On my culture radar this month August 2025.

Music.

Summer is generally a quiet time for new music, but I have been adding some bits and pieces to my playlist.

The best of these is the new seven-minute epic by Tame Impala. There’s a bit of Bohemian Rhapsody here, this is a sprawling piece that careers all over the place. But listen a few times and it reveals itself as amongst the best songs Kevin Parker has released.

I always think of Tame Impala as making perfect music for hot summer evenings and The End of Summer is just that; romantic, easy, complicated, lazy, elegant.

Talking of summer, if you want to impress your friends with a sophisticated but easy-to-love compilation, then look no further than La Torre Ibiza, Volume Cinco, which includes fantastic songs by Mazzy Star, Talk Talk and Boards of Canada.

My Playlist

Books.

I’ve read a lot recently; some amazing books, some good books and some absolutely awful (and that doesn’t include the ones I have abandoned). But, in the usual spirit of this newsletter, I will only list the really good ones.

The Remembered Soldier. Anjet Dannte.

This very long, dense book has sprawling chapters and flows almost like a train of thought. It was a big hit in its native Holland where it was published in 2019 and has just been released in this translation. It’s about the horrors of World War I as seen through the lens of those that survived. It is trance-like, discursive, repetitive, frustrating and yet it was just what I wanted after trying a few miss-hits from my stack of books.

Hot Milk. Deborah Levy.

This came out in 2016 and for whatever reason, I have only just come to it. It’s absolutely brilliant. It follows a mother and daughter as they travel to Spain in search of a cure for what may or may not be an imaginary illness; the mother believes she can’t walk. It is hilarious, true, sexy, sun-soaked, slightly mysterious and is as elegant an inquiry into the human condition as you could possibly hope for.

The Echoes. Evie Wyld.

This is Wyld’s fourth novel and it’s a complex but engaging enquiry into the history of one of the main character’s family. This history appears in fragments, which appear just below the surface of the main story. A clever book and a memorable story; this wears its intelligence lightly.

Audiobooks.

Bless Me Father. Kevin Rowland.

Despite writing a couple of massive hit singles, most notably drunken wedding favourite, Come On Eileen, Kevin Rowland of Dexy’s Midnight Runners barely made a penny from his music until very recently. Well, he did make a bit but spent all of that on drugs; his enthusiasm for coke was such that even his dealer had him marked down as ‘different’.

Add to this some awful relationships, a deep self-loathing, sex addiction, a truly provocative contrariness and it’s amazing that Dexy’s made several albums of the greatest pop music ever made (and I don’t say this lightly).

This is an extraordinary tale of the ups and downs of one of the most successful cult artists of all time. It’s probably only one for fans or music completists, but I am both and loved it (if you can love something so bleak).

Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for some time, you may know that I am morbidly fascinated by Donald Trump. I have thoroughly enjoyed, in that morbidly fascinated way, Michael Wolff’s four books on Trump, which document his rise, fall and rise with wonderful, acerbic clarity.

We all have some idea of how and why Trump won the election last year. But what about the Democrats, and specifically Biden? This book tells us about the collapse of Biden’s bid for a second term and how he was culpable in the Republican victory; and it makes for truly grim listening. There are lies and cover-ups; naivety, complete stupidity, arrogance. A lot of it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious.

This is not only an indictment of Biden and all of his team but of the whole fetid machine that supports the race for the White House.

The Haves and Have Yachts. Evan Osnos.

This is a good companion piece to the Biden book (above). Osnos is a New Yorker journalist, and this remarkable book gathers together a number of his essays on the 1% (the Have Yachts) to create a fascinating view of the ‘new elite’ with figures including Trump, Zuckerberg and Bezos amongst the main characters (Osnos has direct access; this book is not a speculation).

What emerges here is an exceptionally dystopian vision of the future and it is all absolutely fascinating.

Culture.

I saw the David Hockney exhibition in Paris last week. The gallery (The Louis Vuitton Foundation) is perhaps too small to handle a show of 400 works by a major artist, but otherwise it is a truly magnificent retrospective, focusing mainly on the last 25 years. It may be one of the last chances to see a show by Hockney in which he is greatly involved and which shows new work.

And I will soon visit…

Oxford for This Is What You Get at the Ashmolean, which is a deep dive into the collaborative work of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood.

Edinburgh for Andy Goldsworthy / Fifty Years.

That’s all from me. Enjoy The End of Summer.

I send all my best wishes.

Charlie x