Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?
The former British Shadow Chancellor’s new documentary is more favourable of Trumpsters than anyone at the BBC could have ever imagined.
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The artist who breathes Technicolor life into historic photographs
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering Technicolor Oz. When Howard Carter leans over Tutankhamun’s open sarcophagus (1922), he does so in the glare of pharaonic gold. A photograph of fallen American soldiers on the Gettysburg battlefield (1863) shocks the more when
Shades of Rear Window: People in the Room, by Norah Lange, reviewed
A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession:
The magnificent Atkinsons: rigours of travel in 19th-century Russia
Russia has always attracted a certain breed of foreigner: adventurers, drawn to the country’s vastness and emptiness; chancers, seeking fortunes and new beginnings in the Russian rough and tumble. Romantics, all of them, men and women in search of soulfulness and authenticity — the experience of life lived on and beyond the edge of the
July 31, 2018
The Black Arrows come for Zadie Smith
The furore around the Teeth author’s latest short story shows the risk of keeping your politics slightly to yourself.
July 29, 2018
Ben Brantley isn’t transphobic – he’s pitiful
The New York Times critic has nothing to apologise for. Yet he has apologised.
July 26, 2018
A plot not so much paper-thin as soggy and smeary like used toilet paper
Mission Impossible: Fallout reviewed.
Westering
In which our correspondent strikes out for the territory.
Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t funny – especially when he’s mocking the powerless
Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric
Bruce Lee: weird, gruesome and oh-so-cool
Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the film which Lee made just before his death in 1973 at the age of 32, and that would in turn seal his worldwide stardom. There, on one side, stands Lee himself. There, on the other,
Born again: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts,
David Sedaris, the current king of humourists, is often not funny at all
Since the 17th century, a ‘humourist’ has been a witty person, and especially someone skilled in literary comedy. In 1871, the Athenaeum said that Swift had been ‘an inimitable humourist’. But in modern usage the term seems to describe a specifically American job title: someone who specialises in writing short prose pieces whose only purpose
July 21, 2018
Film review: Netflix’s The Skin of the Wolf
Paws for thought
July 19, 2018
Paul Simon says farewell with a daring and inventive show
Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be
Channel 4 doesn’t do ‘news’ in any meaningful sense of the word – it’s pure propaganda
When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech. But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which
Kyoto is all that is left of Japan – more’s the pity
‘Much of what I say may turn out not to be true.’ Hardly the ideal beginning to a guided tour. But Alex Kerr is not your typical tour guide, briskly selling a place to a time-pressed group via a few must-snap essentials — the glint of the sun off Kyoto’s Golden Temple and its still
Two valuable new books about technology that are a bummer to read
All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have an additional challenge, however, of combining all this with boring technical detail. How to explain the mechanical stuff without being either too dry or too simple? What’s the reader’s likely level of knowledge? These questions
A melancholy talent with a genius for send-up – Flann O’Brien was his own worst enemy
It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence of James Joyce, struggling to have their first novels published in the late 1930s. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man in the grip of profound indolence, was published in
Adam Smith analysed human behaviour, not economics, says Simon Heffer
Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. It must vex him, as it does most of us with A-levels, to witness the distressingly ignorant, chaotic and unprincipled way in which the government, run by the party of which he is a member,
July 18, 2018
Drake’s soft centre makes him a new type of hip-hop role model
The Canadian rapper’s response to Pusha-T on his new album is nimble and reasonable.
July 17, 2018
The real reason Scarlett Johansson abandoned her ‘trans role’
There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart,
July 16, 2018
Meet Michiko Kakutani, the conservative
The former New York Times reviewer’s study of truth reveals how she’s been driven to outrage by the erosion of cultural and critical values.
July 13, 2018
My chat with Harvey Weinstein
The disgraced movie producer reached out to Taki with a ‘world exclusive’ about Rose McGowan and Asia Argento
July 12, 2018
Cease to strive! Now!
There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao Tzu argued that the wise man should refrain from action, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount also told us not to bother ourselves overmuch: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not.’ For Christ,
Chopin’s Piano is an eclectic trip through 19th-century romanticism
It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a biography, nor a work of musicology. As an extended historical essay it is patchy and selective. It is partly about pianos and pianism, but would disappoint serious students of that genre. It is not quite
July 10, 2018
Donald Trump’s fixation on celebrity is what makes him so…American
It’s almost impossible to imagine the President praising a book or a person or an idea, or really anything, that hasn’t been approved by a lot of people.
July 5, 2018
Ignore Lily Allen’s sub-adolescent politics – her new album is brilliant
Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual overproduced r&b pop schlock. What used to be called ‘indie’ singer-songwriters are always moaning about how utterly useless they are, taking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ as a kind of self-flagellating worldview. Chart
The virtuoso virtue-signallers of classical music
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute that boasts two highly original features; it’s five hours long and must be performed by a badger. Though it took me only five minutes to write, my opus one is guaranteed to get through to
Why the Romanovs were doomed
The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar