Culture

Here is a Quentin Tarantino film that, like all Quentin Tarantino films, is a typical Quentin Tarantino film, in the style of Quentin Tarantino, in that he takes a familiar trope, nods at it, toys with it, pokes it about, swills it round his mouth, then blows the whole thing up. I wonder if he was like this as a little boy. I wonder if his mother ever said to him, ‘Quentin. I love you. You’re my son. But if you keep stringing the other kids along so exploitatively and then blowing everything up in their poor faces they aren’t going to want to play with you. I don’t know where you get it from. Now, go tidy your room, dear, before I slice off your ear and shoot out your stomach so blood splatters out the front, out the back and up the wall. Run along.

I'm doing Radio 4's 'Any Questions?' tonight with Harriet Harman and Simon Hughes. It's a strange news week, in which almost anything could come up.  But I wondered if Spectator readers had any ideas, points or questions they think should be put to my fellow guests?

The National Gallery is limiting itself to two major shows a year in the Sainsbury Wing. The spring exhibition is Barocci: Brilliance and Grace (27 February to 19 May), the first major showing of Federico Barocci (1535–1612), who managed to fuse Venetian colour with the sense of drawing and pictorial design favoured in Central Italy. The autumn show is The Portrait in Vienna 1867–1918 (9 October 2013 to 12 January 2014), an examination of the punchy Viennese avant-garde of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka. Both sound very promising, and for lighter entertainment, there are smaller shows of Frederic Church’s oil sketches (6 February to 28 April) and Michael Landy’s kinetic sculptures (23 May to 24 November) in the main building.

A brief flurry of excitement in Guardian-land over the festive period as the news trickles out about who might be cast in Dreamworks' silver-screen adaptation of the paper's turbulent love-in with Julian Assange and subsequent fall out with the Wikileaks chief. Benedict Cumberbatch will play the reclusive protagonist, but enter stage (liberal) left Dan Stevens, who was last seen with blood pouring out of his ear on Christmas Day after being clumsily written out of Downton Abbey. Last week’s Mail on Sunday reports that he is now in talks to play Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz. Being played by such a high profile star would surely do wonders for Katz's on-going quest for the top job at the paper.

‘The street scenes in Newlyn lack nothing of subject for the painter,’ reported the young Frank Richards from the Cornish art colony in 1895; ‘paved with cobblestone, some of the narrow streets are occasionally strewn over with fishheads and entrails, so that one’s progress in going “up” or “down”-along is sometimes considerably facilitated by an alarmingly quick slide to an unexpected destination.’ Thirty-six years earlier, Brunel’s bridge across the Tamar had connected England’s westernmost tip to the railway system, speeding the transport of fish one way and tourists the other. And, as elsewhere in Europe, before the tourists came the plein-air painters.