Category Archives: Books

How the ‘art of the insane’ inspired the surrealists – and was twisted by the Nazis

Posted on by

The author of an acclaimed new book tells how Hitler used works by psychiatric patients in his culture war

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.

Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.

Continue reading...

Amia Srinivasan: ‘Sex as a subject isn’t weird. It’s very, very serious’

Posted on by

With her debut book, The Right to Sex, a 36-year-old Oxford don is dazzling everyone from Vogue to Prospect magazine. She discusses porn, gender dysphoria – and why her students are no snowflakes

If All Souls is one of the most inordinately beautiful colleges in Oxford – its bone-white gothic, best peered at by mere mortals from nearby Radcliffe Square, is the work of the great Nicholas Hawksmoor – it’s also one of the oddest and most rarefied. Famously, it has no student body. Each year, however, a small number of recent graduates who would like to become so-called prize fellows may apply to take a famously difficult and inscrutable exam during which, as a tour guide I followed earlier put it, they must “write an essay on a single word, like coconut”. As my eavesdropping also revealed, TE Lawrence, AKA Lawrence of Arabia, passed this exam, but Harold Wilson failed it.

In her lovely, wood-panelled room in All Souls – its current tenant wears Adidas sneakers and likes a good martini, but it still makes me think of patched corduroy and sherry – Amia Srinivasan laughs heartily. “Right,” she says. “Those guides. They always come up with things like: everyone here is a priest, or everyone is a man. Or they tell people: ‘Stephen Hawking is in there right now.’ At least the exam thing is sort of true.” Having taken it successfully herself in 2009 – she had to write around the word “reproduction” – Srinivasan was a prize fellow at the college until 2016, when she became a lecturer at UCL (the one-word riff component was abandoned the following year). Now, though, she’s back. Last January, she took her up her post as the Chichele professor of social and political theory at All Souls, a job once held by Isaiah Berlin. She is both the first woman, and the first person of colour, to hold it. At just 36, she is also its youngest ever incumbent.

Continue reading...

Jamaican dub poet Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze dies aged 65

Posted on by

Influential pioneer touched audiences through performance, books, albums – and even Poems on the Underground

The pioneering Jamaican dub poet Jean “Binta” Breeze has died aged 65, her agents have confirmed.

Breeze, considered one of the most important and influential contemporary poets, was a regular performer at literary festivals in both the UK and across the world.

Continue reading...

Eimear McBride: ‘Women grapple with shame because we’re held to a higher standard’

Posted on by

The novelist on her first book of nonfiction – about women and disgust – and the complexities of prize culture

Eimear McBride, 44, is the bestselling author of three novels: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, which won the Women’s prize for fiction and the Goldsmith’s prize, The Lesser Bohemians and Strange Hotel. Her first work of nonfiction, Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust, is the result of an invitation by the Wellcome Collection to explore its museum and library, housed on Euston Road in London. She lives in east London with her family.

How did your new book come about?
Wellcome was a place where I was a temp, back in the old days before I was a full-time writer. I worked in the library: I was the stack monkey. So when I was asked about doing this, I was very open to the idea; I’ve always been fond of Wellcome. I didn’t go to university, so I’d never had the experience of spending a lot of time just reading.

Continue reading...

Revealed: the secret trauma that inspired German literary giant

Posted on by

WG Sebald’s writing on the Holocaust was driven by the anger and distress he felt over his father’s service in Hitler’s army

His books are saturated with despair. Over and over again, his emotionally traumatised characters are caught – inescapably – in plots that doom them to a life of anguish. Often, they kill themselves.

Now, the psychological wounds and suicidal thoughts that blighted WG Sebald’s own life and secretly inspired him to begin writing fiction are to be laid bare for the first time in a forthcoming biography.

Continue reading...

Baxter Dury: ‘Everything was about Dad. It was the only way he knew how to survive’

Posted on by

The musician talks about growing up with a pop star dad, escaping his shadow – and the 6ft 7in drug dealer who lived with them

• Read an exclusive extract from Chaise Longue: ‘After a certain point of drinking, Dad’s behaviour became a lottery’

Baxter Dury strolls up to the pub, casually dressed and apologetic. The indie musician, known for his stylish suits, is wearing a white vest and unbuttoned denim shirt. His face is even whiter than the vest. Food poisoning. He ate oysters the other day, and has never been so sick. He orders a pineapple juice and soda water, sheepishly. “That’s going to be the headline, isn’t it?” The 2010 biopic about his father was named Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – after one of Ian Dury’s most celebrated songs, and a fair summary of his life.

But we’re not here to talk about Dad, says Baxter, a successful musician in his own right. It’s 21 years since his father died, and 19 since Baxter recorded his debut album, the fabulously titled Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift. Don’t get me wrong, he says, he loved the old man, but he’s got Ian Dury fatigue. He’s tired of the comparisons – their music, voice, looks and lifestyle.

Continue reading...

Sarah Perry: As an author, I felt useless in the pandemic. So I trained to be a vaccinator

Posted on by

Inspired by a desire to be good and help others during the pandemic, novelist Sarah Perry trained to vaccinate people. But what does it mean to be good when there is so much bad faith?

Earlier this year – lockdown three: no sign of spring – I travelled to an airport to try to be good. Dogged for months by the sense of my own uselessness, and having wept with relief and accumulated sorrow when the first Covid-19 vaccine was approved, I’d joined an organisation training volunteers to deliver vaccinations, and so arrived at a desolate Stansted shortly after dawn. Here I sat in the basement of a hotel fallen almost out of use, and in the company of a hundred strangers – though alone and masked in a square of carpet marked out with black tape – learned how to treat fainting fits, panic attacks and anaphylactic shock. In our number were a circus performer, a firefighter, a consultant of some kind; and having been starved of unfamiliar faces for so long we were all, I think, happy to be there (putting a woman in the recovery position I apologised for what seemed a shocking intimacy; but she said what a pleasure it was, after all that time, to be touched). Then we attached sponges to our upper arms, and learned how to insert the needle at 45 degrees, stretching the skin to avoid a bleed; how to depress the plunger, and then remove the needle without doing ourselves a mischief. Then, observed by the nurse, who’d hurried out of retirement to train us, we demonstrated our prowess, were awarded a certificate, and went home to await deployment.

Related: Sarah Perry: what good are books, in a situation like this?

Continue reading...

‘I never saw my guitar again’: readers on belongings they lost in a breakup

Posted on by

Long after two people have gone their separate ways, some partings still rankle. Readers reflect on the beloved items they left behind

Even though my breakup was amicable, I felt a lot of guilt – so when I moved out I said: “Keep it all.” But, in the years since, there have been a few items of kitchenware that I wish I’d held on to: a Le Creuset casserole dish, my favourite mug, a digital cooking thermometer, the plastic bowl attachment for my stick blender (the blender itself I retained at her insistence, but I forgot all the accessories that came with it). There never seemed like a good time to ask for any of it back – I hope she’s at least getting some use out of them. Anonymous, Australia

Continue reading...

Meet Julie K Brown, the woman who brought down Jeffrey Epstein

Posted on by

It was by focusing on his silenced victims, says the dogged Miami Herald reporter, that she was able to help bring the billionaire sex offender to justice after police and prosecutors had failed

The town of Palm Beach in Florida, the crime writer Carl Hiaasen has observed, “is one of the few places left in America where you can still drive around in a Rolls-Royce convertible and not get laughed at.” It’s an unironic island, filled with the super-rich and famous, plastic surgeons and, of course, the former US president, Donald Trump, who holds court at his ostentatious Mar-a-Lago resort.

A satellite of Miami, the island prides itself on its many flamboyant charity balls, but no amount of good-cause fundraising can remove the whiff of corruption that hangs heavy in the subtropical air. If money talks in most places, in Palm Beach it speaks with a confident authority that’s seldom questioned. Never has that understanding been more egregiously demonstrated than in the case of the inscrutable financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Continue reading...

Leïla Slimani: ‘I think I’m always writing about women, domination, violence’

Posted on by

The French-Moroccan author on why she writes, the complexity of identity, and the first book of a trilogy based on her family history

Author Leïla Slimani, 39, grew up in Rabat, Morocco, and moved to Paris when she was 17. Her first novel, Adèle, a melancholy story about a nymphomaniac mother in her 30s, was published in France in 2014. In 2016, she was the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for her second novel, Lullaby, about a nanny who kills the baby and toddler in her care. In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron appointed her as his personal representative for promoting French language and culture.

Last year, Slimani published a nonfiction book, Sex and Lies, a collection of intimate testimonies from Moroccan women about their secret lives. Her latest book, The Country of Others, is the first novel in a planned trilogy based on her family history. Set in the late 1940s and 50s, it centres on her maternal grandparents during Morocco’s period of decolonisation. Slimani lives with her husband and two children in Paris.

Continue reading...

Polygamy in Senegal, lesbian hookups in Cairo: inside the sex lives of African women

Posted on by

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s new book The Sex Lives of African Women examines self-discovery, freedom and healing. She talks about everything she has learned

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has a face that smiles at rest. When she is speaking, it is with a constant grin, one that only falters when she talks about some of the difficult circumstances she and other African women have gone through in their quest for sexual liberation. She speaks to me from her home city of Accra, Ghana, where she says “no one is surprised” that she has written a book about sex. As a blogger, author and self-described “positive sex evangelist”, she has been collecting and recording the sexual experiences of African women for more than a decade. Her new book, The Sex Lives of African Women, is an anthology of confessional accounts from across the African continent and the diaspora. The stories are sorted into three sections: self-discovery, freedom and healing. Each “sex life” is told in the subject’s own words. The result is a book that takes the reader into the beds of polygamous marriages in Senegal, to furtive lesbian hookups in toilets in Cairo and polyamorous clubs in the United States, but without any sensationalism or essentialism. Her ambition, in the book as in life, is “to create more space” for African women “to have open and honest conversations about sex and sexuality”.

Sekyiamah was born in London to Ghanaian parents in a polygamous relationship, but grew up in Ghana. Her formative years in Accra were under a patriarchal, conservative, Catholic regime that instilled in her a fear of sex and all its potential dangers – pregnancy, shame, becoming a “fallen” woman. “I remember once my period didn’t come,” she recalls. “I was in Catholic school at the time, and I would go to the convent every day and pray, because I thought that meant I was pregnant.” From the moment she reached puberty she was told: “Now you have your period, you’re a woman, you can’t let guys touch you. That was always in my head.” Later, she was told: “If you leave your marriage no one else is going to want you. If you have a child as a single woman men are going to think of you just as a sexual object and not a potential partner.” Her mother would only speak to her about sex in cautionary ways. “The idea of messing with boys was so scary to me. It kept me a virgin for years and years.”

Continue reading...

Winnie-the-Pooh goes to Harrods in new authorised AA Milne prequel

Posted on by

Once There Was a Bear by Jane Riordan and Mark Burgess will channel the original books’ voice and pictorial style using details from Christopher Robin’s real life

The story of how Winnie-the-Pooh went from a Harrods toy shelf to the home of Christopher Robin and the Hundred Acre Wood is set to be told for the first time, in an official prequel to AA Milne’s original stories.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Once There Was a Bear has been written in the style of Milne by children’s writer Jane Riordan, with illustrations by Mark Burgess emulating the original drawings of EH Shepard. It is the first prequel to Milne’s books and poetry about the bear, and has been authorised by the estates of both Milne and Shepard.

Continue reading...

Prince Harry agrees publishing deal to write his memoirs

Posted on by

Penguin Random House announces book is expected in late 2022 with proceeds going to charity

The Duke of Sussex has agreed a publishing deal to write his memoirs and said he would do so “not as the prince I was born, but as the man I have become”.

The global deal for his “literary memoir” was announced by Penguin Random House, with publication expected in late 2022 and proceeds to be donated to charity.

Continue reading...

Novelist Elif Shafak: ‘I’ve always believed in inherited pain’

Posted on by

The award-winning Turkish-British writer, whose new book explores love and politics in Cyprus and London, talks about generational trauma, food in exile and how heavy metal helps her write

If trees could talk, what might they tell us? “Well,” says the Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak, smiling at me over a cup of mint tea, her long hair a little damp from the rain. “They live a lot longer than us. So they see a lot more than we do. Perhaps they can help us to have a calmer, wiser angle on things.” In unison, we turn our heads towards the window. We’re both slightly anxious, I think, Shafak because she arrived for our meeting a tiny bit late, and me because this cafe in Holland Park is so noisy and crowded (we can’t sit outside because yet another violent summer squall has just blown in). A sycamore or horse chestnut-induced sense of perspective could be just what the pair of us need.

Shafak, who is sometimes described as Turkey’s most famous female writer, has a reputation for outspokenness. A fierce advocate for equality and freedom of speech, her views have brought her into conflict with the increasingly repressive government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In person, however, you get no immediate sense of this. Gentle and warm, her voice is never emphatic; she smiles with her (green) eyes as well as her mouth. And while her new novel, The Island of Missing Trees – her first since the Booker-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World – is certainly political, its themes to do with violence and loss, it’s also a passionate love story, one of whose most important characters just happens to be – yes – a gentle and sagacious tree.

Continue reading...

Parklife: the year we fell in love with London’s green spaces

Posted on by

Sophia Spring’s photographs celebrate how London’s many parks became a lifeline for locals during the pandemic, writes novelist David Nicholls

We didn’t call it the park; it was the “rec”, as in “recreation ground”. A flat, featureless oblong of patchy grass, sodden in winter, parched in summer, scattered with ring-pulls and dog mess – this was the late 70s – its great featureless expanse broken only by buckled goalposts and a few skinny, unclimbable trees. I hated the rec, partly because of the threat of team sports, partly because of the possibility of violence – the two seemed to go together – but during those long, endless days of summer, when the glare of sunlight on the TV screen became too much, we were harried out of the house to “get some fresh air”. And so we loitered on that great barren prairie, an immense waiting room, wondering why anyone would go to the park out of choice.

Last summer, there were queues at the gates of Clissold Park and anyone wanting to exercise in Highbury Fields was advised to go early to avoid the rush hour. All over the city, the parks began to resemble the sites of the festivals that had all been cancelled and if Londoners had ever taken their green spaces for granted, there was no danger of that now. In the space of six months, they’d been repurposed as meeting rooms, nightclubs, concert halls, theatres and cinemas, cafes and restaurants, impromptu markets, family living rooms, gyms. London is supposedly a city of 3,000 parks and while I’m a little sceptical of that number, it’s true that the city had never seemed greener than that summer. On early morning bike rides I discovered Bushy and Ruskin and Trent, Peckham Rye and Beckenham Place and Ladywell Fields. I discovered the canals and waterways that link them too, the bloodstream of London, captured so brilliantly by Sophia in these photographs. Walk north on the Lea, west or east on the Grand Union, south on the Wandle or the Waterlink Way and you can see the ghosts of London’s old industries, cranes and disused warehouses and old pumping stations. Keep walking for the rest of the day, under the pylons and past the depots, and you can feel the city fading behind you, the skies opening up.

Continue reading...

‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us

Posted on by

Books show how close the US came to disaster, and document an unprecedented moment in US history that is not yet over

This week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America.

Related: Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld

Continue reading...

The lion in the London black cab: the remarkable story of Singh, and the boy who loved him

Posted on by

Gifted as a cub by a Maharajah to a young British boy, Singh lived at a house in Surrey before outgrowing his home and being driven in a black cab to the zoo. Now his story has been made into a book

“He was,” London Zoo said, “one of the zoo’s politest pets.”

Singh the Lion arrived in a black cab and padded in through the front door, on a lead.

Continue reading...

Self-censorship hits Hong Kong book fair in wake of national security law

Posted on by

Far fewer politically sensitive titles are on display in the first such event since Beijing imposed sweeping new regulations

Booksellers at Hong Kong’s annual book fair are offering a reduced selection of books deemed politically sensitive, as they try to avoid violating a sweeping national security law imposed on the city last year.

The fair was postponed twice last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. It usually draws hundreds of thousands of people looking for everything from the latest bestsellers to works by political figures.

Continue reading...

Top US general warned of ‘Reichstag moment’ in Trump’s turbulent last days

Posted on by

Gen Mark Milley drew comparison to Nazi Germany as Trump tried to overturn election defeat, new book I Alone Can Fix This says

Shortly before the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, told aides the US was facing a “Reichstag moment” because Donald Trump was preaching “the gospel of the Führer”, according to an eagerly awaited book about Trump’s last year in office.

Related: Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book says

Continue reading...

Drive My Car review – mysterious Murakami tale of erotic and creative secrets

Posted on by

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and erotic rapture of intimacy. Drive My Car is about all this and more; where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets.

Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful actor and theatre director who specialises in experimental multilingual productions with surtitles – he is currently working in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and is preparing to play the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He has a complex relationship with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a successful writer and TV dramatist who has a habit of murmuring aloud ideas for erotic short stories, trance-like, while she is astride Yûsuke having sex, including a potent vignette about a teenage girl who breaks into the house of the boy with whom she is obsessed.

Continue reading...