The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in which sinners guilty of simony, hypocrisy and graft are punished. The last of those spend eternity immersed in a river of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liquid, the poet noted,
A lot of people ask what it takes to be a stand-up comic — I’ll be honest, I have absolutely no idea. What I do know is that whatever it is, a lot of people love to think they’ve either got it or they can get it. I was honoured to be in six Royal
I once went out with a girl who jabbed me in the ribs every time I mouthed the phrase ‘conceptual art’. It hurt, but I got her point. The C-word, you see, is a tricky one. All too often, it conjures up terrifying images of ‘explanatory’ texts that take 5,000 words to communicate precisely zilch.
No one goes slack-jawed in wonder at the movies any more. In our cyber-enabled times, kid designers can mega-pixelate any old apocalypse on to the screen of your local Imax. It puts the new Mad Max in a strange relationship with its hoary forebears. Mel Gibson first fired up his turbo-jalopy back in 1979 (two
Forget the pollsters and political pundits — English National Opera called it first and called it Right when it programmed Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance to open just days after the general election. Who else is the target audience for an operetta that guilelessly proclaims, ‘We love our House of Peers’, and celebrates
If Julian, Dick, George and Anne had become terrorists they’d have called themselves The Angry Brigade. It’s such a Wendy house name. The quartet of violent outcasts met in a Camden squat in the late Sixties and moved to Stoke Newington where they rented a house to deflect unwanted attention. They began planting bombs around
My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons. Really, if the whole
‘I call Zelma Cacik who may be living in London,’ says the announcer, in the clipped RP accent of the BBC in the 1940s. ‘I call her on behalf of her 16-year-old cousin…’ The voice betrays no emotion, no feeling, it’s so matter-of-fact, but the script spares no punches as it tells the cousin’s story
I love Shakespeare. But when he pulls on his wellies and hikes into the forest I yearn for the exit. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a moonlit, sylvan location populated by a syrupy crew of hectic fairies, humourless bumpkins, panting maidens and swooning aristocrats in disguise. Shakespeare wrote it during his apprenticeship and he had
Since you remain reluctant, let us imagine that one’s selfhood is a work of art — a maquette in clay, as may be, and each life event enacted by the sculptor. In he creeps to the damp-room on his crepe-soled shoes again and again. In time the work proceeds via a series of flukes and
that’s what she said. Of course, I begin to find fault: a shrub partly obscures the view, there’s a glint of car windows and, if I listen hard enough, I sense the thrum of traffic. I’ll admit the colours are strong, mid-summer: yellows of wheat-fields, oaky greens, and the hills’ hazed blue. A single cloud
This article was first published on Apollo magazine’s blog Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) was the star lot at Christie’s ‘Looking Forward to the Past’ sale on 11 May, smashing the record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. What else could you have paid for with $179.4 million in the art world? 1) Three
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was
The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of his bed was a web inhabited by an enormous spider. ‘He explained that he could not make the bed as he had grown very attached to the spider and was afraid of disturbing it.’ This
In dance, it’s usually the moment the boys start fighting that challenges your suspension of disbelief. Synchronised fencing (MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet), unison goosestepping (Grigorovich’s Spartacus), even the Sharks and Jets in Robbins’s West Side Story, are formation set-pieces designed to arouse us. Last year there was a bunch of ballets made by British choreographers
David Mamet is Pinter without the Pinteresque indulgences, the absurdities and obscurities, the pauses, the Number 38 bus routes. American Buffalo, from the 1970s, is one of Mamet’s early triumphs. Don is a junkshop owner who believes a customer cheated him over a rare nickel so he gets his young pal Bob to steal it
‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed to a charismatic shepherd, on trial for propagating a lascivious new religion of unbridled sensuality. Roger’s wife, Roxana, has already converted along with many of his subjects, while the city’s conservative and clerical factions clamour
The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made a packet out of saying the unsayable about race. Richard Pryor kicked down the door, but it was Rock who stamped a registered trademark on the N-word. He also had a rapper’s sensibility in the
Where were you when you heard that Zayn Malik had left One Direction? No, me neither, but as my teenage daughter reports, an entire generation of female youth appears to have been traumatised by the event. Not that she gives a monkey’s herself, of course, but she says that everyone she knows knows someone who
With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected TV writers in Britain. Not even his biggest fans, though, could argue that he’s one of the subtlest. On the whole, whatever his characters are thinking, they’ll also be saying — and generally in a
An extraordinary black-and-white photograph of a young black boy taken on the Isle of Wight by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868 shows him in exotic clothes and a heavy silver-bead necklace, like a chain-of-office or a prisoner’s collar. He looks so sad, reminding me of the caged lions in London Zoo, his eyes heavy-laden, his
The blue sky is Sunni. The white clouds are Shia. The sun is happy. The shops are crowded. The planet is healthy. The oceans are healthy. The oceans have recovered. The economy has recovered. Long ago, when I could sleep the night through Without having to get up to pee, I’d wake at a very
Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, has again refused to write a poem to commemorate the birth of the new royal, Charlotte Elizabeth Diane. Rod Liddle has written his own poem about Duffy, asking why she took the job of Poet Laureate if she doesn’t like writing verse about royals. But this still leaves no one
Our wonderful bisexual poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has decided once again not to write any of her doggerel to commemorate the latest royal birth. I suppose this is a mercy, really. However, here is what she might have written, if she could have been arsed to do so. I can’t abide the Royals, They
Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) was in my opinion the greatest pianist in recorded history. If I had to give one reason – and there are many – it would be the spontaneity of his playing. Above all you hear it in Chopin. His twists of rubato and infinitely subtle shading of phrases sound as if they’ve just
Writers and producers have shown little appetite for putting the coalition on stage. Several reasons suggest themselves. In 2010 wise pundits assured us all that the Rose Garden duo would squabble and part long before the five-year term expired, and theatre folk were persuaded not to gamble on a ship that might sail at any
One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk and the tango, ‘his eyes burning — his hair wild’. What was funny about this spectacle, his companion Sophie Brzeska confided to her diary, was not so much the dances as the sight of the
The soot sunk clouds have gone — to blacken someone else’s landscape. The tugging, ripping, girl-fight wind that stole the weekend’s peace has been abracadabra’d away as though life’s difficult days never even happened. Sometimes the stirred world stills. The trees refitted and re-greened appear overslept and drowsy. How long have you been sleeping? How
Enter Rufus Norris. The new National Theatre boss is perfectly on-message with this debut effort by Caryl Churchill. Her 1976 play about inequality screams, ‘Vote Ed’ at triple-klaxon volume. Not that anyone in the audience was won over. They’d made up their minds long ago. Which is just as well because the play is hopelessly
