Books and Arts Archives

Thursday

July 18, 2024

The Jedermann, the myth, the legend

The telephone was ringing. On the other end was Markus Hinterhäuser, artistic director of the Salzburg Festival. “Robert, would you like to direct a new production of Jedermann for us next year?” A new Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival, but with only a few months to prepare? I hesitated for about one second before saying I would be delighted and honored to direct. Jedermann is the complex, frightening, inspiring and fascinating German adaptation by the great Austrian writer and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal of the English medieval morality play Everyman. Hofmannsthal’s adaptation premiered at Berlin’s Circus Schumann theater in December 1911.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

A new adaptation of The Great Gatsby is enrapturing and impressive

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, Daisy Fay is a mercurial character. The popular rich girl from Louisiana — married to Tom Buchanan, an adulterous brute — is ravishing and entrancing and, at times, cruel. It is her voice that most draws Jay Gatsby to her years after their initial fling when he was a poor officer, as he longs for her across the bay. As Fitzgerald describes it, Daisy’s is a voice that rises in dramatic swells and falls to intimate murmurs, coaxing its listeners to draw closer. Gatsby, the nouveau-riche rumored bootlegger from an impoverished farming family, is obsessed with Daisy: her class, her beauty, her unattainability, her voice. It is a voice, he tells the book’s narrator Nick Carraway, that is “full of money.

Laura Allsop

Inigo Philbrick, the art world’s wheeler dealer stealer

A few months after going on the lam in late 2019, the thirty-two-year-old wunderkind art dealer Inigo Philbrick sent his friend and colleague Orlando Whitfield a trove of documents. Philbrick wanted his old friend to write a sympathetic account of the misdeeds he stood accused of — since described as the biggest art fraud perpetrated in US history, for which Philbrick was later convicted and imprisoned. Whitfield has instead written All That Glitters, a memoir chronicling their friendship and dealings during a heady “gold rush” decade in the art world. Going through Philbrick’s correspondence and the court documents, Whitfield realized his friend was not the person he purported to be, certainly not the one his clients believed he was.

William Newton

A beginner’s guide to buying art

Perceived barriers to entry often keep potential art collectors from taking the step beyond admiration to acquisition. Sometimes this results from neither liking nor understanding what’s available, but basic hurdles can involve learning how best to source and price what you are collecting — and the terminology can be daunting too. In his latest book, How to Collect Art, art-market expert Magnus Resch puts forward the most comprehensive, clearly explained guide to art collecting that I’ve ever read. A best-selling author, an entrepreneur and an art collector himself, Resch not only teaches art management at Yale, but has written and commented on the art market for years.

The Spectator

This month in culture: August 2024

The Instigators In theaters August 2, Apple TV+ August 9 Boston crime movies are back! Starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck — and produced by Ben Affleck, of course — The Instigators is a heist comedy-thriller about a robbery that goes wrong, causing Damon’s therapist to get dragged along for the ride. Affleck/Damon productions have consistently been solid — from the ultimate Boston crime movie The Town to last year’s Jordan 1 sneaker-origin story Air — and this is directed by one of the best working action directors around, Doug Liman, who was responsible for The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Edge of Tomorrow and (the underrated) American Made.

Monday

June 17, 2024

Daniel McCarthy

Anne Applebaum’s solutions to the ‘threat’ of autocracy

Liberal democracy is endangered more by its friends than by its enemies. Neither Moscow nor Beijing lured the United States into strategic humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor was the rise of China to the rank of a great power brought about by Westerners sympathetic to Beijing’s communist system. If liberal parties and movements in the United States and Europe seem to be losing ground to populists, this is not thanks to Facebook ads purchased by Vladimir Putin in support of Donald Trump or Brexit. Liberals themselves sabotaged liberal democracy by prioritizing liberalism over democratic legitimacy for three decades after the Cold War — on fundamental issues ranging from trade and foreign policy to immigration and national values. Anne Applebaum’s latest book, Autocracy, Inc.

Philip Womack

John Freeman’s Hit and Run is gorgeously crafted

John Freeman’s gorgeously crafted novella, Hit and Run, is a gripping account of a few tumultuous months in a youngish man’s life. It is imbued with a black-and-white, noirish tinge, beginning as a detective narrative, moving through domestic drama and romance and eventually morphing into a ghost story, profitably exploring what these genres have in common. Based on real events, though it isn’t clear which elements are true, it shows how lives can unravel (and ravel) at the whims of fate, and at the same time demonstrates that everything is connected. This is a work about significant moments, about “a piece of time so sharp it carved a human being from existence,” glittering with reflections and refractions.

Brice Stratford

Stephen King’s You Like it Darker shows a master at his peak

It is not hyperbole to call Stephen King the most influential horror writer alive. Across page and screen alike, nobody else can claim to have had such an expansive and lasting impact on popular culture. King’s name has become so commonplace that it’s easy to take it and him for granted, and to forget that behind the ultrafamiliar and now-ubiquitous branding there lies, in fact, a wild and strikingly original mind and a beating, bloody, passionate heart. You Like It Darker, King’s latest offering, is a highly accomplished and masterful collection of twelve short (and not so short) stories, all blistering examples of King’s powers. Though some have seen the light of day elsewhere, most are published here for the first time. All are worth the purchase.

Alexander Larman

Is the hype for The Bee Sting justified?

On a recent visit to the bookshops of New York, I found all the usual suspects front and center. If you wanted David Grann, Amor Towles or Salman Rushdie, you had come to the right department; if your tastes veered more toward the Air Fryer Cookbook, that particular whim would be well catered for, too. But the single book I saw on most prominent display everywhere I visited was the new novel by the Irish author Paul Murray, The Bee Sting. A shop assistant in McNally Jackson professed herself an admirer of both writer and work. “I’ve never seen anything like it. We sell a dozen copies a day, sometimes more. It’s hit a chord with people in a way that other books just don’t.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Kevin Barry’s latest novel is bursting with energy, brutality and poetry

"He walked as calamity. He walked under Libra. He was living all this bullshit from the inside out. Oh, he scathed himself and harangued and to his own feet flung down fresh charges. But there were dreams of escape, too — one day you could ride south on a fine horse for the Monida Pass.” Well met by moonlight, Tom Rourke, doper and dreamer, formerly of County Cork, now a miner in Butte, Montana, in 1891. Welcome to yet another wild and whirling world made by Kevin Barry. Barry’s first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, appeared in 2007; he was already celebrated in his native Ireland as a creator of darkly comic troubled characters compassionately drawn.

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Suburbia’s irredeemable reputation in the American canon

"My God, the suburbs!” John Cheever, the short-story writer who has rejoiced in the nickname “the American Chekhov,” had what can only be described as ambivalent feelings about the twentieth-century housing developments that grew up on the outskirts of major cities. He said of them that “they encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity, and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.” Cheever was not wholly consistent himself.

Laura Allsop

Bianca Bosker’s snapshot of the art scene

Early on in her entertaining account of five years immersed in the New York art scene, author Bianca Bosker is informed that, as far as the art world is concerned, because she is a journalist, she is the “enemy.” Given that the job of a journalist is to find things out, then explain and communicate those findings, it is unsurprising that a hermetic, deeply self-protective society like the art world would be resistant to journalistic inquiry. In reality it’s not just Bosker’s profession that makes it difficult for her to get past art’s gatekeepers, but a whole litany of personal and social failings that are gleefully enumerated by an art dealer early on.

William Newton

CreatiVets and the art of war

On Independence Day, Americans recall not only the ideals that led to the founding of the United States, but the sacrifices of those who have made our unique experiment into an ongoing reality. Recognizing the challenges that affect many who have been in the military, CreatiVets, founded in 2013, provides help to disabled veterans through engagement with the arts. Program participants learn how to address and share their experiences through studio arts, music, songwriting and creative writing. The organization’s goal is to help these veterans “transform their stories of trauma and struggle into an art form that can inspire and motivate continued healing.

Christopher Sandford

The evergreen, ageless Rolling Stones

Are the Rolling Stones the new Rat Pack? Or put it another way: how did the Stones achieve this curious headlock on our affections? If anything, it seems to get stronger over time. In the band’s current US stadium tour, aptly sponsored by the old-age interest group AARP, a million customers are each paying $100 for a seat that allows you to aim a pair of binoculars at a distant video screen. Want an actual view of the stage? It’ll cost you up to ten times as much. Still, it’s all gravy. The last major Stones tour grossed $550 million at the box office.

The Spectator

This month in culture: July 2024

The Bear, season three Hulu, June 27 America loves a misanthropic, depressive chef. How else would we know the chef is a real artist? The Bear returns for its third season with the trailer promising lots of arguing, screw-ups, failures and everything else you’ve come to expect from the beloved show. We’re not sure why you would take a perfectly good beef-sandwich shop in Chicago and try to turn it into a Michelin-starred restaurant, but we hope Carmy and the gang give us some sort of good reason. — Zack Christenson Jeremy Allen White in The Bear Wimbledon ESPN and ABC, July 1 You know summer has arrived when the brilliant green grass of the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club lights up your screens.

Wednesday

May 15, 2024

Fergus Butler-Gallie

An incisive memoir of life in the cloisters

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the immaculately Brylcreemed megastar of the golden age of Catholic television and radio evangelism in the United States, famously hated hearing the confessions of nuns. Doing so, Sheen is reported to have said, was “like being stoned to death with popcorn.” Despite this, Sheen — at one point broadcasting to over 30 million Americans — found himself hearing a lot of nuns’ confessions in his later career. He was reduced to this, alongside what was rather euphemistically referred to as his “international cassette tape ministry,” having fallen foul of the archbishop of New York, the doughty Cardinal Spellman.

Ed Zotti

Nellie Bowles critiques progressivism and the media that covers it

One of many fascinating things to be learned from Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by former New York Times correspondent Nellie Bowles, is the process by which someone gets canceled. I was of course familiar with the concept of cancel culture and figured it meant blackballing the wicked, but I’d never gotten a clear idea of how the thing was actually done. On the evidence of Bowles’s book, it means going on Twitter (OK, X) and posting derogatory tweets (X-pressions, whatever) about the offending party contemporaneously with others doing the same thing.

Mitchell Jackson

A history of the LGBTQ+ aspects of the Boy Scout movement

Today, gay activism may seem synonymous with incompetent nonprofit employees shutting down traffic to demand you use ze/zir pronouns because made-up pronouns, and only made-up pronouns, will fix global warming. But once upon a time, gays understood strategy better than nearly any other special-interest group in America. They were the best in the game. Sarah Schulman’s masterful AIDS history, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT Up New York, 1987-1993, details how the HIV activist group ACT UP took a good-cop/bad-cop approach to fighting for life-saving medication.

Philip Womack

Salman Rushdie’s memoir is a devastating and powerful account of near-death

In late summer 2022, at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, the celebrated novelist Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed many times as he was about to give a lecture, the subject of which, ironically, was keeping authors safe. The attack sent shockwaves throughout the literary establishment, and the world. It seemed as if civilization itself was under threat, as if our fundamental freedoms to create, associate and speak as we wish were defunct, reduced to the point of a knife. His new memoir, Knife, examines the attack and its implications for him, and for such freedoms generally.

Mark Piesing

A skillful retelling of one of World War Two’s most dramatic stories

Around lunchtime on a late September day in 1944, a young woman stepped into one of the most fashionable cafés on the Champs-Élysées. Her eyes still scanned the room for threats, even though her war had been over for many months. Known variously as Suzanne, Madeleine, Blanche, Ginnette or Tony, she had “amassed names and personas just as other women of her years and beauty amassed admirers. And she had amassed those too” in the service of her country. Two such admirers now sat opposite her in the café, and she had to decide which one she was going to spend the rest of her life with, and which she would never see again. Such is the climax of the epic story of love and betrayal that Nahlah Ayed tells, using unpublished interviews and archival and personal documents.