Book Reviews

We’re accustomed, some of us, to feeling gloomy about the sinking popularity of Eng lit – once comfortably among the most popular choices at A-Level and most applied-for at university, now very much not. We’re accustomed, too, to regretting the gobbetisation of how it’s now taught at GCSE and A-Level, and the drive to teach ever shorter texts in the face of dwindling teenage concentration spans.  We’re accustomed, some of us, to feeling gloomy about the sinking popularity of Eng lit – once comfortably among the most popular choices at A-Level and most applied-for at university, now very much not. We’re accustomed, too, to regretting the gobbetisation of how it’s now taught at GCSE and A-Level, and the drive to teach ever shorter texts in the face of dwindling teenage concentration spans.  We’re accustomed, some of us, to feeling gloomy about

This is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent ‘culture wars’. It is the biography of a vicar’s son, born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1853, who went as a teenager to Africa to join his elder brother who’d bought a plot of land in Natal. One day, walking past a stream by the side of a field, he noticed some pebbles gleaming especially brightly. They were diamonds.

As bombs rain down on Nazi-occupied Prague, Georg Wilhelm Pabst shoots a film – a romantic courtroom drama adapted from a pulp novel by a creepy Third Reich hack, Alfred Karrasch. Although the leading man finds it strange to make any movie ‘in the middle of the apocalypse’, his director insists that ‘art is always out of place’. In retrospect, Pabst assures the star, it will look like ‘the only thing that mattered’. The discoverer of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, and the director of The Joyless Street, Lulu, Westfront 1918 and other prewar masterpieces, Pabst really did attempt to film The Molander Case in Prague in 1944-45. The bizarre,

Though I’d never read any books about Oasis before this one, I’d have bet it would be impossible to write boringly about the band – for two reasons: namely Noel and Liam Gallagher. As the most entertaining men in music, the former could be talking to a goldfish and still end up riffing in an entirely fresh, witty and profound way, while the latter is probably the greatest natural clown since Buster Keaton. I’ll put my cards on the table and admit that I’ve got a chronic crush on Noel. When I interviewed him for the Sunday Times nearly ten years ago, the simpering, gushing and giggling on the tape