Books
The good, the bad, & the just plain wrong
My pick of the Aussie books of 2024
Spot the Nobel Laureate in Literature
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When will Ronald Reagan get the recognition he deserves?
Max Boot’s contention that Reagan was a lightweight pragmatist who played little part in reviving America or winning the Cold War is absurdly revisionist
Thomas Kyd may have delighted Elizabethan audiences, but he still wasn’t a patch on Shakespeare
Brian Vickers aims to ‘restore’ Kyd to greatness – but claiming too much on too little evidence does the playwright no favours
The rotten core of Credit Suisse
For scandal, sleaze, hubris and treachery, no financial institution has been a serial offender like the disgraced Swiss bank. Little wonder it was dubbed Credit Swizz or Debit Suisse
Why does James Baldwin matter so much now?
The rise of Queer Studies and Black Lives Matter has led to renewed interest in Baldwin – who was exasperated in life with being categorised by colour or as ‘gay’
Modern-day ghosts: Haunted Tales, by Adam Macqueen, reviewed
Dark, unsettling stories set mostly in the world of social media and panic rooms are, strikingly, as much about love as death – and how love is stronger
Nostalgia for the bustling high street is misplaced
Annie Gray is refreshingly unsentimental about the days when cooking for the family involved time-consuming visits to the butcher, the greengrocer and baker
‘Carried away by those Russians’ – the dreadful fate of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters
The queen’s repeated warnings to Alix and Ella of the danger of marrying Russians were ignored, and both Princesses of Hesse would die appalling deaths at the hands of revolutionaries
For God or Allah: the savage wars between Christians and Muslims over the ages
It’s impossible to say which side excelled in imaginative barbarism in this blood-soaked history spanning 1,300 years
The must-have novelties nobody needed
Richard Loncraine and Peter Broxton, designers of surreal ‘executive toys’ in the 1960s, reveal the frailty and vanity of a time when ‘poets, pop stars and miniskirts were everywhere’
Why 4,000 pages of T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism is not enough
Faber’s text-only, strictly chronological four-volume edition of the prose is fatally purist – though admittedly cheaper than the eight-volume Johns Hopkins version
Celebrating Miss Marple, expert on the wickedness of village life
The elderly spinster with a fine sense of evil was a creation Agatha Christie never tired of – unlike the ‘tiresome, egocentric’ Hercule Poirot
The mythic mishmash of Wagner’s Ring
Its towering themes of gods, giants, dragons and magic were not purely Germanic in origin, whatever fever-dream they later conjured in Hitler’s brain
Out of this world: The Suicides, by Antonio di Benedetto, reviewed
Written as Argentina descended into the Dirty War, this eerie fable about a reporter investigating a spate a suicides is thrillingly original
Four legs good, two legs bad – the philosophy of Gerald Durrell
From a young man determined to protect the world’s vulnerable species, Durrell became in middle age someone who loathed the species of which he was a member
Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?
His kiss-and-tell memoir implies that the past five Tory prime ministers all feared him. But the longtime Chair of the 1922 Committee was in reality no ‘kingmaker’
‘Teaching someone to draw is teaching them to look’: the year’s best art books
Subjects range from a Paleolithic bone carving to Banksy’s graffiti, via colour concepts, romanticism, tattoos and mirror painting
A rare combination of humour and pathos: the sublimely talented Neil Innes
The musician and parodist, whose mantra was ‘not to say no when there’s a way to say yes’, had a gift for creating happiness in private as well as public, as his widow poignantly attests
Learning difficulties: The University of Bliss, by Julian Stannard, reviewed
The bureaucrats have taken over, treating both academics and students as administrative nuisances in a searing satire on university life
The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed
After fighting for the Allies in Hungary, France, Belgium and Holland, Stanislaw Maczek finds himself stripped of his Polish citizenship as a result of the Yalta conference
British architecture according to the Great Man school of history
Simon Jenkins seems excessively preoccupied with the flamboyant houses of the privileged, leaving his narrative tottering beneath the weight of gaudy swank
Rebels and whistleblowers: a choice of recent crime fiction
A veteran CIA officer gets involved in an anti-government movement in Bahrain, and a young British intelligence officer infiltrates a news service
Besieged Odesa is still caught in a conflict of identities
Older citizens have identified with Russia all their lives – and Russian is still commonly spoken everywhere. But young Odesans are now using more Ukrainian as a symbol of resistance
Who’s still flying the flag for Britpop?
Alex James’s embrace of the term distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Miranda Sawyer reminds us of how much of the best 1990s music fell outside Britpop’s retromania
