Category Archives: Books

Glennon Doyle: ‘So many women feel caged by gender, sexuality, religion’

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Glennon Doyle’s memoir inspired Adele – but do we all need to be ‘untamed’?

The marriage wasn’t unbearable, but it didn’t feel right any more. The lightbulb moment came when she realised she needed to think about what she truly wanted, rather than about what society had trained her to think she wanted. Also, she became aware that remaining in an unhappy marriage meant she wasn’t being the parent she wanted to be: following her heart would cause heartbreak to her family now, but it had a noble purpose. Today, her ex lives within walking distance and they share parenting. She got out, and she wants to tell the world how it’s changed her life.

Who is this woman? Well, it could be Adele, whose new album reveals why she decided to leave her husband Simon Konecki, and what it means for their son Angelo, nine. “It just wasn’t right for me any more… I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn’t miserable-miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first,” she said in a recent interview.

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Too much bosom: why The Wheel of Time is far from ‘great for women’

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Rosamund Pike, who stars in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming take on Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, says his female characters are role models. Really?

What is going on with Amazon Prime’s characterisation of The Wheel of Time? I ask this as a fantasy fan, someone who not only adores the classy stuff (NK Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay etc) but has also devotedly ploughed her way through The Belgariad, most of Terry Goodkind (until it got too crazy even for me) and Simon R Green. And how many people involved with the forthcoming adaptation have actually marathoned their way through all of the books?

My eyebrows were first raised back when the deal to adapt Robert Jordan’s extremely long series was announced in 2018, when head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke praised its “timely narrative featuring powerful women at the core”. Now, I read these books in my late teens, but my resounding memory of them was not of “powerful women”. In fact, I remember thinking Jordan’s depiction of women was pretty dismal – he might have packed in far more female characters than Tolkien ever did, but they’re constantly objectified, forever hoisting their bosoms around, adjusting their skirts – even getting spanked as punishment.

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Nazis based their elite schools on top British private schools

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Eton and Harrow among those whose ‘character-building’ qualities were admired by German educators in 1930s and 1940s

Nazi Germany’s elite schools, which were set up to train future leaders of the Third Reich, used British private schools such as Eton and Harrow as their models, a new book reveals.

The historian Helen Roche has written the first comprehensive history of Nazi elite schools, known as Napolas. Drawing on research undertaken in 80 archives in six countries as well as testimonies from more than 100 former pupils, Roche discovered just how keen the Nazis were to learn from the “character-forming” example of the British system.

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Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

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The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to him

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books about the 20th-century history of central Europe, including Bloodlands, which examined the devastating consequence of Hitler and Stalin’s simultaneous reign of terror over civilian populations, and won the 2013 Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Snyder wrote a short book, On Tyranny, which provided 20 brief lessons – “Defend Institutions”, “Remember Professional Ethics”, “Read Books” – from the 20th century that might help readers protect democracy against dictatorship. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in 2017. A new edition of the book, with illustrations by the German-American Nora Krug, whose graphic memoir Belonging confronted Germany’s Nazi past, has just been published.

What prompted you to want to make this graphic version of On Tyranny?
It came out originally in this extremely simple, accessible form. I always had the idea that it could take a different form, but that only became concrete once I read Nora Krug’s Belonging. I cold-called her and said: “Could you please do this?” Part of it was also to renew it. I changed the text a little bit, removed some of the stuff that was specific to 2016 and added some lines that recall what happened in 2020.

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The nocturnal​ ​beauty of the ​urban ​underpass – in pictures

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How did the British fashion photographer Perou end up shooting a book of grimy, deserted underpasses around England? It started, he says, “when Karl Hyde of Underworld asked me to photograph one for his [2013] solo album Edgeland”. Hyde suggested they expand the idea, and the result, eight years later, is Tunnel Vision, featuring more than 200 English underpasses photographed at night, with gnomic captions (supplied by Hyde) taken from graffiti found nearby.

“The more I photographed underpasses the more wonderful I found them,” says Perou. “They’re all unique: they have different designs and lighting, different paint or municipal art on the walls. They’re almost all uniformly smelly and cold,” but, he insists, “beautiful and full of character.”

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Barbara Taylor Bradford: ‘My mother told me: “Keep your head down and don’t flirt at work”

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The author, aged 88, on her first job working with Keith Waterhouse, giving advice to Sean Connery and her 56-year marriage

I was a serious little girl growing up in Leeds and had supportive parents who were instrumental in my success. My mother sold my first story to a children’s magazine when I was 10. My father, an engineer, funded my addiction to taxis when I started working on Fleet Street.

At 16, I started my first job in the typing pool at the Yorkshire Evening Post and became a reporter after secretly slipping stories on to the subs’ desk. I was the only woman in the newsroom. My mother told me: “Keep your head down and don’t flirt at work. Your attitude towards men will dictate their attitude towards you.” The best advice I ever had.

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Tom Ford: ‘I paid $90,000 for my own dress. The clothes we make are not meant to be thrown away’

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From fashion with va-va-voom to veganism – ahead of the release of his new book, America’s starriest designer takes a moment to reflect

Tom Ford answers my phone call in precisely the way I’d hoped he would: with a voice as smooth as butter and the grace of Cary Grant.

We are in touch to discuss his latest project, a coffee-table book charting the past 15 years of his career – or “post-Gucci”, as those familiar with luxury fashion prefer to describe the era that has followed Ford’s departure from the Italian super brand.

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‘We’re taking the man out of the myth’: the musical reclaiming Rumi from Instagram

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A new stage production aims to tell the Sufi poet’s story beyond his aphorisms – and challenge assumptions about Islam and the Middle East in the process

He is everywhere and nowhere. The words of Jalal al-Din Rumi are found on sunset images pasted on Instagram and coffee mugs sold on Etsy; his poems have been featured in recordings from Madonna and Coldplay and he is reputed to be the bestselling poet in the US. Rumi’s observations and aphorisms on life may be endlessly cited – “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop” – but few in the west know him as anything more than a bearded Sufi mystic.

“Rumi has become a mystical, almost deified figure,” says Nadim Naaman. “The reality is that he was the opposite of an untouchable deity.” Naaman, a British Lebanese singer, actor and writer, has collaborated with the Qatari composer Dana Al Fardan to create Rumi: The Musical. “Our approach was to take the man out of the myth,” says Al Fardan, “and to present him as human being.” This is the second time Naaman and Al Fardan have brought a beloved Middle Eastern poet to the London stage. Their 2018 show Broken Wings, which is returning to London in the new year, was based on a novel by the Lebanese poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was the success of that production that convinced them there may be an appetite for a musical that delved into the life of Rumi.

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Can history teach us anything about the future of war – and peace?

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A decade on from psychologist Steven Pinker’s declaration that violence is declining, historians show no sign of agreeing a truce

Ten years ago, the psychologist Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argued that violence in almost all its forms – including war – was declining. The book was ecstatically received in many quarters, but then came the backlash, which shows no signs of abating. In September, 17 historians published a riposte to Pinker, suitably entitled The Darker Angels of Our Nature, in which they attacked his “fake history” to “debunk the myth of non-violent modernity”. Some may see this as a storm in an intellectual teacup, but the central question – can we learn anything about the future of warfare from the ancient past? – remains an important one.

Pinker thought we could and he supported his claim of a long decline with data stretching thousands of years back into prehistory. But among his critics are those who say that warfare between modern nation states, which are only a few hundred years old, has nothing in common with conflict before that time, and therefore it’s too soon to say if the supposed “long peace” we’ve been enjoying since the end of the second world war is a blip or a sustained trend.

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On my radar: Damon Albarn’s cultural highlights

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The musician and composer on a magical performance by Udo Kier, a west African drumming app and where to find a taste of Palestine

Damon Albarn was born in east London in 1968. Interested in music from a young age, he studied at East 15 Acting School and then Goldsmiths, where he co-founded the band that helped kick off Britpop. As well as recording eight studio albums with Blur, Albarn also co-created Gorillaz and the Good, the Bad & the Queen, spearheaded the collaborative organisation Africa Express and has scored stage productions including Monkey: Journey to the West and Dr Dee. He lives in Notting Hill, west London, with his partner, Suzi Winstanley. On 12 November, Albarn releases his second solo album The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows on Transgressive Records.

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Sally Rooney novels pulled from Israeli bookstores after translation boycott

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Following the acclaimed author’s decision not to have Beautiful World, Where Are You translated by an Israeli publisher, two major retailers have removed her work from their shelves

Books by Sally Rooney will no longer be sold in two Israeli bookshop chains, after the acclaimed writer’s decision not to sell translation rights for her most recent novel to an Israeli publisher.

Rooney’s novels were previously available from Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim, but the books have now been removed from their websites, and will be pulled from physical shops too. The retailers have more than 200 branches between them.

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Damon Galgut wins Booker prize with ‘spectacular’ novel The Promise

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The novelist takes the £50,000 prize with a ‘strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself’

• Damon Galgut is a clear and unsurprising Booker winner

Damon Galgut has won the Booker prize for his portrait of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid. The judges praised The Promise as “a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh”, and compared it to the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

This is is the first time Galgut will be walking away with the £50,000 prize, despite having been shortlisted twice before.. The Promise is his ninth novel, and his first in seven years. He becomes the third South African to win the prestigious fiction prize, after JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. Through the lens of four sequential funerals, each taking place in a different decade, The Promise follows the Swarts, a white South African family who live on a farm outside Pretoria. The promise of the title is one the Swarts make – and fail to keep over the years – to give a home and land to the black woman who worked for them her whole life.

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Senegal’s Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wins top French literary prize

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Prix Goncourt goes to 31-year-old’s novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, praised for its ‘stunning energy’

The Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has become the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

The award, announced on Wednesday at the Drouant restaurant near the Opéra Garnier in Paris, was hailed as “symbolic” by the French literary establishment, 100 years after the prize – presented since 1867 – was first won by a Black author.

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Bookshops thrive as France moves to protect sellers from Amazon

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Legislation for minimum delivery price aims to stop ‘distorted competition’ against independent bookshops

At her independent bookshop in the small, rural town of Puy-en-Velay in southern France, Anne Helman had seen an influx of customers since the coronavirus pandemic who said they would rather buy books in person than online.

“I’ve never sold as many copies of Albert Camus’s The Plague,” she said. “Children wanted fantasy books. Adults wanted novels and the classics, particularly stories about viruses and the apocalypse. There has been a newfound enthusiasm for buying locally and supporting independent bookshops; it’s seen as the virtuous thing to do.”

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Huma Abedin says kiss from unnamed senator was not sexual assault

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  • Clinton aide gives first interview for memoir Both/And
  • Abedin also discusses 2016 election and Anthony Weiner

In her first interview to promote her new book, Huma Abedin said she did not think an unnamed senator sexually assaulted her when he kissed her at his apartment, some time in the mid-2000s.

She also said she would “take to her grave” her part in the emails investigation which cost Hillary Clinton dearly in the 2016 presidential election, which the candidate lost to Donald Trump, though she knew it was not all her fault.

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Mark Gatiss: ‘I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English’

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The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter

Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.

This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.

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Gothic becomes Latin America’s go-to genre as writers turn to the dark side

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The region used to be almost synonymous with magic realism but recent bestselling fiction draws on a legacy of dictatorship, poverty and sinister folklore

A young man follows the bloody trail of his CIA father, through Paraguayan torture chambers and the sites of Andean massacres. An Ecuadorian artist fantasizes about running a scalpel through the tongue of her mute twin. In a Buenos Aires cemetery, teenage fans devour a rock star’s rotting remains.

These grisly scenes – and many more like them – populate the pages of Latin America’s recent bestselling fiction. From the Andes to the Amazon and to the urban sprawl of some of the world’s biggest cities, a ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.

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Master of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neither

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Martin Indyk’s well-woven biography is sympathetic to the preacher of realpolitik condemned by many as a war criminal

As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger nursed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to a close. The disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel ultimately yielded a peace treaty. The Syrian border remains tensely quiet. Unlike Vietnam, in the Middle East Kissinger’s handiwork holds.

The Sunni Arab world has gradually come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state. Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. Relations with Saudi Arabia are possible.

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Ai Weiwei: ‘It is so positive to be poor as a child. You understand how vulnerable our humanity can be’

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From living in a dugout in Little Siberia to his friendship with Allen Ginsberg in New York, artist and activist Ai Weiwei reveals what drives his restless creativity

Ai Weiwei is hard to pin down. For the first few minutes of our Zoom call, him bleary-eyed at his computer, I think he’s talking to me from his new base in Portugal. My mistake – it’s Vienna, where he’s planning a show for next March. A year and a half ago, Ai was giving interviews about his new life in Britain; before that it was Germany, the country that offered him safe harbour when he finally left China in 2015, after years of hounding by the authorities and a spell in detention. So where does he actually live?

“Yeah, the question always comes up,” he says sheepishly. He moved to Cambridge so his son, Ai Lao, could improve his English. His son is still there, but in the meantime, “I found a piece of land near Lisbon, so I’m kind of settled there, but that’s only for the past year”.

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‘We have to fight for what is right’: Patti Smith on gender, Sally Rooney and Cop26

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In the run-up to the climate conference, the rock’n’roll poet reflects – with a little help from her daughter – on a life spent breaking barriers, hanging out with Dylan and learning to Instagram

More than two decades ago, Patti Smith and a group of other artists were sitting with the Dalai Lama when the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys asked the Tibetan spiritual leader a question: what’s the number-one thing that young people can do to make a better world? Without missing a beat, the Dalai Lama replied: “Look after the environment.”

“I thought it was so beautiful,” Smith says in her trademark New York drawl. “That was his number-one preoccupation. Not to free Tibet, but to take in hand a global concern that was going to affect us all, on a scale we haven’t seen before.”

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