in the theatre. When I wrote about Stoppard’s Arcadia a month ago , I didn’t know the play was about to be revived in the West End. My uncharacteristic timeliness was sheer accident 🎭
Recommended Wynn Williams’s book [Careless People] to a friend, who bought it. A little poke in the eye for Facebook. So comments Charles Arthur, The Overspill
Two of Scott Turow’s three most recent novels tell the stories of the final legal cases of two characters who were introduced in his first novel almost forty years ago. Presumed Innocent (1987) was the first-person narrative of Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor who was blindsided to find himself charged with the murder of another lawyer in the Prosecuting Attorney’s office, with whom he’d previously been…
I answered without stopping to think. I used to believe that pedestrians were the big menace. They often don’t look around them. I’ve been knocked off my bike twice by wayward pedestrians (and once by a driver suddenly throwing open the door of her parked car). But no, drivers are worse.
Michael Beard, Nobel Prize winner for Physics and antihero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel, Solar , is a grotesquely comic character. Increasingly obese through the novel’s three sections, he finds himself unable to control his ravenous appetite for food (whether fine or gross), adulation, sex (and possibly marriage), booze, salt and vinegar crisps, travel, well-paid sinecures and solar energy patents.…
Someone on the train has the Z Cars theme as his (I’m assuming) ringtone!
Until a few months ago it hadn’t occurred to me that Anthony Head and Murray Head could be brothers. They seemed to belong to different worlds: 1) Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Centrepoint, “Say it ain’t so, Joe”; and 2) freeze-dried instant coffee ads, Slayer-watching 🤷♂️
None of these options quite reflects my view. I’d say that till recently a degree has been essential, though not necessarily in economic terms. But its nature is changing (decidedly for the worse), largely because of the increased role and influence of administrators.
Robert Reich was born 10 days later than Donald Trump. His reference to “ ending his seventh decade and beginning his eighth ” must be a deliberate error illustrating his point about reduced sharpness: someone about to turn 80 will be ending their eighth decade and immediately beginning their ninth.
I haven’t seen any of Tom Stoppard’s plays in live performance. I watched Professional Foul on television when it was first broadcast in 1977, but it’s rather different from his work for theatre. It’s about a philosophy professor attending an academic conference in Prague. He’s using the unexciting conference as cover to go to a World Cup qualifying match which is being played at the same time. At…
Lilliput Press has recently reissued Anthony Cronin’s memoir Dead As Doornails (1976) with a new short introduction by Joseph O’Connor (which can also be found in The Irish Times — subscriber only ). I had long intended to reread Cronin’s account of literary Dublin in the 1950s, so I immediately ordered a copy. I had first read it, borrowed from the library, in the early 1990s. I had…
Today I learned, thanks to Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History , that Lenin was a mushroom . That explains a great deal that has puzzled me for decades. I wish I’d known it much earlier.
On my way to the coffee shop today, I realized I’d forgotten my book so I looked in the Oxfam shop, not expecting much, and found a copy of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Loving it so far 📖
I somehow missed the fact that Jack Shepherd died back in November. I first noticed him on tv in Bill Brand, then almost failed to recognize him as Baxter Dawes in Griffiths’s adaptation of Lawrence. Also have fond memories of Blind Justice. And then jazz piano: The play that changed my life
To Hamlet, hell is real: he takes seriously the prospect of an eternity of torture, unendurable yet inescapable, as punishment for one’s sins. That’s why, when he finds his father’s murderer at prayer he holds back from taking his revenge: A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge. ’A took my father…
This is the predicament of modern Britain. The country needs centre-right reform at home and centre-left leadership abroad. So says Janan Ganesh of the FT . If that’s true, it sounds like an opportunity for Ed Davey and the Liberal Democrats.