Arts Reviews

This is the first of my more-or-less monthly columns, the idea of which is to report on operatic events other than those that take place at the two major London venues, with occasional trips to those areas (i.e., everywhere other than London) where the annual government grant for the arts is £4.80 per head, while in London it is £69.00. This fact was widely reported a few weeks ago, but while I thought for an hour or two that it might lead to a revolution, there was no widespread articulate reaction to it of any kind, nor, so far as I know, any indication that this gross inequity would be

Alec Cobbe is a designer, painter, musician, picture restorer and collector, and has recently donated drawings, photographs and other archives to the V&A, where some of this collection is now on display. Cobbe was born in Dublin and aged four moved to the family house Newbridge, an 18th-century, 50-room country villa designed by James Gibbs, which, he says, was the ‘single greatest influence on my life’. He had an ‘idyllic lamp-lit childhood’ — there was no electricity — where the ‘running water was rainwater, which had to be pumped daily to a tank at the top of the house’. And to keep young Alec amused there were pictures, historic interiors

This has become a Christmas tradition for me: watching this extraordinary four-minute film about 25 December 1940. Its narrated by an American – at the behest of the British government, who wished to persuade Americans that our fight against Hitler was worth joining. The script is beautiful, almost poetic. “For the first time in history, no bells ring in England to celebrate the birth of the Saviour. No church bells are allowed to be rung in England. If they are, it will mean that the invader has come… At Christmas, England does what England has done for a thousand years – she worships the Prince of Peace.” Do watch the

Peter O’Toole has passed away today, aged 81. Amongst the many characters he played was the lead role in Keith Waterhouse’s  Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on the Spectator’s Low Life column. O’Toole was easily Jeffrey’s favourite of the actors to play him – Tom Conti, he thought, seemed to disapprove of all the drinking but O’Toole ‘made it his play’. Below is our review of his performance, by Christopher Edwards dated 20 October 1989. Readers of The Spectator will need no explanation about the contents of this production, based as it is upon the weekly column of our own Low Life correspondent. When I recently tried to arrange an interview with

Writing about Graham Sutherland in 1950, the critic Robert Melville observed: ‘When one looks at a picture one finds oneself over the frontier or one doesn’t. Criticism has no power of making converts to an experience which occurs without the intervention of reason … Criticism considers the sensitive flesh of the image and discovers its spiritual stature: indeed, unless we pursue the meaning of the image as language, painting may well fall silent and rest content in the pride of its flesh.’ This quotation is of relevance here for several reasons: because one of my principal roles as a writer is to function as an art critic; because Melville rightly