The Critics | The Spectator

Did the Bayeux Tapestry succeed as a tool of Norman propaganda?

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It makes for a good pub quiz question: what has 632 people, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 41 ships and only six women? Along with the UK’s heatwaves came Bayeux Tapestry fever as the Canterbury Embroidery returned to England for ten months after something approaching a millennial sojourn in France. The British Museum was barely able to cope with the demands on its website for the first tranche of tickets to visit the exhibition. It is easy to see why. The Tapestry depicts, in an abundance of endlessly fascinating detail, that most famous date in English history: 1066. In popular perception, the doughty Anglo-Saxons narrowly lost to that bastard Duke William and his land-grabbing Normans at the Battle of Hastings, consequently being forced to submit to the Norman yoke.

Leyla Sanai

A passion for music: Partita, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed

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Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling novels tackle political and social issues and win prizes, among them the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize for Fiction (twice). Subjects she has covered include colonialism; environmental issues (preserving ecosystems and flora and fauna, and punishing polluting companies); the validity of extended family approaches to child-rearing in Cherokee Nation communities; the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and their friendship with Trotsky; and the McCarthy era and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Richard Bratby

Do we really need a Dudamel Schumann cycle?

The Listener

Grade: B These are strange days in the recording industry. Heaven alone knows why Platoon – an Apple sub-conglomerate with all the charm of the Borg – has decided that this is the moment to release a cycle of Schumann symphonies recorded live by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2018. But I’m not complaining. No conductor records these four misunderstood masterpieces for the glory. No: it has to be love; and while you can draw any number of conclusions from Platoon’s decision to give the recordings away for free via streaming and download platforms, the real value is in the listening. If perceptions of Dudamel as a hyperactive ex-wunderkind were ever really justified, they aren’t now.

Adam Begley

The triumph of virtue over fear and malice: The Bridge, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed

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A small, beautiful book about betrayal, the cost of isolation and the persistence of human decency, Colm Tóibín’s The Bridge is set in the 1950s, in a remote Catalan village high in the Pyrenees, among people cut off from the modern world. Cut off for now. A bridge across the river threatens to speed the advent of paved roads, telephones and electricity. Miquel and his father live in an old stone dwelling on a hardscrabble farm, attended by an orphaned houseboy, Manolo, and haunted by the reverberating absence of Miquel’s mother, who was caught in a sudden snowstorm and died. Her corpse, buried under ice, lay undiscovered until a spring thaw. Since her death, Miquel and his father have taken to smuggling goods out of nearby Andorra.

James Walton

War is as good as Succession

Television

In his ruefully funny 2012 novel The Man Who Forgot His Wife, John O’Farrell compares the increasingly uncivilised process of divorce to war: ‘In 1939 the RAF thought it was immoral to bomb the Black Forest to deprive the Germans of timber. But by 1945 they were deliberately creating firestorms to kill as many civilians as possible.’ As the title suggests, the starry new divorce-based drama War makes a similar comparison – except that here the unhappy couple are cutting straight to Dresden. The show began as it meant to go on: which is to say, glitteringly. At a London awards ceremony of ineffable poshness, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) was named Pioneer of the Year for creating one of the world’s biggest yet nicest social media platforms.

Stephen Bayley

Abstract ideas made concrete

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The Iron Curtain, or at least its most visible symbol, was not metal. Berlin’s Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Wall) was concrete. Its ugliness of form and function seemed to many proof of the evils inherent in this ancient building material. But for every hideous Berliner Mauer, you have a glorious Roman Pantheon. The dome of Hadrian’s incomparable temple is, after nearly two millennia, the largest unreinforced concrete structure in the world. In our own era, concrete has allowed the best architects to do their best work. Witness Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel. And who would argue against Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre as the best late-20th-century British building?

Lloyd Evans

The problem with Sting’s musical

Theatre

The Last Ship, a musical written by and featuring Sting, is touring Europe, Australia and America. The show is a class-war parable set in Newcastle during the 1980s. A team of shipbuilders are about to complete a new vessel, the Utopia, when a bossy government minister, Baroness Tynedale, arrives at the docks to deliver bad news. With her bright- blue suit and posh hectoring voice, she’s a pantomime Mrs Thatcher and she announces that the yard will be seized and flogged to private investors. The shipbuilders establish a Marxist committee and plot to overturn her evil scheme. A gripping start. Plucky Geordies pitted against yuppie scavengers from London. The show even features a song about the competing merits of collectivism and monetarism. Then it all implodes.

Chris Mullin

‘I shall always want to say thank you to this country’: the gratitude of a former kindertransport refugee

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For all that it is an anachronism, the House of Lords contains some remarkable specimens, not least Alf Dubs. The child of a mixed marriage – his father was Jewish, his mother not – he arrived in this country from Prague on one of the kindertransports organised by Sir Nicholas Winton, with his possessions in a knapsack and a luggage label on his coat identifying him. Many of his Jewish compatriots were not so lucky and perished in the death camps. He was fortunate in another respect, too. Unlike with many of his companions, his father had already made it out and was there to greet him. His mother eventually managed to join them, arriving in the UK just four days before the outbreak of war.

Michael Hann

Ian McCulloch’s still got it

Pop

No one ever joined a rock band because they didn’t want to be recognised. Being adored matters to stars, sometimes too much, but that only makes those who love them care even more. That could be heard in the cries of ‘We love you, Mac!’ at a glorious night in Regent’s Park. Echo & The Bunnymen’s singer Ian McCulloch – who was once famous for pronouncing on how much better his band was than any other – has not had an easy time of it in recent years. Unlike his peers in the Cure and U2, he’s not playing to 50,000 people at a time, though his band were regarded as every bit their equals – perhaps their betters – in the early 1980s.

Alan Judd

Terrorism nearly always fails – so where does that leave the ‘freedom fighter’?

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This book begins with rueful comments on the absence of philosophy from terrorism literature. The phenomenon is frequently analysed through psychological, religious, political, economic, sociological and military perspectives, but rarely from the philosophical. Yet questions such as how and why terrorists opt for violence, how they justify it to themselves and others, how they regulate it and why they stop, all have philosophical ramifications. As do questions about counter-terrorism, particularly with reference to retributive terror, running agents in terrorist organisations, interrogation and torture. Quassim Cassam and Richard English, philosopher and historian respectively, avoid the easy route of exploring such questions via abstract thought experiments.

Richard Bratby

Meet the man behind Royal Opera’s new Parsifal

Opera

Evgeny Titov has landed at the Royal Opera, and he has good news for Britain’s beleaguered opera scene. ‘It’s the best place to work,’ he declares, leaning forward with enthusiasm; and already he’s thrown the interview off course. Usually with overseas artists there are courtesies, and then a tactful acknowledgment that British companies work under unavoidable pressures of time and money. But this actor-turned-opera director, whose career has taken him from St Petersburg to the Salzburg Festival, has seen a few things, and he means what he says. He likes it here. ‘Everybody told me before I came, “You will love it,”’ he says. ‘“Oh, is that so?

Ariane Bankes

Battling the elements – Claude Monet’s litany of anguish

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For a painter we acknowledge as a master of atmospheric effects and ever-changing light, whose early work ‘Impression, Sunrise’ sparked the artistic revolution that became Impressionism, Claude Monet (1840-1926) spent an awful lot of time complaining about the weather. He was obsessed by it, cowed and crushed by it, inspired by it to flights of genius, and its vagaries would become the intrinsic focus of his art: ‘I have just returned, covered in mud and soaking wet, the weather is so awful it is impossible to do any work’ is a constant grizzle. He seethes with frustration as he is forced to make constant changes as everything keeps growing and getting greener... In brief, because of these changes, I am following Nature without being able to capture her...

Hermione Eyre

The singular vision of Quentin Bell

Exhibitions

Every visitor to Charleston Farmhouse will know the work of Quentin Bell even if they don’t realise it. He made the distinctive clay colander lights there, and many of the zany sculptures and ceramics. The son of Vanessa Bell, he grew up at Charleston, and later, when he was of great age – and even greater beard – he led a campaign to ensure the place was properly preserved. But what was Bell’s work really like? This exhibition gives us about 100 examples so that his singular vision emerges, and guess what, for all the progressive modernism of his background, he had a taste for Victoriana, fairground illusionism and the Belle Époque. His reliefs are dancers out of Degas, his figurines dressed like Manet’s bar attendant.

Rupert Christiansen

Today’s choreographers stand no chance against Balanchine

Dance

The only problem with presenting a blazing masterpiece such as Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements as a curtain raiser is that it will make anything that follows it look pallid or insignificant. And that’s what blights English National Ballet’s new triple bill, which starts with a massive blast of electricity and ends in a big slow yawn. Symphony in Three Movements formed part of the astonishing festival that George Balanchine masterminded in 1972 as a homage to his close friend and artistic inspiration Igor Stravinsky, who had died the previous year. Presented in one week were 31 ballets to the composer’s scores, 21 of them new, ten of them by Balanchine himself.

David Crane

Warnings, omens and the end of days: the surreal times of the Emperor Charlemagne

Lead book review

I don’t know if it is still the case, but there was a time in London when the ring of a doorbell on Saturday morning could only mean the Jehovah’s Witnesses and another copy of Watchtower. They all made for some pretty dotty reading in those days, but there was one article that has stuck in the memory – a piece that asked, and predictably answered, the question: ‘How Great was Charlemagne?’ The article concluded: ‘Though then known as Charles the Great, he was great neither in God’s eyes nor in the eyes of those whose standards are set by God’s Word.’ If it is not an attractive judgment, it is one that needs thinking about, because if anyone is equipped to enter into the mind of 8th- and 9th-century Man it is very possibly the Jehovah’s Witness.

Daisy Dunn

Why artists love Aphrodite

Arts feature

Aphrodite – talk about a difficult birth. Her father the Sky (Ouranos) had come to resent the fertility of his wife/mother the Earth (Gaia). They’d had 18 children already – a gamesome brood that included Titans, Cyclopes, and the 100-handed Hecatoncheires. The last of these were so hateful that Ouranos convinced himself that he would be murdered by one of them and usurped as ruler on high. Ouranos’s way of coping with his complex was to keep on having sex with his wife so as to hole up his offspring in the birth canal. Gaia urged her sons to save her, but only Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was brave enough. While his father was still at it, Kronos went in and lopped off his genitals with a sickle.

23 September 2026

Lloyd Evans

One for hardcore fans: Golden Boy reviewed

Theatre

Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets in 1937, feels like a Norman Wisdom movie. A talented boxer wants to become a great violinist so he refuses to throw heavy punches in case he damages his fingers. The boxer, Joe, comes from a loving family who urge him to pursue a musical career but he meets a greedy, fast-talking agent, Tom, who promises him wealth and fame in the ring. To prise Joe away from his family, Tom encourages his adorable girlfriend, Lorna, to use her influence on him. Lorna promptly falls in love with Joe and the romantic triangle adds heaps of conflict to his career as a boxing champ. Josh O’Connor, looking more like a Hungarian philosopher than a streetfighter, brings an arrogant physicality to the role of Joe.

Graeme Thomson

Farewell to Saint Etienne

Pop

There are many ways for an established act or artist to call it a day. Some implode mid-tour in a fireball of drugs, ego and flying guitars. Others drift quietly out of sight unannounced. Some take their cue from those annoying people at parties who bid everyone a fulsome farewell and then just keep coming back. Most, as we know, don’t manage to say goodbye at all. As ardent scholars of pop history, Sarah Cracknell, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley are more aware than most of all the pitfalls and indignities involved. They have duly planned Saint Etienne’s exit from the scene with obvious care and attention. Like those annoyingly reasonable couples who throw divorce parties, the trio have pitched their retirement as a celebration. This is conscious dethroupling, indie-pop style.

Deborah Ross

The new Sense and Sensibility is not a patch on the old one

Cinema

Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility, which advertises itself as ‘a fresh take for a fresh generation’, has its work cut out. Not only is the Jane Austen novel beloved but there’s also the shadow of Emma Thompson’s sublimely deft 1995 version directed by Ang Lee (with its unforgettably magnificent ugly-cry scene). This one has no such grip on the book, and is considerably drearier and less affecting, but it’s not bad bad. It’s not Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion, after which we decided she should never be allowed near Austen again. On this occasion the ‘old take for the old generation’ cannot be surpassed – although well done, fresh generation, for having a go. Top marks. One doesn’t wish to be discouraging.

Bryan Appleyard

When will the art world acknowledge this master?

Exhibitions

Watercolours can be fatal for your standing in the art world. ‘As soon as you say you paint in watercolour,’ says Gerard Stamp, ‘you can see people popping you into a pigeonhole – ah, you’re a Sunday painter doing vases of flowers.’ There are many flaws in the aesthetics of the ‘art world’, but this one is unusually absurd. Stamp’s paintings are some of the most beautiful of our time. ‘I presented one to Queen Elizabeth II when she opened Norwich Cathedral Hostry on behalf of all who love the Cathedral. I had an exhibition there… and showed her round together with the Duke of Edinburgh, who took me aside, pointed to a large charcoal drawing and said: “How the bloody hell did you do that?” I’m told the painting is still hanging in Sandringham.

Damian Thompson

The genius of Sherlock & Co.

Radio and podcasts

The podcast audio-drama Sherlock & Co. is an updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in which the great detective is neurodivergent and gay, Dr Watson is a millennial who preaches against ethnic stereotyping, Lestrade is a woman who speaks with a Caribbean twang, and the society gossip Langdale Pike has morphed into a drag queen. Throw in the fact that it’s produced by Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger and you might imagine that we’re talking about a woke brew designed to repel conservative Holmesians like me. Actually, Sherlock & Co. is my favourite podcast ever. I love it almost as much as Conan Doyle’s ur-text and infinitely more than the BBC’s Sherlock, which began well but then disappeared up its smug backside.

Richard Bratby

When will I see a Carmen set in 19th-century Seville?

Opera

No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in rejecting novelty on sight; no joy in measuring a living performance against your record collection and coming down, every time, in favour of the dead Nazi. I get that. Still, it’s a plain fact that in three decades of regular opera-going, I have never – not once – seen a live production of Carmen that locates the action in 19th-century Seville. Or one that centres the visual elements – mantillas, sunshine, picture-postcard Spanishness – that directors tell us (and how they tell us!) have become such clichés.

Stuart Jeffries

‘I think the best revenge is indifference’: Salman Rushdie interviewed

Arts feature

‘I probably got a one or two seconds look at him before he delivered the first blow,’ recalls Sir Salman Rushdie. For the next 27 seconds, on 12 August 2022, the man whom Rushdie will refer to only as A. (‘for asinine’, he explains) tried to kill the writer on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. A. slashed through the tendons of Rushdie’s right hand, cut his thigh, stomach and chest, incised a gaping wound in his neck and finally stabbed him in the right eye.

22 September 2026

Olivia Potts

The myth of authentic English food

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There were two butcher’s pork pies in my bag that also contained a copy of Lewis Bassett’s The Full English. As I began reading this investigation into the story of English food, having those pies on my person felt particularly in keeping with the English culinary tradition. By the time I’d finished the book, I was not so sure. Bassett sets out on well-trodden ground to ask: what is English food? He focuses on a clutch of dishes or products which have long been seen as important to, or turning points within, English food culture: bread, haute cuisine, curry, fish and chips, roast beef, sausage rolls, olive oil. So far so conventional – but that’s rather the point. His contention is that much of our received wisdom about English food is reductive or simply wrong.

Genevieve Gaunt

An overpromised land: Farewell to Eden, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed

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Farewell to Eden, Sebastian Faulks’s 18th novel, is a timely masterpiece; a riveting story of war and lost love across two scarred terrains: postwar Britain and Palestine in 1946. It’s a profound meditation on morality, faith and music. And a murder mystery to boot. It’s 1951 and we meet the solitary Philip Deval, an ex-army man with a degree in philosophy. London’s ‘shrapnel scars’ and paucity of work push him to take a job at a school called Witchelm. On his first night, smoking in bed, he murmurs a peculiar thought aloud: ‘Christ, how long can I get away with this?’ Clues snake through the novel to reveal an ingenious denouement. Faulks flashes back to Palestine in 1946.

Robin Evans

The Cavalry in the Clouds: tales of the airborne Great War

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The first aeroplane flight in Britain was made in 1909 by John Moore-Brabazon, holder of the first British pilot’s licence. The same year, he strapped a basket containing a piglet to his craft in order to disprove the old adage. Pigs might now fly, but an industry didn’t – yet. In Flying Pianos, Charles Spicer introduces a three-part cast of mavericks, Great War heroes and predominantly military champions of the earliest aeroplanes between 1906 and 1936. His evocative title is a poetic term for their elementary construction, also reflecting his breezy tone, as, despite the constant risk (plus dark pilot humour), he eschews truthful alternatives such as ‘spinning incinerators’. Colourful flight compendiums are nothing new.

Jim Lawley

Rain never stopped play – cricketing feats of Victorian Britain

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Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, this splendid book recreates cricket’s watershed year, 1864. At the time, Kit Harris explains, football was still in its infancy and ‘there was almost no other sport to occupy a man’s time’. So cricket was played in winter, too. The smooth surfaces of frozen ponds and lakes made for prodigious scoring: ‘The ball, once struck, found no obstruction before reaching the banks.’ Boundaries didn’t exist, so batsmen ran until a fielder returned the ball. Later that year, playing for United England against All England, William Mortlock ‘hit one ball past square leg, through the gateway, out of the ground, across the road and into a garden wall opposite’. The stroke brought seven runs.

Mark Piesing

Madness, mutiny and murder in the Canadian Arctic

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The elegant, charismatic and narcissistic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wasn’t the average adventurer that Alaska attracted in 1912. When he arrived in Seattle from the Gold Rush port of Nome, he told journalists that he had discovered ‘a lost tribe of whites’ in the uncharted High Arctic. He also sold politicians the vision of an undiscovered land rich in gold, raw metals and oil that, only nine years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, would soon be covered with airfields. The Canadian government quickly offered Stefansson unlimited resources to lead an expedition back to the High Arctic. His objective was to claim what may have been the greatest geopolitical prize for Canada and the British Empire: the mysterious continent at the top of the world.

Susie Mesure

A fatal mistake: Time Being, by Jude Cook, reviewed

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Jude Cook’s intriguing third novel, Time Being, opens with a bang. A philosophy lecturer has been shot dead through the door of a toilet stall in the humanities building at the University of London. Laura Cameron was her discipline’s answer to Brian Cox or Mary Beard, a broadcast regular, almost as renowned for her ‘eccentric, bohemian style as for her books on meta ethics and moral responsibility’. The motive is a mystery, stumping everyone from Jack, Laura’s ‘dependable and handsome barrister husband’ to the Met’s senior investigating officer, DCI Wahid Malik. Cue shock from all concerned; all except Esther Luck, a fellow philosophy lecturer who counted Laura as a ‘dear friend’ and was also using the fifth-floor toilets at the time of Laura’s murder.