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Who is there left that you can talk to? Days go by. ‘Friendless, deserted’ (The Beggar’s Opera?) — left in the lurch (what lurch?) — you languish. Time to make plans to die? You box up some age-stained letters, set aside more stuff, but your heart’s not in it. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Another of your thoughtless friends falls off the perch. Those language-teachers, those sergeant-majors, those not-quite-wives — how old they must all be now! And those types at school: grumbling, frowning, living their boxed-up lives — Mr Cartwright-Brown would be a hundred and thirty-nine. All gone... Time to wait out our world’s decline? (Wait even longer and watch the planet cool...?) Be serious. It’s not a dress rehearsal, OK...

Peter Scupham

Out of Reach

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Think of a hand-slip, a spun summit bothered by mist, the whirr and thrum of dark metals, a stranded face minding a gap which widens, widens, leaves one candle to burn in silence, late summer wings to char on glass, unspoken words to spell their spells forwards, backwards — fine fruit to hang in armouries of thorn for the devil to spit on.

8 September 2014

Anna Baddeley

Strictly Come Dancing review: seriously, who are the 11 million people who enjoy this stuff?

There's a Radio 4 programme, presented by the smug moraliser Marcus Brigstocke, called I've Never Seen Star Wars, which gets famous people to do things they've never done before, like watch Star Wars. I'm not famous, but before last night I'd never seen Strictly. The very idea of it bored me. I don't like ballroom dancing, I don't like sequins or kitsch or seventies nostalgia, I don't like programmes starring celebrities I've never heard of doing silly things because they desperately need the money. I don't get the semi-ironic personality cult around 'Brucie', a man without any obvious charm or talent, apart from being the only 20th-century light entertainer who's not dead or behind bars. I do however quite like his replacement Claudia Winklemann.

4 September 2014

Laura Gascoigne

Pizza, choc-ice and Leonardos – the treasures of Turin

Arts feature

To most non-Italians Turin spells Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Fiat). But this subalpine city has a longer history than the internal combustion engine. It may be twinned with Detroit, but its cavalcade of equestrian monuments testifies to an older sort of horsepower — the sort harnessed by the condottieri of the House of Savoy to turn their little Duchy into a major player on the European stage and, for four brief years from 1861 to 1865, into the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. So while Detroit has the Detroit Institute of Arts, Turin has 55,000 sqm of royal museums, currently undergoing unification into a single complex called the ‘Polo Reale’.

Andrew Lambirth

The Bloomsbury painters bore me

Exhibitions

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) claimed that nothing has really happened until it has been recorded, so this new exhibition at the NPG devoted to her life can only now be said to have happened — for here I am recording it. Of course it is a truism that an exhibition only exists while it is on. Afterwards it remains in (some of) the memories of those people who visited it, and in photographic records or a catalogue of the exhibits.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Joan Rivers (1933 – 2014) was the best

Joan Rivers has died from complications resulting from throat surgery. She was 81. For many, she was the best. The funniest, sharpest, most mischievous comic we will ever know. And though she'd hate us for saying it, she was also a true feminist pioneer. Well before it had been settled whether women should be doing stand-up at all, she was not only doing it but shaping it - and subtly shaping society too. Her early routines, like the following 1967 set from the Ed Sullivan show about how crappy the female experience could be, were laying the ground for political feminism: But her radicalism was restless. And when the political tides turned, so did she.

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4 deserts the British bird. Shame on them!

Radio and podcasts

A strange coincidence on Saturday night to come back from the cinema, having seen a film about a woman fighting to save her job while suffering from depression and thoughts of putting an end to it all, only to switch on the radio and hear from people who have had suicidal thoughts themselves or who have suffered the peculiar, awful grief of losing someone to suicide. The film was affecting and sensitively done, but after listening to In Memoriam: Conversations on a Bench (Radio 4) I realised how different the impact of radio can be. It was not that the film had in any way glamorised depression, or turned us as viewers into voyeurs revelling in someone else’s misfortune.

Lloyd Evans

Bent bureaucrats, ‘fake dykes’ and bad bakers — this week’s theatre

Theatre

Eye of a Needle, by newcomer Chris MacDonald, looks at homosexuality and asylum. Gays from the Third World, who’ve suppressed all evidence of their orientation at home, find they have to leap out of the closet once they reach the UK, and provide documentary proof of their hot-tub marathons and nitrate-fuelled rubdowns. Lots of comic potential there. We open with a boastful Ugandan describing his ten-in-a-bed shenanigans to a shy English civil servant, who transcribes his X-rated testimony with silent professionalism. The message is upbeat: good old Britain helps grateful refugees escape from tyranny and prejudice. Then everything curdles. We meet Natale, a Ugandan lesbian, who treats the application process as an affront to her dignity.

Deborah Ross

Before I Go to Sleep prefers creepy car parks to feelings

Cinema

Before I Go To Sleep is Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestselling thriller of 2011, but whereas the book was smart, gripping, ingeniously plotted and had psychological depth — who are we, when we can’t remember who we are? — this is a disappointment on so many levels. It’s not as if it’s even set in Crouch End, north London, any more. According to my press notes, Crouch End was not deemed sufficiently ‘cinematic’, which has to be upsetting, if you live in Crouch End, as I do, and have always said to people, ‘Come on over. You’ll love it. It’s just so very cinematic round here’, but there you are. I suppose I’ll learn to live with it, as uncinematically as I can.

Hugo Shirley

Mariinsky’s Les Troyens — a bad night for Berlioz and Edinburgh

Opera

I wonder whether grand opéra really takes war as seriously as this year’s Edinburgh Festival wanted it to. These vast works, written to exploit and reflect the power, resources and tastes of mid-19th-century Paris, tended to favour history and its battles for the scenic opportunities they afforded rather than for the lessons they taught. It was the cross-cultural love stories in the foreground that were the dramatic focus; whatever the context, the obligatory ballet always had to be shoehorned in. Berlioz provided a work that ostensibly fitted the formula with his Troyens, fashioned from Virgil’s Aeneid during the 1850s, painstakingly, obsessively and with minimal reward. It was rejected by the Paris Opera and for many decades performed only in truncated, bisected versions.

Peter Phillips

Enough ‘themes’ at festivals

Music

One might have expected the streets of Edinburgh, especially at festival time, to bear some evidence of the political struggle currently engulfing our nation, but in fact there was none at all. Apparently, the arguments for and against independence have to be traded on the doorstep and not in the street, which, to those visitors who anticipated fireworks, almost amounted to a vacuum. However, it meant that the streets could be made over to the customary bewildering number of stand-ups, advertisements, students handing out leaflets (they come at you these days on roller-skates, pirouetting as they approach), and thespians of every type.

Kate Chisholm

Even near the front line, there were flowers on the ward

The Indian lady at the chemist

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I trust her look the shadow round her eyes her level stare explaining paracetamol these ones are strong take them at night she looks straight at me she is not very tall either inside deeper than skin confidence blooms more fragile and more certain than the hug of a friend.

3 September 2014

Tristram Hunt

Here’s why we should save the Wedgwood Museum

A public appeal has been launched to save the Wedgwood Museum pottery collection, which is being sold to pay off the ceramics firm's pension bill. The museum entered administration in 2010 after the firm collapsed and its £134m pension debts were transferred to the museum trust. The Art Fund said it had raised about £13m to buy it, but that a further £2.7m was needed by 30 November in order to save the collection. Here's why we need to save this museum: We are fairly certain that the late Robert Maxwell never met the even later Josiah Wedgwood, but Cap’n Bob’s nefarious legacy is now being keenly felt by Wedgwood’s descendants.

29 August 2014

William Cook

The false paradise of Metroland | 29 August 2014

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train… Near the end of the Metropolitan Line, where London dwindles into woods and meadows, stands a Tudor manor house, built within the moat of a motte-and-bailey castle. Now a quaint museum, charting the history of the farms that once surrounded it, this modest landmark shares its name with the local Tube station, Ruislip Manor. A century after they built it, the railway that runs through here still feels out of place. There are fields on one side, suburban semis on the other. Welcome to Metroland, the bizarre no-man’s-land between town and country, created by the Metropolitan Railway, which celebrates its 150th birthday this year.

Nicholas Mayes

Will we learn to love our ugly houses?

What are the root causes of Britain’s housing crisis? The Philosophers’ Mail – which has copied the format of MailOnline but I suspect is not aiming at quite the same demographic – recently offered an alternative to the usual explanations. That most people are opposed not to building more houses, but to building ugly houses, and that this accounts for most of what we dismiss as a nimbyism that prevents much-needed development. As they put it: 'Most of the large housing developments built in the South East of England in the last 25 years share one common and (in this context) generally undiscussed feature: they are very ugly. Or, to be more precise, they are far uglier than the countryside they have replaced.

28 August 2014

William Cook

The enigma of Werner Herzog

Arts feature

Strange things happen to Werner Herzog — almost as strange as the things that happen in his haunting, hypnotic films. In 1971, while making a movie in Peru, he was bumped off a flight that subsequently crashed into the jungle. Years later, he made a moving film about that disaster’s sole survivor. In 2006, while filming an interview with the BBC in Los Angeles, he was shot in the belly by some nutter with a small calibre rifle. Most film-makers would have been turned to jelly by this terrifying interruption; Herzog simply laughed it off, cheerfully dropping his trousers to reveal a bleeding bullet wound, and a natty pair of Paisley boxer shorts. ‘He has become a catalyst for extraordinary events,’ says his British producer Andre Singer.

Andrew Lambirth

Agitprop, love trucks and leaflet bombs: the art of protest

Exhibitions

Titles can be misleading, and in case you have visions of microwave ovens running amok or washing machines crunching up the parquet, be reassured — or disappointed. Disobedient Objects, the new free display in the V&A’s Porter Gallery, is about objects as tools of social change. It’s a highly politicised exhibition and contains a great deal of fascinating material, from films to how-to guides (not quite ‘how to make a bomb’, but nearly). The gallery was packed when I went along. An admission charge might have made a difference. However, this is the kind of exhibition that should be free in a democratic country — if only to remind as many of us as possible what repressive regimes elsewhere impose on their luckless populations.

Diana Hendry

My First Love

Poems

I made the mistake of getting in touch with him twenty years after – invited him to stay. He was almost alcoholic, had lost his front teeth, told endless anecdotes and, worst of all, was allergic to my dog. You’d think that’d be a cure or antidote to all those years of unrequited love spent yearning and longing, that I could forget that time — was I seventeen? — when he asked me to go with him to the States, could forget that moment years later when, at long long last he proposed, could forget that because I was young and fearful and he was wild, arty and penniless, I kept saying no. Less easy to forget how, ever since, I’ve wondered...

Roderick Conway-Morris

A wooden UFO lands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Who needs drugs when you have Radio 3?

Radio and podcasts

I’m willing to bet it’s only on the BBC’s Radio 3 that you’ll find yourself listening to a programme quite like Words and Music (Sunday evenings). You might want to disagree. Surely, it’s just a few bits of music stuck together with some poems and other readings on a random theme dreamt up by the production team? How easy must that be to pull off? Seventy-five minutes (or sometimes even longer) of dirt-cheap radio, quick to make, very few overheads, involving just a few hours per programme of research (nowadays so easy on Google) and a dead-simple edit job splicing everything together. But name another station anywhere that could make it work week-by-week with quite the same style, panache and sheer brio of the team at Radio 3.

James Walton

BBC2’s Hotel India: slums? What slums?

Television

Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The tone of Wednesday’s episode was set immediately when the narrator introduced us to ‘one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the world’, where ‘no detail is too small or demand too great’, and there’s ‘an army of staff dedicated to flawless service’. To prove it, head of housekeeping Indrani then strode fearsomely down a corridor like a more elegant version of Hattie Jacques’s matron in the Carry On films.

Lloyd Evans

Dolts, Doormats and FGM: theatre to make you physically sick

Theatre

Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963. Eddie is a swaggering, shaven-headed Marine and Rose is a shy, awkward waitress. Come to a party, he says. She refuses, prevaricates, reconsiders, accepts. They reach the venue; he ignores her. Furtive conversations in corners and a pervasive air of mystery suggest that something is up. The party, or ‘Dogfight’, turns out to be a secret Miss Piggy contest in which a bunch of insecure soldiers award a cash prize to the creep who invites the ugliest escort. When Rose learns she’s been tricked, she asks for an explanation. ‘You were disqualified,’ shrugs Eddie. This grisly set-up occupies the first act.

Deborah Ross

Night Moves – the opposite of a Dan Brown film

Cinema

Night Moves is a film by Kelly Reichardt, who also made the heart-wrenching Wendy and Lucy (2008), which may be one of my favourite films of all time. (If you don’t know it, go look it up; I’m old now, so no longer have the energy to educate you in these matters.) Her films, she has said, are ‘just glimpses of people passing through’ but whereas you or I would make a film about people just passing through which would be just that — everyday people would pass through, uninterestingly — her understanding of character and narrative and character as narrative is so profound, these ordinary people become wholly absorbing. She also, I should mention, made the wonderful Meek’s Cutoff, but you’re going to have to look that up too.

James Walton

Kate Bush Hammersmith Apollo review: Still crazy after all these years

Music

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI by insisting that her first single should be the abidingly peculiar ‘Wuthering Heights’. So, a famous 35 years after her last stage appearance, how on earth could she live up to such a fiercely idiosyncratic career, now regarded with almost universal awe? Well, at first the answer seemed to be by doing the most unexpected thing of all: serving up a bog-standard rock concert.

Hugo Shirley

The small rewards of small-scale opera

Opera

Perhaps I should come clean straightaway and admit that, despite the fact that OperaUpClose is about to celebrate its fifth birthday, I’d never been to see one of its shows before last week. This has not been a conscious decision; maybe, though, I’d been unconsciously put off by the company’s early braggadocio — by the manner in which it gleefully trumpeted the Violetta-like decline of ‘traditional’ opera so that it could offer itself up as a timely cure.

Fred Johnstone

Like a Prayer

More from Books

The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like a prayer he keeps his coat on, but he’s going nowhere the place is a circus of contradictions nurses anonymous as nuns push trays of benedictions in all colours and shapes; on the tongue they taste vaguely of a memory of Christ hung for our sins on a mates rates tree you count the minutes until the redemptive delivery kicks in; the bed’s unmade, it reeks of you the unrisen penis and the unrepentant view of a wall dulled in industrial blue paint you’d want the submissiveness of a consumptive saint to take it in your stride, not to feel the nails go in, the flogged skin crack and peel washing your face in vinegar from the tap, scrying unholy metaphor in the mirror, s.

27 August 2014

Steerpike

Citizen Brand

So it turns out the revolution will be televised after all. ‘Brand’, a full length documentary about the comedian turned political activist Russell Brand, is heading our way next year. The multi-millionaire comedian—who is dating a scion of the Goldsmith family—used a recent appearance on Newsnight to call for the overthrow of the state, claiming ‘profit is a filthy word'. It sounds like we are in for a treat: ‘This feature documentary film promises to follow his spiritual and biographical journey from comedian turned film star, and husband of pop star, to his present incarnation, following his realisation that he had, in Russell's own words, "embraced the superficial and doped up times in which we live, only to find it was an empty proposition".

James Walton

Kate Bush Hammersmith Apollo review: still crazy after all these years

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI by insisting that her first single should be the abidingly peculiar ‘Wuthering Heights’. So, a famous 35 years after her last stage appearance, how on earth could she live up to such a fiercely idiosyncratic career, now regarded with almost universal awe?