Reviews

Below are links to recent articles (newest last)

Click on the buttons to read the full article

Oxford and the world

Oxford Photographers, Exhibition at the Mathematical Institute, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford, 2 – 24 May 2018

www.oxfordphotographers.org email: oxfordphotographers@gmail.com

Lascaux a-go-go

Ewen Henderson: 5 May – 2 June 2018 

Oxford Ceramics Gallery

29 Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6AA

Tel. 01865 512320

www.oxfordceramics.com 

Opening hours: Tues – Fri 11 – 6 pm, Sat 10 – 4 pm

Vera and the boys

Paul Berry & Mark Bostridge, : Vera Brittain: A Life, Virago, £12

Vera Brittain is best remembered today as mother of Shirley Williams (Labour’s shopping-basket lady in the 1974 general election) and author of Testament of Youth, her tragic First World War memoir.  A memorable television version some twenty years ago had Vera ably impersonated by cute little Cheryl Campbell.

The Archers

I turned on my radio on Sunday morning to discover Jennifer Aldridge in bed with her former husband Roger Travers-Macey.  She was saying she had wasted all the years she spent with Brian Aldridge.  I would have known more but I can never usually manage more than five minutes of The Archers at a time.  That was the big climax to the weekend omnibus edition and events have obviously been tending that way for some time.

Final days

Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon in America, Robson Books, £16.95

Quill-nosed, gaunt, hair to his shoulders, John Lennon in his last days looked more like the seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn than his former Beatle self.

Roaring boy

Patrick McGuinness (ed.),  T.E. Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press,  222 pages,  £12.95

T.E. Hulme was the roaring boy of pre-1914 literary London:  a tall strapping fellow who once hung Wyndham Lewis up on the railings in Soho Square by his trouser turn-ups.  Twice sent down from Cambridge, he spent time as a labourer in Canada.  He was, perhaps inevitably, very right-wing.

Cigarface

R.A.C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, Macmillan, Papermac, £12.99

Alastair Parker died just days before Churchill and Appeasement was published in paperback.  So the book serves as a fitting finale to his career as historian and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. 

Suffering vigorously

Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: A Commentary on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber, 14.99

There’s sure to be a film about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.  The question is, has Andie McDowell chutzpah enough to play Plath?  Or Ralph Fiennes the presence of Hughes?

When women were girls

Joyce Carol Oates, I’ll Take You There, Fourth Estate, £10.99, paperback

Does this woman ever stop?  Joyce Carol Oates has written forty books in as many years.  She has built up a tremendous momentum which carries the reader forward like a locomotive.

The truth as a lie

JFK, directed by Oliver Stone, Capitol Cineplex, Cork, 7pm.  Late show Friday and Saturday night 11pm.

No film in recent years has been hyped as massively as Oliver Stone’s JFK.  It seems to have inspired articles in every magazine and newspaper in the world.  The film itself is the centre of the phenomenon, forty million dollars’ worth of Oliver Stone, but obvious interest goes beyond the production to take in the themes of Kennedy’s charisma, the mystery still surrounding his death and their place in popular culture.

Berlin!  Berlin!

Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas, Edited by Henry Hardy, Chatto & Windus, (Random House), £20

Most of us remember Sir Isaiah Berlin, if at all, as a gnomelike figure being vigorously nodded over by Michael Ignatieff on BBC2.

Peace by ordeal

Paul Routledge, John Hume: A Biography, HarperCollins, £8.99, 311 pages

From its beginnings, as the cumbersome name implies, the Social Democratic and Labour Party was a hybrid, forcibly amalgamating different strands in the political life of Northern Ireland Catholics.  The SDLP was ‘The John Hume and Gerry Fitt Party’ – in that order.

Primal epic of the world

Derrek Hines, Gilgamesh, Chatto & Windus (paperback) £8.99

Curiously, the hero of the oldest known work of literature was a real historical personage: Gilgamesh, ruler of the Sumerian city of Uruk (in modern Iraq) around 2800 BC.

The enigma of Charles Causley

Patrick Gale, Mother’s Boy, Tinder Press (Headline), 406 pages, £20

Charles Causley is remembered as a sort of literary Alfred Wallis, a writer of deceptively simple ballad-form poetry; reviving his reputation now nearly twenty years after his death in 2003 perhaps inspired by the Covid fashion for sea shanties.