Books and Arts

Friday

Stephen Smith

Antony Gormley’s lonely figures transfer to paper

If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI bots filling the world with humanoids, it’s the look on their glassy faces when they realize that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby Beach in Liverpool to Gateshead, from Texas to the Netherlands and western Australia. He and his simulacra might not detain our new overlords for very long, of course (but in the meantime “The Gormleys versus the Bots” is the Doctor Who series I’m here for).

Tuesday

Anne Margaret Daniel

The photographer who connects Bob Dylan and the Beatles

MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two. All loved the music of Little Richard and Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran; all were blues fans swept off their feet by rock and roll. Dylan was a Minnesota boy who early in his life became the avatar of the American folk scene, and then a protean man containing multitudes, both musically and otherwise.

bob dylan

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as “Heil Hitler” and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

kanye west

Friday

James Delingpole

The Pitt doesn’t make HBO Max worth a subscription

HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called “the best medical drama on television in years.” This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as “most amusing form of cancer” or “most ineradicable variety of testicular lice.” But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.

the pitt
schiaparelli
Margaret Mitchell

The art of Schiaparelli

It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it “shap,” “skap” or “skyap”? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: “No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.” The V&A’s new exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the web of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate to compare them), Elsa Schiaparelli created clothes for the modern, independent woman – it is now conventional to say so, but they “pushed boundaries.

Alexander Larman

The decline of the royal biography

About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.” I listened to his advice and wrote a trilogy of books about the Windsors: The Crown in Crisis, The Windsors at War and Power and Glory. The first two sold very well, and the third was barely noticed, but I was glad that I took my agent’s counsel, even if we had to part ways because he had practiced what he preached, and diversified from historical biography into his own career writing about the royals.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

A Tate show with dreamy, elusive power

One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born in 1965 – has been emerging for a long time now. But, with the opening of a big retrospective at Tate Britain, his status as a major figure in modern British art is clear. Anderson is completely individual yet visibly connected to the tradition – indeed, to several traditions – and capable of creating huge, wall-filling canvases into which you can sink and float away, but which also make you think and feel.

Graeme Thomson

Unrelentingly entertaining: Basement Jaxx reviewed

How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually “sir”): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Earlier this month, I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits. And yet one felt like the future, and the other like the past. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, aka turn-of-the-millennium electronic duo Basement Jaxx, should be credited for having great sport with that in-built characteristic of almost all electronic outfits. Namely, that two or three blokes pushing a bunch of keys and buttons cannot ever hope to forge the kind of compelling visual identity so crucial to rock groups.

basement jaxx
private equity
Richard Walker

Is private equity secretly running your life?

Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 percent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you out on all that. Private equity is one of those things that you either know about or don’t. If you are in the finance business you know, because it is the story of the past quarter century. If you are not in that world, if leveraged buyouts and limited partners and debt pushdowns are all just business-page noise, then you are in the majority. And it turns out that means you may not know who is really running your life.

etna
Caroline Moorehead

Living in the shadow of Etna

The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its “impenetrable darkness” reminded Samuel Taylor Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land Where Lemons Grow (2014)won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring – yet respectful – eye. Unpicking its geological and human history and a landscape “cobbled together from the expressions of the Earth’s unrest” became for her a way of returning to the very beginnings of life. Mount Etna, at 11,200 feet in height, is Europe’s biggest volcano and one of the most active in the world, grumbling and spewing for many months at a time.

zac brettler russian london
Philip Hensher

The fate of the British teenager who posed as a Russian oligarch’s son

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (“Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.”) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Charles Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

Tuesday

Orson Fry

Meeting Karl Ove Knausgård

On a winter’s morning, outside the Three Lives bookstore in New York’s West Village, Karl Ove Knausgård has just finished signing copies of his latest novel, The School of Night. His features are familiar from the dustjackets – the gray-blue eyes, the grizzled beard – but he is surprisingly tall and his signature silver mane is now cropped short around the ears. Gone, too, are the cigarettes, traded for a vape. The School of Night is the fourth novel in Knausgård’s “Morning Star” series. It takes its name from a secret society of Elizabethan poets and scientists, which included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and the play-wright Christopher Marlowe.

karl ove knausgård

Friday

Hermione Eyre

This Hockney show is disorientingly enjoyable

When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorienting, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the iPad sketches he made have been put together here, blended into a frieze, a walk-through panorama of the seasons rendered with Vivaldi-like virtuosity. As we move along the curve of this 90-meter frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles. He distills the garden to its dramatic essences. The chill mist of winter is numinous, the dormant trees skeletal, the spring blossom riotously delicate, the blue sky bluer than blue.

hockney

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Will the Stones ever play live again?

How times change. Our forebears once thought that full-figured Bill Haley was at the razor-sharp, frighteningly decadent and anarchic edge of pop culture. Compared to the Rolling Stones’ subsequent carnival of drug busts, court appearances, car crashes, house fires, paternity suits and chosen or enforced overseas exile, not to mention the matter of Keith Richards’s alleged blood transfusion, or of his unusual choice in dispersing his father’s ashes (cocaine, nostril), Haley’s act now seems as quaint as the background accompaniment to an Edwardian tea-dance.

Graeme Thomson

Anthemic angst from The Twilight Sad

The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavor, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to be full of the joys of spring, although they approach personal crisis – and catharsis – in very different ways. It’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth album by Scottish indie-rock band the Twilight Sad, is their first in seven years. During that hiatus lead singer and lyricist James Graham was dealing with his mother’s decline and eventual demise from early onset dementia, while also becoming a father.

twilight sad
Alex Diggins

Ovid puts today’s radicals to shame

It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her mouth or languidly caresses her cheekbone with its tail. In the room behind me, another woman stares fiercely back. Her shoulders are bunched with muscle, arms stiff at her sides, like a nightclub brawler about to nut someone. But it’s the bull’s horns sprouting from her forehead, and the mane of matted fur marching down her back, that make it hard to meet her gaze.

colm Tóibín
Leyla Sanai

Tales of quiet intensity: The News from Dublin, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed

Colm Tóibín is a master of understatement, his work characterized by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). Within a few pages, he fills the gaps between words – the things he doesn’t say – with as much meaning as the prose. Familiar themes emerge. There is the Irish diaspora in the US (as in Brooklyn and Long Island); the Catalan Pyrenees (the setting for “The Long Winter” in Mothers and Sons); and Argentina (as in the novel The Story of the Night). Feelings of exile and being an outsider are aroused, while Catholicism still taps on the shoulders of those long lapsed.

David Honigmann

The misery of working with Chuck Berry

In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular music.  There are three dynamics at play. First, there are the Thucydides tensions, where a waning power tangles with a rising one. Frank Sinatra invites Elvis Presley to join him on a television show; Keith Richards throws a filmed concert with Chuck Berry. (Richards, for once, is the younger partner.) The older player is not always generous.

Ian Buruma

Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg

At the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi war criminals, one man stood out: Adolf Hitler’s favorite architect and later armaments minister, Albert Speer. He cut a gentlemanly figure in a gallery of rogues. The strutting, smirking Hermann Goering reminded Rebecca West, who attended the trial, of “a tout in a Paris café offering some tourists a chance to see a black mass.” Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiting brute, was like “a dirty old man of the sort who gives trouble in parks.” On the same bench, all declaring their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of monstrous crimes, were the lantern-jawed SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the sour-faced ex-Champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, Fritz Sauckel, the thuggish slave-labor chief, and the rest of the sorry gang.

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

The Royal Opera’s Siegfried is magnificent

Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy? Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional.

siegfried