The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
During lockdown, a friend and I moved into a flat that had a difficult relationship with the TV aerial. Ineptitude and laziness combined to ensure that the only channels we were able to watch were BBC ones via the iPlayer app. So most nights – if there was no live sport – we found that
The Expansion Project, Ben Pester’s debut novel, builds on the satire of corporate culture that he previously explored in his short stories. It centres on Capmeadow, a business park that proliferates with offices, wellness gardens, chalets, convenience stores and even a temple carved with reliefs of ‘collaborative working practices’. Shrouded in creepy mists, it seems
One of the facts that emerges from this detailed study of ‘modern British aristocracy’ is that the divorce rate among peers is roughly twice that of the rest of us, although the old unwritten adage that it didn’t much matter how you behaved provided discretion prevailed has long held good among many. Witness the 10th
It was Sir Hubert Parry who in 1899 complained about ‘an enemy at the doors of [real] music… namely the common popular songs of the day’, ten years before he put a William Blake poem to music and came up with the most famous classical/pop fusion of all time, ‘Jerusalem’, which even featured on a
At the age of 13, when some girls become passionate about ponies, Anjana Khatwa developed an infatuation with rocks. Growing up in a Hindu family in Slough, she had a moment of epiphany on holiday in south-east Kenya when she walked across an ancient lava flow and felt convinced that the rock beneath her feet
One of the most compelling artefacts described in this history of human birth is a stone carving discovered at an ancient temple site in what is now Turkey. The Gobekli Tepe totem pole, 11,500 years old, 6ft 3in tall and weighing 1,100lb, shows successive generations giving birth: a faceless figure at the top delivers a
The railways have survived into the 21st century by constantly reinventing themselves. Written off all too frequently by parsimonious politicians as a 19th-century invention made redundant by the car and the aeroplane, trains have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. Most happily, the sleeper has made a comeback, despite the fact that towards the end of the
Königsberg is no more. Now known as Kaliningrad, it forms part of a small Russian exclave surrounded by Lithuania and Poland. It is probably here that the third world war will start. Before it was bombed flat and ethnically cleansed, the historic Baltic city formed one of the main centres of the German province of
Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of being approached in the 1990s by a screenwriter who wanted to make a Shakespeare -biopic. Greenblatt repeatedly told him to forget Shakespeare and look instead at his predecessor Christopher Marlowe. The screenwriter knew what he was about and ignored Greenblatt’s advice – the result was Shakespeare in Love. The
Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is set in a retirement village and features pensioners solving murders, was a publishing sensation. (There are now four books in the series, with combined sales of more than ten million copies.) I’ve never read it. ‘Cosy crime’, as it’s called, is either your bag or it isn’t.
I do not, if I can help it, catch a train to anywhere on a Sunday. Yet there I was at 9.14 a.m. heading out from Woodbridge in Suffolk towards Cambridge to view a painting by Walter Sickert, a work I had not seen before and whose vital statistics – what even the work was
August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on their heels, and the galleries are filled with makeweight group shows staged to hold the fort until the end of the holidays. This year, however, even events of that kind are thin on the ground:
I once spent a delightful weekend in Madrid with the co-producer of Alien. His name was David Giler (now dead, sadly, I’ve just discovered) and he’d hit upon the bizarre idea of trying to get my anti-eco-lunacy book Watermelons made into a Hollywood movie. The film project never came off but I did learn an
I have nothing but admiration for those men who burn a candle for the music of 1966. Partly because, like them, I believe 1966 to be pop’s greatest year, but mainly because being a psychedelic hipster requires a commitment that invites ridicule. It’s one thing to be an ageing fella who likes rock’n’roll – sharp
Grade: C In the 1990s the young Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci gave us a reading of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata whose thrilling athleticism bore comparison with those of Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen. A few years later Bellucci began a complete cycle of the piano sonatas – but, rather than include his existing Hammerklavier, he produced
Good Night, Oscar is a biographical play about Oscar Levant, a famous pianist who was also a noted wit and raconteur. The script starts as a dead-safe comedy and it develops into a gripping battle between the forces of anarchy, represented by Oscar, and the controllers of NBC who want to censor his crazy humour.
At some point during the past decade and a half, it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age. While Britpop, New Labour and acid house do not immediately evoke the same spirit as, say, Versailles under Louis XIV or Augustan Rome, compared with what followed they were certainly characteristic of something. Appetites for
Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing. But its lustre and mission have now been largely eclipsed by the viral spread of its anarchic bastard offspring, the Fringe. In competition with the latter’s potty-mouthed stand-ups and numberless student hopefuls, the dignified old
The village of Brigadoon rises from the Scotch mists once every 100 years, and revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical are only slightly more frequent. The last major London production closed in 1989; and if you know Brigadoon at all it’s probably through the lush 1954 movie. The new staging at Regent’s Park takes a
‘Is it any good?’ a friend asked when he saw I was reading this book. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s full of wankers.’ By that stage I was only up to page 24, but the remaining 184 pages did nothing to fundamentally alter my view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The works of,
C.P. Cavafy, who had a very high opinion of his own work, would no doubt be gratified to learn that he is now one of the most admired poets of the 20th century. This is all the more remarkable because during his lifetime (1863-1933) he did not allow a single volume of his poetry to
To read something by the Cumbria-born Sarah Hall is to enter a dizzying, earthy and often dystopian world where the elements rule and nature is blood red. Her nine previous short story collections and novels straddle life’s peripheries, often scratching at the limits of what it means to be human. ‘Mrs Fox’, one of her
Against Morality is not against morality. But it is against moralising. Which is a start. Anti-cancel culture, anti-identity politics, Rosanna McLaughlin’s small book of essays is the first insider-artworld publication to condemn the Savonarolan turn within culture. A cause for celebration, you might think. Her argument is perfectly sound. ‘Morality has become the central pillar,
I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow. In 1914, a decade after the signing of the Entente Cordiale, the War Office fell hook, line and sinker for the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre’s doctrine of Attaque
‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more
After Jane Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra destroyed the majority of her letters. This act, often interpreted as an attempt to preserve Jane’s reputation, has had the opposite effect of fuelling fervent – at times prurient – speculation about what the letters contained. While Cassandra may simply have wished to shield her relatives from the
Food memoirs, as distinct from cookery books, and from the relatively new genre of ‘biographies’ of ingredients, used to fall into three rough groups: foraging, hunting or gathering food; producing or cooking food; and eating. Like the restaurateur Keith McNally’s recent I Regret Almost Everything, Michael Finnerty’s The Cheese Cure adds a fourth category, memoirs
‘I can’t write books drinking all day and going to every soiree in Manhattan,’ Truman Capote complained. In order to write In Cold Blood, his ‘non-fiction novel’ about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, Capote and his partner Jack Dunphy therefore went to Palamos, a fishing town on the Costa Brava. Leaving
Few among Muriel Spark’s circle of friends would have disputed the judgment of Storm Jameson when recommending Spark to the publisher Blanche Knopf in 1963: ‘I warn you, or remind you, that you are taking on a tartar. She has worn out two Macmillan directors already.’ Even tartars are forgiven, however, when they exhibit a