In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, Sarah Churchwell reviews The Redgraves: a Family Epic by Donald Spoto. Although the book is billed as a biography of a theatrical dynasty, it is in fact focused almost exclusively on the pater familias, Michael Redgrave. “As seems to have been the case in life,” Churchwell writes, “[Michael Redgrave] is the centre, the rest of the family the orbiting moons.” Spoto pays particular attention to Redgrave’s bisexuality. “Spoto strongly implies that Redgrave’s primary erotic energies were directed toward men.” Though, Churchwell points out, “he also had several long-term sexual relationships with women.” There is a more serious problem with Spoto’s book, however. “By the end,” Churchwell notes, “his generally admiring tone has become positively hagiographic … [I]t is time for celebrity biographies to begin to aspire to something more commensurate with the power of their subjects.”
Also in Books: Helen Lewis reviews Grace: a Memoir by the creative director of US Vogue, Grace Coddington (“Coddington’s crashing lack of interest in anything non-fashion-related begins to grate”); Claire Lowdon reviews Infrared by Nancy Huston, the novel that this week won Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award (“The sex – there is a lot of sex – is truly terrible, worse than DH Lawrence on a bad day”); Michael Sayeau reviews Travels in China by Roland Barthes (“Barthes took [his trip to China in 1974] as an opportunity to experience a real-life manifestation of the politics that he, at a safe distance, had espoused”); Bryan Appleyard reviews Inside the Centre, Ray Monk’s biography of the father of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer (“Oppenheimer’s [career can be seen] as a failure to grasp the way his inner world would be seen by the outside”); and Peter Popham pays tribute to Sir Geoffrey Hill at 80, Britain’s best living poet.
Elsewhere in the Critics: “The Coup”, a short story by Tom Rachman; Ryan Gilbey on Seven Psychopaths, directed by Martin McDonagh; Alexandra Coghlan on English National Opera’s Carmen; Rachel Cooke on Christmas television adverts; Antonia Quirke on a Radio 4 interview with Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Content from our partners
Related
