Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
The Blue Flower
(Penelope Fitzgerald) I thought that Penelope Fitzgerald’s novalised (geddit?) part-biography of the poet and philosopher Novalis would help me straighten out the Penelopes Lively and Fitzgerald and stop me from confusing Novalis and Nerval. Of course Lively and Fitzgerald are virtually indistinguishable, both being women who have won the Booker Prize. By an incredible coincidence, each is English and has one “e” in her surname. It is also easy to see how I have confused the two male writers – after all, Gerard de Nerval was the pseudonym of Gerard Labrunie who took his lobster Thibault for walks about bits of France while Novalis was the…
Continue Reading →Dominion
'Non preoccuparti, we left Winston in the car.' (Chamberlain, Mussolini, Lord Halifax & Count Ciano at Rome Opera, Jan. 1939)
(C J Sansom) Smog, smog smog. There is a lot of smog in this novel, which serves to hide the holes in this rather unlikely plot. But it’s an ok read if you believe in “holiday” books. World War I is known only as The Great War because there was no World War II. Halifax succeeded Chamberlain. England surrendered and Churchill is now an underground resistance leader. How differently things actually turned out! It’s all very well until the erstwhile surprisingly amiable and hands-off Nazis turn a bit nasty and start to disappear people. Importantly however, Germany’s most effective means of domination is to control Europe with finance rather than jackboots. How…
Continue Reading →The Luminaries
Never judge a book by an interesting cover.
(Eleanor Catton) The 2013 Man Booker Prize judges must have super-sensitive metal detectors, for they found gold in this boring, pointlessly complicated novel. After working through the dross, slag and tailings for only a short time I lost interest in magic bullets, missing crates, who had seen whom when and where and I had no idea anymore why it mattered. Snore. I still might have given this sometimes evocative book an additional star…but then I got to the appalling, awful courtroom scenes. Grrr.
Continue Reading →The Worst Movie of All Time
L takes no prisoners
Peter’s admirable list of anaesthetic films is frightening, truly scarey. To think that I have sat through all that rubbish. However, it lacks one thing – mention of the worst film of all time. That most tendentious, over-rated, over-blown, self-adoring snore-inducing piece of celluloid-poo of all time, starring the worst actor of all time. Yes, that’s it. Of course I mean LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. You know that scene in Donnie Darko in the cinema? You thought that Donnie, Gretchen and Frank were watching The Evil Dead with some distorted clock faces and stuff? Wrong. Obviously they are watching Lawrence of Arabia. Consider. One of them has…
Continue Reading →Vivienne Westwood
Just plain bad. (I hear you Mum)
(by Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly) It is no secret that, ever since I read “From A to Biba” and “Quant by Quant”, there has been a special place in my daydreams for an assuredly idealised and somewhat chronologically inaccurate 1970s King’s Road, London. I’ve often imagined bobbing into Biba for some knee-boots and popping into Mary Quant for some pop-art makeup*. But until I read this bio/auto-bio, I never, but never, envisaged wandering into Dame Vivienne’s “Worlds End” store on that same blue-skyed Saturday morning. Perhaps because it is in such a different world altogether from the non-challenging swinging London I…
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