Culture

Culture

Friday

Michael Moorcock

J.G. Ballard’s surreal fiction continues to resonate through the century

In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM color. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of de Chirico. Set in an Anglo-Spanish colony, it featured a surrealist painter. a racing car driver and a toreador. All love the mysterious Pandora, who is unable to love anyone until the Dutchman drops anchor. To prove his passion for Pandora one suitor takes poison while another pushes his beloved car over a cliff.

j.g. ballard
Melissa Kite

Americans think they want the ‘real Ireland.’ They don’t

As the first Americans of the season got out of their car I scrunched up my face and groaned. “They’re all like that, remember?” said the builder boyfriend. “What if the bed gives way?” I demanded. “How will they even fit in the bed?” The BB shrugged. “Who cares?” he said, with his usual sunny attitude. I don’t mean to suggest these people were overweight. I mean they were giants. I’m sure their depth was right for their height. There was just an awful lot of them, and we are not the Premier Inn, with super-king beds that sleep two medium-sized horses. She was in sportif wear. He was tousle-haired and bearded, dressed in a flowing shirt and baggy trousers.

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Toby Young

The American dream is dying. Good

The American dream is dying, according to the Times of London. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you “work hard and play by the rules” you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 percent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 percent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 percent rated today’s quality of life as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 60 percent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.

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Peter Bear

The joy of licorice

“I’ll swap you two of my rolls for three of your spogs.” That was the sort of thing you’d hear round the tuckshop in morning break when we schoolboys swapped and bartered our Liquorice Allsorts. We all had our favorites, spogs being the round pink or blue jelly buttons that had a coating of tiny sugar grains, while the pink or yellow coconut rolls featured a plug of licorice surrounded by coconut ice. Pontefract Cakes were another schoolboy favorite: small round discs of licorice that were allegedly one of, if not the oldest commercial sweets in the world. In the 11th century, Benedictine monks introduced licorice to Pontefract, Yorkshire. At that time, the plant’s roots were commonly chewed to soothe sore throats, ease coughs and help digestion.

Nicholas Farrell

My heated argument about Italy’s birthrate

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were having dinner in the Osteria del Tempo Perso (the Hostelry of Lost Time). It is in the old city which in the 5th century was the last capital of the western Roman empire as, besieged by various types of barbarian, the final fall drew ever nearer. I was drinking again. The rules are simple: I can drink when abroad, defined as anywhere outside the province of Ravenna, which I rarely leave; or else when anyone foreign – i.e. non-Italian – comes to visit, which is even rarer. My younger brother Simon, the KC, had come for a long weekend with his second wife Cyrena, two of his four children from his first marriage, Sam (33) and Rufus (28), and his stepdaughter, Jemima (22).

Graeme Thomson

How good are the Rolling Stones’ alter egos, the Cockroaches?

Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising lineup becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years. Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.

James Delingpole

AI could never replace me

There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate youth, thinks I’m an idiot, that AI is the future and quite mind blowing in its potential to change everything. Probably we’re both right. Personally, I don’t feel quite as threatened by AI as perhaps I should. More by accident than design, I seem to have ended up in one of the very few jobs that AI isn’t going to steal.

zurbaran
Jaspreet Singh Boparai and Jonathan Ruffer

The genius of Zurbarán – and why he vanished

A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbarán was 11 years old. Since Zurbarán never left Spain, he could not have seen any of Caravaggio’s paintings with his own eyes. Indeed, he might never even have heard the artist’s name. Still, there are unavoidable similarities between the two men’s work. Zurbarán shared Caravaggio’s sense of drama and his love of shadows broken up by patches of strong light.

Helen Barrett

The nightmare of filming A Hard Day’s Night

It would be easy to dismiss A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles film made in 1964, as a throwaway period piece. The plot hurls the Fab Four into a meta narrative: they’re playing themselves while a director – a seething Victor Spinetti – panics as the boys are delayed on their way to a televised variety performance by mishaps, distractions and stampeding fans. The film was thrown together to fit the group’s breakneck schedule – scripted over a few weeks in January by Alun Owen, shot by Richard Lester by May and out in cinemas in July. In her absorbing, concise book, Samira Ahmed sees the film not as a cursory promo but as a watershed moment in British culture – “a kind of cinematic big bang.

Stephen Smith

Antony Gormley’s lonely figures transfer to paper

If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI bots filling the world with humanoids, it’s the look on their glassy faces when they realize that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby Beach in Liverpool to Gateshead, from Texas to the Netherlands and western Australia. He and his simulacra might not detain our new overlords for very long, of course (but in the meantime “The Gormleys versus the Bots” is the Doctor Who series I’m here for).

Wednesday

Patrick West

Finland’s sad secret to happiness

In recent years it’s become a hackneyed truism that Nordic nations have found the key to happiness. The Danes, who often take first place in global rankings for mental wellbeing, pride themselves on hygge, that feeling of coziness evoked by wrapping oneself in blankets and being surrounded by candles. The Swedes promote lagom, the concept of the optimal medium. And while the Finns also appear to be satisfied with their lot – Finland came first in this year’s World Happiness Report for the ninth time in a row – they have no well-known term that encapsulates their attitude to life. In the spirit of Nordic one-upmanship, however, that could be about to change.

finland

Monday

Rob Crossan

My Chernobyl holiday

There are few things that look sadder than an abandoned sports field. I spent longer than I meant to sitting on a decaying bench looking out over the forest that was once the intended playing surface for the Stroitel Pripyat soccer club. The sky above was cerulean, cloudless and entirely still. The only life came from my hand-held Geiger counter which spluttered and crackled, telling me that I was in a territory that wasn’t fit for a stroll, let alone 90 minutes of lung-bursting athleticism.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The Michael Jackson biopic ignores half his life

If you’re planning on making a biopic of a major musical figure, you would be advised not to miss out various rather vital aspects of their life. For instance, Bohemian Rhapsody dealt – if at times obliquely – with Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality and AIDS. The recent Bruce Springsteen film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempted to tackle his mental health difficulties and near-breakdown. Neither film was perfect, but they were at least made with reasonably good intentions. That is rather more than can be said for Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, which opens in US cinemas this week and has been greeted with disbelief.

Michael Jackson

Tuesday

Catriona Olding

Why gingers have more fun (genetically at least)

Contrary to what we redheads have been led to believe, we are not disappearing. Our numbers have increased in the past 10,000 years, according to a recent Harvard study. What’s more, researchers found, being ginger may actually be desirable as far as natural selection is concerned because "having red hair was beneficial 4,000 years ago." The reason why has yet to be discovered. But it’s good news for the class bully, producers of sunscreen and those – like me – who’ve had a love-hate relationship with the variants in their MC1R gene which leads to red hair and pale skin. I was an extreme redhead as a child growing up in Scotland; not one of the beautiful ones with long, auburn curls and green eyes.

William Atkinson

Britain should take Prince Harry back

"It won’t last," my schoolfriend Albert told me, as we staggered down London's Embankment one summer evening in 2018, a few pints into his birthday pub crawl. I wasn’t sure as to what he was referring. The evening twilight? His youthful good looks? Our ability to walk in a straight line? He expanded: "Harry and Meghan. She’s not right for him. They’ll be divorced within five years. Just you wait." Then he burped. I was surprised by Albert’s comments. I, like tens of millions of other viewers, had been taken in by the royal wedding weeks before. Yes, the presence of Oprah Winfrey and an over-enthusiastic American preacher had been a little gauche.

bob dylan
Anne Margaret Daniel

The photographer who connects Bob Dylan and the Beatles

MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two. All loved the music of Little Richard and Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran; all were blues fans swept off their feet by rock and roll. Dylan was a Minnesota boy who early in his life became the avatar of the American folk scene, and then a protean man containing multitudes, both musically and otherwise.

Monday

Matthew Fraser

What happened to Provence?

The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and summer crowds. I have been spending time in the south of France since the early 1990s. Provence was fashionable in those days. Peter Mayle’s massively successful book, A Year in Provence, inspired thousands to pull up stakes and move to southern France to emulate his idyllic life in the Luberon hills. Some settled farther west in the Dordogne, famously called "Dordogneshire" for its concentration of British expats. Mayle became a one-man publishing industry, following up with sequels including Toujours Provence and Encore Provence. Thirty years ago, I stayed with friends who owned a renovated farmhouse with a spectacular view of the Dentelles de Montmirail.

Sunday

Olivia Potts

Gentleman’s Relish is no more

It is the early hours of the morning and an email drops into my inbox. Lacking any kind of willpower, I open it. Now I’m wide awake. Because this isn’t the usual PR slop that starts my days. It’s a tip-off. A big one. A reader has discovered something about a company and they are urging me – me! – to investigate. Adrenaline surges. This must be what it felt like to be Woodward. Or Bernstein. Only my informant is pointing me in a slightly different direction. Their intel is on Gentleman’s Relish: the incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves. It has been available in the House of Lords dining rooms – but for how much longer? Online supermarkets and delis are showing it as out of stock. What is going on?

gentleman's relish
kanye west
Rod Liddle

Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as “Heil Hitler” and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

Friday

James Delingpole

The Pitt doesn’t make HBO Max worth a subscription

HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called “the best medical drama on television in years.” This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as “most amusing form of cancer” or “most ineradicable variety of testicular lice.” But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.

the pitt
schiaparelli
Margaret Mitchell

The art of Schiaparelli

It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it “shap,” “skap” or “skyap”? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: “No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.” The V&A’s new exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the web of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate to compare them), Elsa Schiaparelli created clothes for the modern, independent woman – it is now conventional to say so, but they “pushed boundaries.

Alexander Larman

The decline of the royal biography

About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.” I listened to his advice and wrote a trilogy of books about the Windsors: The Crown in Crisis, The Windsors at War and Power and Glory. The first two sold very well, and the third was barely noticed, but I was glad that I took my agent’s counsel, even if we had to part ways because he had practiced what he preached, and diversified from historical biography into his own career writing about the royals.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

A Tate show with dreamy, elusive power

One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born in 1965 – has been emerging for a long time now. But, with the opening of a big retrospective at Tate Britain, his status as a major figure in modern British art is clear. Anderson is completely individual yet visibly connected to the tradition – indeed, to several traditions – and capable of creating huge, wall-filling canvases into which you can sink and float away, but which also make you think and feel.

Graeme Thomson

Unrelentingly entertaining: Basement Jaxx reviewed

How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually “sir”): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Earlier this month, I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits. And yet one felt like the future, and the other like the past. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, aka turn-of-the-millennium electronic duo Basement Jaxx, should be credited for having great sport with that in-built characteristic of almost all electronic outfits. Namely, that two or three blokes pushing a bunch of keys and buttons cannot ever hope to forge the kind of compelling visual identity so crucial to rock groups.

basement jaxx
private equity
Richard Walker

Is private equity secretly running your life?

Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 percent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you out on all that. Private equity is one of those things that you either know about or don’t. If you are in the finance business you know, because it is the story of the past quarter century. If you are not in that world, if leveraged buyouts and limited partners and debt pushdowns are all just business-page noise, then you are in the majority. And it turns out that means you may not know who is really running your life.

etna
Caroline Moorehead

Living in the shadow of Etna

The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its “impenetrable darkness” reminded Samuel Taylor Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land Where Lemons Grow (2014)won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring – yet respectful – eye. Unpicking its geological and human history and a landscape “cobbled together from the expressions of the Earth’s unrest” became for her a way of returning to the very beginnings of life. Mount Etna, at 11,200 feet in height, is Europe’s biggest volcano and one of the most active in the world, grumbling and spewing for many months at a time.

zac brettler russian london
Philip Hensher

The fate of the British teenager who posed as a Russian oligarch’s son

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (“Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.”) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Charles Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

Gavin Mortimer

The populist, the princess and a very French love story

Princess Maria Carolina de Bourbon des Deux-Siciles isn’t a name that rolls off the tongue – but it’s now on the lips of every socialite and political pundit in France. The 22-year-old Italian aristocrat, who is the elder daughter of the Duke of Castro, was splashed across the cover of gossip magazine Paris Match last week, gazing into the eyes of her new beau. Was he notable for being a duke, a prince or another such member of the hereditary elite? Not at all. The suitor in question was Jordan Bardella: the right-wing powerhouse whom polls suggest will succeed Emmanuel Macron as French president next year.  In an interview with Hello! in 2024, Maria Carolina declared she was "still waiting for Prince Charming to come and serenade me with a guitar and a red rose.

Wednesday

Gary Dexter

Meet the humans training robots at the ‘arm farm’

AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as a paralegal, data analyst, radiologist, coder or novelist is about to be hacked out from under you. So far, so apocalyptic. But what about the jobs that are primarily embodied? Sous-chef, rehabilitation nurse, plumber, dog-trainer? These are expected to lag behind, awaiting the next generation of robots. But there is an important further question. Who will train these robots? Answer: you will.  This is the concept of the arm farm. On an arm farm, practitioners of the aforementioned jobs – chefs, nurses, plumbers etc. – wear Go-pro helmets, pressure-sensitive gloves, even full motion-capture rigs, and do the jobs that the robots will ultimately usurp.