If I had been given a monkey for every time someone had told me knowledgeably that Boris Johnson was a comical buffoon unfit for high office, I’d be able to open a very large ape house. It annoys me not just because it’s not true but also because of what it says about the stupidity
My favourite programme last week was France on a Plate (BBC4, Sunday) in which Dr Andrew Hussey investigated the link between gastronomy and la gloire; French glory and destiny. He began with a recreation of François Mitterrand’s last meal, which climaxed with the illegal consumption of ortolans, an endangered songbird which is blinded then boiled
It is worth remembering that the BBC, despite its recent, excessively well-aired problems, gives us a great many stimulating, well-made programmes, on both radio and television. Rather surprisingly, given its format and the yawning, ever-present potential for dumbed-down disaster, the BBC2 Maestro series, aired in August/September this year, turned out to be all of those
Oleg Vassiliev: Recent Works Faggionato Fine Arts, 49 Albemarle Street, London W1, until 23 January 2009 The septuagenarian Russian artist Oleg Vassiliev is exhibiting for the first time in London. Vassiliev was born in Moscow, in 1931, and studied graphic art at the Surikov Art Institute (Moscow State Art Institute), a training which provided him
Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art Islamic art is a fast growing subject of study. Too many countries are involved for it to be categorised like French or Japanese art. In New York and London Islamic art tends to be confined to a section of an institution such as the Met, the British Museum or the
The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions Metropolitan Museum, until 1 February 2009 Philippe de Montebello retires from the position of Director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after 31 years of service, at the end of this year. A forum of curators has organised an exhibition of
It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2. ‘There’s one for you if you want it,’ he said. Well, obviously I wanted it, but cash was a little short at the time — in fact, not so much short
Les Contes d’Hoffmann Royal Opera Der fliegende Holländer Barbican Astonished delight was the first reaction, of everyone, I think, at the Royal Opera’s latest revival of John Schlesinger’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann: astonishment that Rolando Villazón seems not only to have overcome his vocal and possibly other crises, but to be, in all
Lakeview Terrace 15, Nationwide Summer 15, Key Cities Lakeview Terrace is one of those menacing, neighbour-from-hell type thrillers with Samuel L. Jackson playing Abel Turner, an LAPD cop who bristles with hostility from the moment Chris and Lisa, an interracial couple — he’s white, she’s black — move in next door. This is a movie
The Family Reunion Donmar Chicken Hackney Empire August: Osage County Lyttelton T.S. Eliot was in his fifties when he turned to the theatre. What’s amazing about his 1939 play, The Family Reunion, is its experimental verve and nonchalant risk-loving energies. Harry, a country squire, returns from eight years abroad to take possession of his estate.
Caught by chance on Remembrance Sunday, the broadcast of the composer’s celebrated recording of War Requiem kept me hooked, listening with half an ear, half fascinated, half repelled, for the whole duration of a trip down memory lane, recalling the wave of patriotic fervour and heart-on-sleeve emotion surrounding the work’s première, 1962, in the new
Changeling 15, Nationwide Changeling, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a most melodramatic melodrama starring Angelina Jolie and her totally amazing, bee-stung lips. (I was stung by a bee once, but on the eyelid; it didn’t look so great.) Anyway, based on a true story, it’s set in Los Angeles in 1928 and is
The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after? Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just
Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. The fourth centenary of John Milton, which falls on
Duality, yin and yang, twin-tub theatre. Call it what you like, a Christmas show must straddle the generations and please both kids and adults at once. Casting Keith Allen as Long John Silver in Treasure Island was clearly intended to achieve this double-barrel effect. To kids he’s Lilly Allen’s dad while adults know him
Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald
Byzantium 330-1454 Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009 In his excellent book Portrait Painters, written more than half-a-century ago but still full of wisdom and stimulating observations, Allan Gwynne-Jones includes a note on the character of English art. He has been discussing the great glories of the medieval school of manuscript illumination in Britain, often
This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. At
Triple Bill Royal Opera House According to a tacitly shared, unwritten code of common professional practice, critics ought not to divulge their opinion before being published. Which is why I felt terribly guilty when, at the end of Wayne McGregor’s Infra, I gave my first impressions to a BBC interviewer. True, I did not say
I really, really wish I could change places this week and become a TV critic. Nothing on radio has quite matched the drama of that extraordinarily necessary BBC2 documentary, The Fallen, which in three long hours commemorated each and every one of the British soldiers who have died in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.