Arts Reviews

You have probably idly wondered, as you stood in a queue for the loos at Chelsea Flower Show, why the Royal Horticultural Society stages its greatest flower show of the year in the week before the Whitsun Bank Holiday. Late May is good for irises, Oriental poppies, alliums, hardy geraniums, seed-raised verbascums, lilacs, wisteria and viburnums, but it is too late for tulips and too early for roses and most summer perennials. That is why so many of the plants seen at Chelsea have either been forced into premature growth or retarded. It becomes clear if you know that Chelsea used to be called the Great Spring Show, in the

A tip of the stetson to Radley Balko for reminding (that is, telling) me that today is the thirtieth anniversary of John Wayne’s death. It’s tough to pick one’s favourites from a great career that spanned 171 movies but, though I know that in many ways The Searchers and Stagecoach are the greatest of the Duke’s movies, my five favourites are: Red River She Wore a Yellow Ribbon The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence Rio Bravo The Horse Soldiers What are yours? Below the jump, some clips! UPDATE: James Joyner joins the party. I second his endorsement of Rooster Cogburn. From Red River: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon:   And,

Summer Exhibition Royal Academy, until 16 August Every year the Summer Exhibition arrives with promises of innovation and difference, every year it’s much the same. People gamely ask ‘what’s it like this year?’, and the imaginative struggle for a novel way to describe it. Yet its great strength is its unchangeability — the extraordinary (occasionally preposterous) juxtaposition of the international avant-garde, establishment figures and amateurs from the Home Counties and beyond. Nowhere else can such diversity and potential richness be found. The Academy continues to try to tame this leviathan, to modify its rules, or to dedicate a whole gallery to some lately trendy off-shoot of art such as film

Angelina Jolie attends Belstaff’s ‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button’ Premiere & After Party on December 8, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Alexandra Wyman/Getty Images for Belstaff. Some of you will doubtless have your own sordid little reasons for thinking, yes she is. Here’s the good news: Naomi Wolf agrees with you! Ms Wolf has written what may be the most amusing piece I’ve read all year. The Lovely Angelina, you see, “has it all”. The whole thing is priceless but, as Double X’s Willa Paskin explains, this may be the most deliciously off-the-wall part of the whole extravagant mess: Then there is the plane. Women are so

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur British Museum, until 23 August Part of the Indian Summer season of events sponsored by HSBC I don’t know when I last enjoyed an exhibition more. I had an idea from the publicity material what I might be seeing, but the reality of it is a thousand times lovelier. Many of us are familiar with Indian miniatures, but this exhibition consists mostly of large paintings done between the 17th and 19th centuries. Made for the northern Indian court of Jodhpur (the royal capital of Marwar), none of the 54 paintings on show has ever been seen before in Europe. The large format

Ricky Jay has an op-ed in today’s NYT on the Susan Boyle phenomenon. It’s interesting – there may not be many people alive who know more about the history of freak shows and public oddities than Jay – but it’s really just an excuse to point you towards Mark Singer’s terrific New Yorker profile of Jay. It begins: The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher Taffirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar ofthe Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened: Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was per- forming magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a

Michael Kinsley has a very entertaining take-down of the “new” Newsweek in this week’s edition of the New Republic*. However, I doubt the “old” Newsweek would have dared publish this very entertaining, even brutal, demolition of Oprah Winfrey. In fact, it’s the sort of piece one might imagine appearing in TNR. So, whatever the merits of Kinsley’s piece and whatever the future may – or more probably does not – hold for Newsweek, anything that exposes Oprah’s weird combination of sappy new age snake-oil and shameless hucksterism is no bad thing. If nothing else, it’s worth being reminded that Oprah peddles the anti-MMR nonsense that, if its supporters have their

Andrew Lambirth talks to Douglas Dunn and Norman Ackroyd about their latest collaboration Illustrated books are one of the glories of a library. Looking over my own shelves I find assorted delights ranging from The Story of My Heart, the unorthodox vision of the naturalist Richard Jefferies fittingly partnered with woodcuts by Ethelbert White, to David Gascoyne’s poems decorated rather sombrely by Graham Sutherland, and ‘The Traveller’ by Walter de la Mare, accompanied by colourful landscapes by John Piper. The pairings of writer and artist are often intriguing: Wyndham Lewis and Naomi Mitchison, William Beckford and Marion Dorn, Samuel Johnson and Edward Bawden. One of my favourites is an anthology