Culture

Culture

Tuesday

Julie Burchill

Spare us the girls’ weekend, Meghan

I almost spat out my toast (smothered with the As Ever, The Raspberry Spread Trio – "Made To Keep On Hand And Enjoy Often," $42 – naturally) in pure molten anticipation when I read that my role model in spreading jam to flour, sorry, speaking truth to power, will be hosting a women-only weekend "retreat" in Sydney during her forthcoming Australia jaunt, with tickets "a steal" at $2,699 AUD ($1,930 USD). I already had my credit card in my hot little hand until I remembered that, though I love to lunch tête-à-tête with one lady, being in the company of many women at once – with not one awful toxic man around – makes me feel like drawing crude approximations of penises on fragrant toilet doors after around half an hour.

Thursday

Olivia Potts

My take on marry me chicken

I am not in the habit of bringing viral TikTok recipes here. It is a safe space, away from digestive biscuits submerged in yogurt masquerading as cheesecake, baked oats, or sugary instant coffee whipped up like foam (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ignorance is bliss). No, here we are in the realm of tried-and-tested vintage recipes. So why am I letting marry me chicken into this sacred place? For the uninitiated, it first popped up a decade ago on an American food website called Delish, but it became the most-searched recipe on the New York Times in 2023. It’s a simple concept: chicken cooked in a creamy, tomatoey sauce that is so delicious that the person to whom you serve it will get down on one knee.

marry me chicken

Tuesday

William Atkinson

Why my mustache had to go

I loved my mustache. Unfortunately, my fondness for it seemed inversely proportionate to its popularity among my peers. After much unsolicited feedback from friends ("You look like a young Peter Mandelson") and online strangers ("You look like a 1970s porn star"), I put a poll on my Instagram asking my followers whether or not I should scrap it. Four-fifths said I should. After a brief consideration of my options (ignore the results? Rerun the vote? My mustache was making me think like a Latin American dictator), I reluctantly shaved. God how I miss it. There is something intoxicating about a mustache – a small hedgerow on his top lip can convince even the dowdiest man that he looks like a Battle of Britain pilot.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

European culture is being Americanized

Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last month’s jamboree. Organizers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu” and the song that followed, her very own, “Nothing is Impossible.” “The technical, logistical and organizational complexities of an Olympic ceremony are not comparable to a live performance by a single artist,” said a spokesperson for the organizing committee.    Was there also a linguistic complexity in the decision? Perhaps Carey didn’t feel confident singing live in Italian in front of 75,000 spectators in the San Siro Stadium, plus the 9.

Une bouteille de beaujoulais nouveau à côté d'un repas McDonald's, France, 1994. (Photo by Robert DEYRAIL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Won’t someone please think of Dubai’s influencers?

The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran, the worry about what might come next, we can still find time to feel a warm and comforting sense of schadenfreude over the large number of British women with stapled-on lips who are cowering in their Dubai apartments as the Iranian shells come raining down. The name under which these women collectively labor is "influencer," a term which, like "content creator" is close to meaningless and both could be usefully replaced by "shitgibbon" or "unemployable." We laugh at their sense of entitlement, their shock that the real world has intruded upon their private Idaho You do not know these people, any of them, I suspect.

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Anne de Courcy

Streamlined chic or lacy froth: royal style wars of the 1930s

The semiotics of clothes, especially royal ones, can be fascinating, sending out powerful messages. Think of the jewel-studded, pearl-strewn portraits of Queen Elizabeth I or Princess Diana’s revenge-chic black dress. As a fashion queen herself (Justine Picardie was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar for more than seven years and has an acclaimed book on Chanel under her belt), no one is better placed to unpick the subtleties of royal public couture. So, judging by this book’s title, I was expecting a shrewd analysis of diplomacy dressing, with perhaps some behind-the-scenes vignettes. What happens if a royal lady unexpectedly gets a run in her tights at a crucial moment? Is there a color code if three of them are out together? How do hats stay on in a gale?

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Deborah Ross

Fascinating: EPiC – Elvis Presley in Concert reviewed

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a concert documentary that grew out of the 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas performances discovered by Baz Luhrmann while researching his 2022 biopic Elvis. As I have little interest in "the King" I approached with a heavy heart. But now? I’m abundantly interested. In fact, I’ve shifted from indifference to thinking that if I could see one musical artist live at their peak it would have to be him. He’s that electrifying. A warning, however: it’s a 12A. "Elvis picks up a bra thrown on to the stage during a concert performance and puts it on his head," notes the BBFC. I wish I’d had the chance to throw a bra that he’d put on his head. Hopefully, it would have been one of my nicer ones that day. They are of varying quality.

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Rory Sutherland

Does The Spectator hate the Welsh?

This St. David’s Day weekend, I devote this column to a celebration of the world’s most under-appreciated ethnic group. Under-appreciated, certainly, in the pages of The Spectator, whose editorial policy suffers from a Pictish delusion that its readers are eager to hear of the appointment of a new procurator fiscal in Ayrshire, or political divides on Pitlochry council, while having zero interest in the finer country to the west. Sometimes mere exposure to Wales may be enough to inspire greatness, as in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace or Led Zeppelin Now in celebrating Wales, we need some ground rules. Since the Welsh are much more agreeable than other Celtic tribes, they are widely content to have sex with people from other cultures and ethnicities.

welsh

Friday

Carson Becker

Gavin Newsom, the everyman elitist

Young Man in a Hurry is California Governor Gavin Newsom’s attempt to explain himself to a divided country that may soon find him vying for its presidency. He alternates between candor and wile in answering the book’s central question: who is Gavin Newsom? In these pages he constructs a striking hero’s journey, illuminating an insular world of inherited wealth, hereditary political power and ideological contradiction that few Americans will have been exposed to. But he also casts himself as a struggling underdog, a folksy type whose patrician image belies a life of perseverance and a unique set of emotional and psychological deprivations.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Enjoyably old-fashioned: ITV’s The Lady reviewed

I lasted all of five minutes with Netflix’s tasting menu-length Being Gordon Ramsay. This surprised me, because I’ve long had a bit of a soft spot for the irascible, crevice-faced, sweary old ham. I know that all reality TV is fake but I’ve always quite enjoyed watching carrot-top pretending to lose his rag yet again in some rat-infested culinary cesspit before transforming it, in the space of a month, into a Michelin three-star. Ramsay no longer even pretends that his programs are anything more than extended plugs for his brand But the dishonesty and contrivance and brazen commercialism of this autohagiography are just too much to stomach.

Lloyd Evans

Fans of George Eliot are in for a shock: Bird Grove at Hampstead Theater reviewed

Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is a comedy of manners set in 1841. A portly suitor, Horace, arrives at a respectable house intending to propose to a rebellious and brilliant 22-year-old, Mary Ann. Horace’s father is dying and he must find a bride before nightfall or lose a substantial legacy. This ludicrous but very human situation starts the play. It’s instantly gripping. Mary Ann is in the drawing room being treated for headaches by a French mesmerist along with two wealthy radicals, Mr and Mrs Bray, who encourage her political activism. Her father, Robert, introduces his guests to each other and invites them to stay for tea. This fascinating glimpse of her early life shows George Eliot as a surly, arrogant, spoiled and heartless pest A hilariously awkward party ensues.

Hermione Eyre

Marvelous but repetitious: Gwen John – Strange Beauties reviewed

A pilgrimage to Cardiff Central, sorry, Caerdydd Canolog (according to the signage in the station, which also had my return train’s destination ‘Lundain Padd’ton’) to see the new Gwen John show. She is being lauded as Wales’s greatest artist, but she left Tenby at 18 in 1895, and never went back. After studying at the Slade she moved to Paris, fell in love with Rodin, and adopted the Catholic faith.

Richard Bratby

‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. "All he can say is, 'Go, then. I can’t hold you any more,'" says Christopher Maltman, who has sung the role of Wotan throughout the Royal Opera’s current Ring cycle, and brings it to completion when Siegfried opens later this month.

Ian Thomson

The Venice Ghetto was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution

The word "ghetto" is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for "foundry": ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the center of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet. The Ghetto – the first of its kind on the Italian peninsula and anywhere in the world – became a model for segregated Jewish quarters throughout Europe. It was soon blighted by poverty, malnutrition and disease. The Ghetto Nuovo was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution. In this fascinating history of the New Foundry and its inhabitants, Alexander Lee conjures the Adriatic seaport in all its strange glory.

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Tim Butcher

The curse of gold for the Asante nation

As a metal, gold never corrodes. As a possession, the reverse is too often true. It has the power to warp morality, destroy decency and tarnish humanity. This duality – entrancing beauty alongside corrupting potency – lies at the heart of this magnificent book that engagingly blends African history with a current relevance that reaches far beyond the continent. The history is laid out with clarity and conviction. The Asante nation (Barnaby Phillips wisely settles on this spelling over a variety of homophones including Ashante, Ashanti and Achantis) is a component part of the modern west African nation of Ghana. Much like the Zulus in South Africa, their foundational history dates back only a few hundred years and is underscored by military prowess bordering on barbarism.

Wednesday

Gary Dexter

Your AI Grandma will speak to you now

There’s a trend on YouTube at the moment for videos in which older people give advice. They speak directly to camera, frankly and without pretension. One can almost sense the care home staff hovering in the background, coaxing their barely extant charges into making one last testament of their time on Earth. The videos have titles such as "Things I’d tell my 30-year-old self," "Harsh realities of being an 85-year-old woman." "A girl and a woman talk about life," "Lessons learned" and "How to deal with loneliness."  The commenters below the videos respond, largely, with gratitude and a surprising lack of trollery. "I’m terrified of dying," one commenter writes. "I fear many things, but nothing scares me as much as death does.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Has SNL gone too far?

It has been a very long time since Saturday Night Live was in the headlines for a good reason (probably Nate Bargatze’s first hosting stint in October 2023), and those who have been wishing that the increasingly beleaguered show would be put out of its misery now finally have their opportunity to say so. In last weekend’s episode, one sketch in highly questionable taste revealed a gang of canceled celebrities – including Bill Cosby, Armie Hammer and Mel Gibson – as coming forward and explaining that their various controversial or criminal activities had been driven by their having Tourette’s.

SNL
John Sturgis

Ice and identity in Lublin, Poland’s forgotten city

A Real Pain was one of my favorite films of recent years, a tragicomic exploration of family, history, place and identity featuring two Americans in Poland – specifically in Warsaw and Lublin. My wife was also quite smitten – with Lublin as much as the film – and on the back of this began planning a weekend in the eastern Polish city. I was a little wary of such an overtly fan-like step – this felt one notch down from trying to emulate an influencer, of all the awful modern things. But she’s very good at arranging interesting weekends overseas on a minuscule budget so on this question I relented. And so it was that I found myself recently arising at 3 a.m. and heading to London's Luton airport, on which I felt sure Poland would prove an upgrade.

Wednesday

Gareth Roberts

The BAFTAs N-word scandal has been very revealing

At the BAFTAs on Sunday night, John Davidson – whose story of living with Tourette’s syndrome is dramatized in the (very good) film I Swear – shouted out the N-word when black actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan were on stage to present an award. You’d hope that by now people might understand the mechanics of Tourette’s symptoms – that the tics are totally involuntary, and consist of erupting with the worst possible things at the worst possible times; the imp of the perverse dialed up to 11. But no. The cruel and ideological politics of identity still have a grip on the mediocrities of the creative industries This was another one of the increasing number of events in this century that feel almost comically demonstrative.

Saturday

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Carl Jung, the man behind the psychobabble

A surefire way to alienate people is to talk about the dream you had last night. In polite society, we’re generally told nobody cares about the goings-on of our subconscious and that it’s probably best to keep quiet. Nothing, then, quite prepares one for the oneiric delights to be found in Jung’s Life and Work, a new edition of the collected interviews between Professor Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist and founder of modern analytic psychology, and his former student, Aniela Jaffé. The tone is set in the very first interview, where Jung recalls a childhood dream involving a gigantic “erect phallus” reaching “almost to the ceiling” equipped with an all-seeing eye and seated on a plush golden throne.

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ann lee shakers
Damian Thompson

Ann Lee deserves better than her biopic

Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th-­century Manchester who joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or “Shaking Quakers.” In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden. Ann then had a series of visions that, according to subsequent Shaker accounts, identified her as the “woman clothed with the sun” whose appearance in the Book of Revelation heralds the end of the world. In 1774, “Mother Ann” and a small band of faithful emigrated to America.

Friday

Aidan McLaughlin

Le Sirenuse: the loveliest hotel in the world

Look out from the balcony of your room at Le Sirenuse and you’ll see the trio of rocks jutting out of the Tyrrhenian Sea that gave the hotel, one of the last true greats in the world, its name. The three jagged islets form an archipelago, which is said by the Greeks to have been the home of sirens whose enchanting songs lured sailors to their deaths. Le Sirenuse, a scarlet palazzo wedged into the cliff-face of Positano, boasts similar powers of attraction. In a place known around the world for its beauty, Le Sirenuse stands out. It has developed a reputation as the loveliest hotel in the world; somehow, it exceeds that billing.

Clare McHugh

Love Story’s counterfeit Kennedys

Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.” On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.” If JFK Jr.

Flora Watkins

Andrew, Queen Elizabeth and the pitfalls of ‘gentle parenting’

It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew – practical joker and fond of a fart gag – might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these cops were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later. ‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II – an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting.

Anne Margaret Daniel

The many David Bowies

Alexander Larman is the author of a biography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and of Byron’s Women. Reading Larman’s new biography of David Bowie, one gets the sense that this could have been the end of a trilogy, given all three men’s talent and excesses. In fact, Bowie once considered playing Byron in a movie. Larman’s focus in Lazarus is on Bowie’s career from the end of the 1980s through to his final works: the musical Lazarus and the album Blackstar, the artist’s last gift to his fans, released on his 69th birthday – two days before his death from liver cancer in 2016.

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Thursday

Diane Cole

The auteur Eugène Atget

Few connoisseurs of the image are unfamiliar with the great French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). But his name is, unfortunately, unfamiliar to the lay person. This is a shame: his gloriously detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images of late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris evocatively conjure the shadows and lights of the boulevards, parks and alleyways of the Belle Époque. His astonishing close-ups of finely crafted architectural details are as striking as his sometimes surreal views of storefront windows and food-stall displays. Whether training his bulky large-format view camera on scenes interior or exterior, he reveals an aesthetic sensibility exquisitely sensitive to the world around him.

Harry Cluff

Marilyn Monroe, poetic muse

The year 1959 was a particularly productive but especially depressing year for Sylvia Plath. She toured the length of America, attended a series of stimulating literary seminars and wrote some of her most beloved verse. While outwardly active and energetic, her diary reveals she was struggling all the time to sustain her few fleeting fits of happiness. One entry in October describes a vivid dream she had, in which Marilyn Monroe appeared as a kind of fairy godmother. Monroe gave Plath a manicure and promised her a “new, flowering life,” before wishing her well and inviting the troubled poet over for Christmas. The image of Monroe clearly consoled her. Plath was hardly the only poet to be mesmerized by Monroe’s outward magnificence and fascinated by her perturbing private tragedies.

Clare McHugh

Inside the Murdoch family fallout

Terrific scripts, marvelous acting and glamorous locales – plus that haunting theme song – made HBO’s Succession superlative television. The show also took the sheen off being a billionaire. Who among us, watching Logan Roy (a barely veiled stand-in for media mogul Rupert Murdoch) mess with his children’s psyches, didn’t think “Isn’t it perilous to be quite so loaded?” Journalist Gabriel Sherman’s new book prompts a similar, aversive recoil. Every family has squabbles, but the Murdochs have fallen out with shocking animosity. Though it’s hyperbolic to claim, as the author does, that the struggle for control of News Corp broke the world, his gruesomely detailed account reveals how shattering the battles have been to those who fought them.

Alice Cockerell

The literary appeal of the English upper classes

“However British you are, I am more British still,” said the American expatriate novelist Henry James, explaining his fascination with all things aristocratic and Anglo. It’s a type of fascination that’s only gathered steam over the years. A grand representative of the establishment, Lady Anne Glenconner, sold thousands of copies of her first book, Lady in Waiting, in the US, and recently discovered that her (admittedly predominantly homosexual) American fanbase has taken to throwing Lady Glenconner-themed costume parties. Meanwhile, Carla Kaplan, whose biography of Jessica “Decca” Mitford, Troublemaker, went on sale at the end of last year, discovered that Decca, known as “the Queen of the Muckrakers,” has a manic following among cowboys and long-haul truckers.