Arts Reviews

Stiletto heels, a baby’s dummy, Spice Girls ephemera and glittering embroidery — the predictable paraphernalia of womanhood is all on show in What Women Want. But the latest exhibition at the enterprising Women’s Library in the East End of London is underpinned by some surprising revelations. So we have a 1972 edition of Spare Rib magazine (which I had thought always prided itself on being a feminist alternative to Good House-keeping) advertising an article by ‘Georgie Best’ on sex. Another case of books, diaries and postcards contains Married Love by Marie Stopes, opened at the title page to reveal that it was first published in 1918 and that it was

Nowadays ‘Kienholz’ is a brand. Its founder, Edward Kienholz (1927–94), was a self-taught artist who grew up on a farm on the borders of Washington and Idaho. He made a living as an odd-job man and drove a truck stencilled ‘Ed Kienholz Expert, Estab. 1952’, before co-founding a commercial art gallery and establishing a reputation as an artist of nightmarish surrealistic installations, using real furniture and life-size figures. In 1972 he met and married Nancy Reddin (born 1943), and in 1981 he issued a statement that all works from 1972 onwards were co-authored by him and Nancy. Since his death more than a decade ago, Nancy Reddin Kienholz has continued

It was a story straight out of the Arabian Nights. Two immense temples are lifted high into the air, and transported to a remote desert site. At the same time an entire hill is created in order to replicate the original setting. Such, essentially, is the story of Abu Simbel. The twin temples of Abu Simbel, built by Rameses the Great, one dedicated to himself as a god, the other to his delectable wife-daughter Nefetari, were carved out of the living rock at a bend in the Nile. Rameses lived to be almost 100 and spent a considerable part of his long life building temples and statues to himself. Looking

Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, isn’t quite up to his usual standard. It’s not terrible, but it feels as though it was yanked from the director’s improvisatory workshop when it was still in the development stage. It’s about a family of secular north London Jews, and, from the first, everything about them is slightly wrong. Their accents are too adenoidal, almost as if they’re extras in an am-dram production of Fiddler on the Roof, and they use so many Yiddish words you get the impression that each member of the cast has swallowed a Yiddish–English dictionary. (My wife, whose father is a secular north London Jew, was as

America, more than any other country I can think of, encourages such extreme opinions that it’s sometimes difficult to analyse why such views are held. There are rigid anti-Americans, of course, who variously dislike its capitalist and free-market system, its silent majority’s lack of sophistication, or its military and technological might. Much of this is just plain envy. Others define the country through its president. At the moment Bush-haters are in the ascendancy, hence the gloating tone of much of the broadcasting coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It was, as the mad Michael Moore put it, all the fault of George W. himself. I dare say Moore is already finding ways

I tried hard to love Elizabeth I (Channel 4, Thursday) because such work and effort had gone into it, but it was an uphill job. The opening scene, of a doctor examining our heroine’s vagina, was no doubt meant to be challenging and attention-grabbing, but it felt unnecessarily gynaecological. As Barry Humphries would have said, the doctor was just keeping his hand in. The other problem is that we have seen so many depictions of these people and this era that they all echo round each other, with, for some reason, Blackadder the loudest. The Duke of Anjou (Hugh Laurie with a comedy French accent): I muzz ask you ziss;