Normally I detest people who use laptops on crowded trains, but if you’re watching a DVD your elbows aren’t flying, and with earphones you’re no more of a nuisance to your neighbours than you would be reading a paper. So on a train crawling towards Bournemouth for the Tory conference, I set up the machine
Like myself, both the Arts Council and the Arts Council Collection are celebrating their 60th birthdays this year. I was born just as the modern concept of the welfare state was being incubated, which is why I find so moving that moment in Humphrey Jennings’s film Diary for Timothy (1945) when E.M. Forster’s commentary asks
What a spectacle at the Royal Academy: the main galleries packed with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), in a massive show which dazzles with its vehement and emotional handling of materials. Here is a giant of an artist, but the paying public is overloaded with visual stimulus. It is simply impossible to take in
Honestly, first it’s restaurant reviews and now it’s films, too, which does make me think: what next? Deborah, when you get a minute, would you mind changing the toner in the photocopier? Deborah, would you make sure to empty the bins before you leave? Doesn’t anyone else at The Spectator do any work at all?
Michael Boyd’s Complete Works festival may not have over-garlanded Stratford with bunting and flags, but it’s made the town a much more buzzy place. Boyd is not only bringing back some of the best Shakespeareans of the older generation — including Patrick Stewart as Antony and Prospero, and Ian McKellen as Lear — but also
Mozart is full of loose ends and extremes. One-off miniatures, contextless and unparalleled, of singular profundity and perfection — the A-minor rondo and B-minor adagio for piano, the pieces for glass harmonica and mechanical organ, the Masonic Funeral Music; and four of his most ambitious-scaled monuments — two quasi-religious operas, Idomeneo taking seria into realms
It’s only since watching Stephen Fry’s brilliant Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (BBC2, Tuesday) that I’ve begun properly to understand why I am the way I am. Lots of people have suggested to me at one time or another that I should see a psychiatrist. ‘You’re so successful,’ they say. ‘How can you possibly
‘All gilt and beshit’. That was Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French interiors when he visited Paris in 1748. As an image it is hard to fault, conjuring up gilded boiseries and the bird-droppings of rococo plasterwork. ‘In the streets [of Paris],’ the eye-witness report continued, ‘he was often clamorously rude.’ Hogarth sounds like a modern-day
Recently I found myself lured for the second time in as many years to what is surely one of the most alluring music festivals in the world, the Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany, which has survived — nay, flourished — for more than 80 years now, come hell, high water and Hitler. It’s alluring in
It all sounds very kinky, really, bringing together the two Sir Johns under one roof; Sir John Betjeman, so amiable, house-trained and telly-friendly, and Sir John Soane, so arcane, Dumbledore-ish and stridently innovative. But I have to say I think it works rather well since, in such close proximity, each of the knights brings out
There’s something different about Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s new show at Flowers Central: it has a title, Myths. This may not sound like much — and Schierenberg shrugs it off — but when an artist abandons the neutrality of New Paintings for a title with so much historical baggage you suspect something is afoot. And when you
It’s very pleasant to be able to greet a small show at the V&A after the relentless stream of blockbusters we’ve seen in Brompton Road in recent years. Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design is confined to one gallery and consists of 60 drawings displayed in two banks of angled cabinets down the length
Welsh National Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s finest surviving opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, is an almost unqualified success, and one hopes that the five cities that it tours to after leaving the company’s home in Cardiff will give it the reception it deserves, so that WNO’s cutting back of its tour next spring
At last the BBC has worked out what to do with Graham Norton. The series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Graham? (sorry, silly me, Like Maria) has just ended and it was so achingly, screamingly, dementedly camp it made its host, clad in a suit which appeared to have been woven from aluminium
Alasdair Palmer talks to the French artist who has discovered the secret of the Master’s technique How did he do it? Among the many great unanswered questions about Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, that has long been one of the most puzzling. Part of the perennial appeal of the ‘Mona Lisa’, and one reason why, today,
In 1435 a young Tuscan poet and diplomat visited the court of James I in Edinburgh. The purpose of his mission remains something of a mystery. But he was impressed by the women of the country, whom he described as ‘fair, charming and easily won’. It also did not take him long to discover that
James Pryde (1866–1941) is one of those artists who enjoyed a considerable vogue in their own lifetime, and resurface now and again but never with anything like the same success. (The last solo show of his work I saw was at the Redfern in 1988. There was a museum show in Edinburgh, his native city,
The ancient tradition of arts patronage is being revived in Marbella, the Andalusian playground of the rich and famous. Here in the shadow of the Sierra Blanca mountains, next to the luxurious Marbella Club, built by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe in the 1950s, The New World Trust, organisers of the Marbella Film Festival and the
There are, as we all know, many disadvantages to going away on holiday, not least the fact — so ably nailed by Alain de Botton — that we are forced to take ourselves with us. How relaxing it would be to leave home without one’s own deficiencies and inability to enjoy oneself when doing nothing.
The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit,