Who is the best Verdi and/or Wagner? Find the answer in the book written by Peter Conrad
19 Feb 2013 17:38:15
Verdi and Wagner celebrate their 200th birthdays this year, and they're still not speaking. Verdi and/or Wagner begins in the Venetian garden where their busts stand: "The one who skulks in the bushes is Giuseppe Verdi. The other – his jaw set at a confrontational angle like a mountain ledge as he scans the horizon for detractors, or perhaps for devotees on pilgrimage to his shrine – is Richard Wagner."
You get the message pretty quickly: Conrad doesn't like Wagner the man very much. He would a... Read Full Story
The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence
17 Feb 2013 22:05:15
The first impression a reader might have when encountering Gavin Extence's first novel is that they're reading a book that could be called "The Curious Incident of the Boy Who Was Struck By a Meteorite". As with Mark Haddon's book, Extence depicts an unusual teenage protagonist, the titular Alex, who suffers epileptic fits after being hit by a meteorite and lives near Glastonbury with his tarot-card-reading single mother. The first third or so ladles on the quirk in a way that verges on cliche; ... Read Full Story
Why It's Still Kicking off Everywhere by Paul Mason
17 Feb 2013 22:03:02
Mason takes us on a journey of the global indignados, from the Spanish graduate without a job to the Egyptian revolutionary, to the venue where, in terms of this book, it all began: a squat in Bloomsbury. On the basis of that discussion, Mason penned a blog giving 20 reasons "why it's kicking off everywhere". That post, by his own admission, went viral and led the author to expand on his ideas.
Adapting a rich vein of leftwing revolutionary thought for the wired generation, Mason argues passion... Read Full Story
Benjamin Britten biographies by Paul Kildea and Neil Powell
17 Feb 2013 22:00:53
A century after his birth in Lowestoft, the youngest of four children born to a dentist and his wife, Britten's life and work are being celebrated with a level of excitement no one can have imagined when he died in 1976. True, he was famous and had his array of honours and titles and his burgeoning festival in the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh. He had, too, a large circle of devoted friends, and a far smaller knot of those he had cast aside, often in a silly fit of pique.
His death made the... Read Full Story
The Heretics by Will Storr
15 Feb 2013 04:09:27
Bertrand Russell's essay "On the Value of Scepticism" was published 85 years ago this year. Its opening lines are as relevant today as they were then: "I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." His proposal was "wildly paradoxical" because Russell understood that most of us do not use reason to form our beliefs.... Read Full Story
The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
15 Feb 2013 04:08:21
Like all Peirene books, Venderbeke's is brief, in this case just breaking the 100-page barrier. I gather that its British publisher was surprised to find it had not already been translated, which shows a rather touching faith in this nation's curiosity about European fiction. But you may wonder why it is a set text in Germany. Something funny is going on here, but what?
"Although I found the mussels creepy" – the book is narrated by the elder daughter – "I went over, as I didn't want to be cowa... Read Full Story
World War Two by Norman Stone
15 Feb 2013 04:06:58
The straight answer to both questions is no. Stone gives a superficial summary of the background and course of the war, raising endless questions and supplying few answers. The coming of war is down to Hitler "maddening everyone". Well, perhaps. But decades of scholarship have gone into trying to understand the international crises of the 1930s and the British and French decision for war. Perhaps historians have been wasting their time with tedious monographs and stolid research. No one reading ... Read Full Story
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder
04 Feb 2013 10:44:39
Fame came too late for Tony Judt. He was 57 in 2005 when he published his history of Europe after 1945, Postwar, the book that sealed his reputation worldwide. Three years later he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Two years after that, he was gone. Which means that his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, like Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, was written – dictated, actually – in bed. And fittingly enough, the first section of each of the book's nine chapters is given over... Read Full Story
Light Shining in the Forest by Paul Torday
04 Feb 2013 10:41:25
The bovine local police are treating the missing children as runaways; Norman and his sleuthing press sidekick know better and, after a series of unlikely coincidences, they light upon the children's captor – Gabriel Merkin. Merkin is a serial killer in the Hannibal Lecter mode (although with none of Lecter's intelligence or soulfulness), released after a typical bit of police bungling. Now it only remains to see whether Norman and co can get to Merkin before he stuffs and mounts his victims.
T... Read Full Story
Empire of Secrets by Calder Walton
04 Feb 2013 10:35:10
A decade ago, two books appeared at opposite poles of the discourse over Britain's empire, its demise and legacy. One, by historian Niall Ferguson, was cheerleader for the imperial enterprise, subtitled How Britain Made the Modern World. As well as chronicling what he saw as its achievements Ferguson posited that with empire, Britain founded global "liberal" capitalism, withdrawing altruistically from its territories when the fruit was ripe.
The other, After Empire by the professor of literatur... Read Full Story
The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam
01 Feb 2013 01:46:54
What Troy was for the ancients, the World Trade Centre attacks and subsequent wars seem destined to become for our own time. The events acquired a mythic aura even as they were unfolding; miracle-stories circulating within hours of the attacks, conspiracy theories springing up days later. In the absence of rational agency on either side, the narrative defaulted effortlessly into the tropes of legend: quests for magical weapons, duelling codes of conduct, ransoms and bounties, eschatological bomb... Read Full Story
Chasing Venus: the Race to Measure the Heavens
01 Feb 2013 01:44:43
It is the things one has not done that one regrets, they say. A debatable proposition, but I now have one more regret to add to the list: that I did not make any effort to see the transit of Venus across the sun's face last year. There had been one eight years before, you see, and I was getting blase; and I had not fully appreciated that there would not be another one until 2117. So what, I thought. It's just a little dot, an astronomical phenomenon of small significance, and you couldn't even s... Read Full Story
