Culture

The Winter’s Tale Old Vic Phèdre Lyttelton I seem to be alone in feeling great waves of pity for anyone involved in an assault on The Winter’s Tale. This strange dud of a text remains mystifyingly popular with theatre folk. It’s two plays shunted together. Act one is a mawkish palace tragedy, act two is a pastoral operetta with lots of songs and larky rhetoric and a silly happy ending. The play’s central character, Leontes, is a sexual paranoid who accuses his best friend of adultery, slings his pregnant wife in jail and sends their newborn baby into exile. Later he finds out he was mistaken. They’re all innocent. Contrition breaks over him. But just as his jealousy was unconvincing so his remorse is unaffecting.

A tip of the stetson to Radley Balko for reminding (that is, telling) me that today is the thirtieth anniversary of John Wayne's death. It's tough to pick one's favourites from a great career that spanned 171 movies but, though I know that in many ways The Searchers and Stagecoach are the greatest of the Duke's movies, my five favourites are: Red River She Wore a Yellow Ribbon The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence Rio Bravo The Horse Soldiers What are yours? Below the jump, some clips! UPDATE: James Joyner joins the party. I second his endorsement of Rooster Cogburn.

Summer Exhibition Royal Academy, until 16 August Every year the Summer Exhibition arrives with promises of innovation and difference, every year it’s much the same. People gamely ask ‘what’s it like this year?’, and the imaginative struggle for a novel way to describe it. Yet its great strength is its unchangeability — the extraordinary (occasionally preposterous) juxtaposition of the international avant-garde, establishment figures and amateurs from the Home Counties and beyond. Nowhere else can such diversity and potential richness be found. The Academy continues to try to tame this leviathan, to modify its rules, or to dedicate a whole gallery to some lately trendy off-shoot of art such as film and video.

Angelina Jolie attends Belstaff's 'The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button' Premiere & After Party on December 8, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Alexandra Wyman/Getty Images for Belstaff. Some of you will doubtless have your own sordid little reasons for thinking, yes she is. Here's the good news: Naomi Wolf agrees with you! Ms Wolf has written what may be the most amusing piece I've read all year. The Lovely Angelina, you see, "has it all". The whole thing is priceless but, as Double X's Willa Paskin explains, this may be the most deliciously off-the-wall part of the whole extravagant mess: Then there is the plane. Women are so used to being dependent on others (certainly on men) for where they go, metaphorically, and how they get there.

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur British Museum, until 23 August Part of the Indian Summer season of events sponsored by HSBC I don’t know when I last enjoyed an exhibition more. I had an idea from the publicity material what I might be seeing, but the reality of it is a thousand times lovelier. Many of us are familiar with Indian miniatures, but this exhibition consists mostly of large paintings done between the 17th and 19th centuries. Made for the northern Indian court of Jodhpur (the royal capital of Marwar), none of the 54 paintings on show has ever been seen before in Europe.

Ricky Jay has an op-ed in today's NYT on the Susan Boyle phenomenon. It's interesting - there may not be many people alive who know more about the history of freak shows and public oddities than Jay - but it's really just an excuse to point you towards Mark Singer's terrific New Yorker profile of Jay. It begins: The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher Taffirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar ofthe Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened: Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was per- forming magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel.

Michael Kinsley has a very entertaining take-down of the "new" Newsweek in this week's edition of the New Republic*. However, I doubt the "old" Newsweek would have dared publish this very entertaining, even brutal, demolition of Oprah Winfrey. In fact, it's the sort of piece one might imagine appearing in TNR. So, whatever the merits of Kinsley's piece and whatever the future may - or more probably does not - hold for Newsweek, anything that exposes Oprah's weird combination of sappy new age snake-oil and shameless hucksterism is no bad thing.

Andrew Lambirth talks to Douglas Dunn and Norman Ackroyd about their latest collaboration Illustrated books are one of the glories of a library. Looking over my own shelves I find assorted delights ranging from The Story of My Heart, the unorthodox vision of the naturalist Richard Jefferies fittingly partnered with woodcuts by Ethelbert White, to David Gascoyne’s poems decorated rather sombrely by Graham Sutherland, and ‘The Traveller’ by Walter de la Mare, accompanied by colourful landscapes by John Piper. The pairings of writer and artist are often intriguing: Wyndham Lewis and Naomi Mitchison, William Beckford and Marion Dorn, Samuel Johnson and Edward Bawden.