When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought it was the nearest thing to operatic perfection I had witnessed. But this revival is even finer. Whereas I concluded last time that L’heure espagnole was fundamentally an old-time bore that goes on for far
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell tour is an astonishing moment. One flinches. An eclipse has happened and the light has just run away with her. All gone. Michael Hulls’s momentous lighting states Guillem’s intentions as clearly as Elias Benxon’s filmwork
Are you a man? Those of you who don’t fall into the category of ‘adult male’ will clearly answer no — but even those who do might not say yes. Do you apply the label ‘man’ to yourself? Are you happy using the phrase ‘I’m as [insert quality] as the next man’? You’re not? Me
In Competition No. 2910 you were invited to submit a poem by a pet who is cheesed off with its owner. The contempt in Basil Ransome-Davies’s closing couplet, written from the perspective of a bolshie moggy, was echoed throughout the entry by a hacked-off parade of bullied, misunderstood and condescended-to pets: He wants affection, he
What should be the response of politicians to mass emailings and Twitter storms? The question is an urgent one, especially for Conservative MPs, given the general truth that mass petitions, in which complex issues are simplified to ‘for or against’ and emotion given a head start over reasoned argument, tend to come from the left.
From ‘What will they do with it?’, The Spectator, 14 August 1915: It is true that in a good many cases boys of 17 ought not to be sent to the trenches. Such boys would, however, be quite serviceable for home defence purposes, and it is obvious that we must in any case keep a quarter
It appeared the ultimate summer ‘silly season’ story: that Labour would choose an unrepentant, self-consciously unspun bearded leftie as its leader. But, as ballot papers for the leadership election are dispatched, the story is threatening to close with a nightmare final chapter for the party. This week the pollsters YouGov had Corbyn 20 points ahead
‘I visited the black marble obelisk which marks the epicentre of the explosion, and I saw the plain domestic wall-clock retrieved intact from the rubble with its bent hands recording the precise time of day when the city was obliterated: 11.02 a.m. I was glad to be alone, because I could not have spoken.’ Published here
The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed with. K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese at Yale, confines himself to ‘Machado’ and has invented an adjective ‘Machadean’. Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in the very Machadean town of Petropolis, called him ‘the Dickens
It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when its hero entered the monastery at Wearmouth, Northumbria at the age of seven and, as far as we know, never left. Not that Bede was entirely parochial, distributing what was then an exotic luxury, pepper,
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old days’ of the publishing industry is palpable: a time when books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell …
The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The tomatoes hang green and heavy, like water bombs. Everywhere the boughs bend, the elder with its black beaded bunches, its little popping mice eyes. The crooked old pear across the street is having a stellar
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of his centenary, the obituaries — once they had expressed astonishment that this titan from the age of Attlee and empire had still been around —paid tribute to a polymath whose achievements could fill nine more
Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize and has become a bestseller in France — a promising start to a literary career, in other words. Wood’s new novel The Ecliptic is both an attempt
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left
I opened the envelope: it contained a ticket in my name from London St Pancras to Paris Nord, departing at 9.17 on the 12th of the 12th, a Friday; coach 3 seat 27, non-smoking; and another for returning the following day, at 13 minutes past two, in the afternoon – dans l’après- midi; and a
Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As a conductor, he stands out in a profession increasingly given to the eclectic, and to performances of music outside the western canon. The practitioners of art music have almost all surrendered to the requirement to
I didn’t have very high hopes for ‘Life In Squares’ (the BBC three-parter about the Bloomsbury circle which concluded this week). But the first episode stuck me as promising. The second faltered, and the third was rushed and anti-climactic. Nevertheless it was all much better than expected, with some strong performances. The main reason for
Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write: I feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Following months of scandal over her email shenanigans (in a nutshell: she’s been using a private email address rather than her government one) she’s just had to hand her email server to the FBI. And anyone who has so much
It seems that Karen Danczuk’s glittering post-politics career isn’t going quite to plan. The estranged wife of Labour MP Simon Danczuk — who used to work for her husband as a secretary before they split — is currently looking for a job. Alas, the former Labour councillor seems to be discovering that experience in the bubble doesn’t