Culture

Arriving in Salzburg, ahead of this week’s Whitsun music festival, the first thing that greets you is a rather grumpy statue of the greatest composer who ever lived. Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in this implausibly pretty Alpine city, and each time I return here the boyish creator of the world’s most beautiful music seems more ubiquitous than ever. Wandering the narrow alleyways of Salzburg’s medieval Altstadt, its cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of tourist traffic, Mozart’s pale and pensive face stares back at you from the window of every souvenir shop, emblazoned on every conceivable knick-knack, from fridge magnets to action figures (my personal favourite is the

Martin Amis died in Florida on Friday, of oesophageal cancer at the age of 73. Some of The Spectator’s best writers praised, reviled, laughed at and scorned Amis throughout his career. Here’s some extracts from our archive: The Rachel Papers ‘The narrative is often very funny indeed, but I suspect that Martin Amis is getting the last laugh. Charles Highway is so much the archetypal youth, of a certain time and a certain class, that he is necessarily a comic creation. Sex is nowadays the vox populi, and almost vox dei if certain clergymen have anything to do with it, but for Highway it is a road paved with bad intentions. Although his

Nish Kumar’s grandiosely titled podcast Pod Save the UK isn’t anything like as annoying as you’d expect. Yes, his speaking voice – a high-pitched nasal gurgle – can grate a little, especially when punctuated, as it is often and loudly, with a laugh that is very obviously insincere. But I listened to the full hour without experiencing a single violent urge. This wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. Not at all. When he was on the telly, as he was improbably for four long years fronting the BBC’s truly godawful The Mash Report, like much of the rest of the nation I found I could manage about ninety seconds of him

It’s been 60 years since Muswell Hill brothers Ray and Dave Davies – then 19 and 15 respectively – formed The Kinks. What is now known as the ‘catalogue’ division of record companies love an anniversary, particularly when fans of the band are likely to be edging into pensionable disposable-income territory. And so, a new compilation titled The Journey has arrived, with 36 tracks curated by the brothers from across The Kinks’ 30 years of active service, which have been scrubbed up to sound better than ever. It’s fitting that a band which sang a lot about heritage and preservation – very unusually for the young men that they were at the time – should, in turn,

Steven Spielberg has suggested that The Fabelmans, his latest film, is a $40 million therapy project. The Fabelmans focuses on divorce and in doing so holds a mirror to the director’s own parents’ split. In its unblinking depiction of what has for so many become a rite of passage – almost one in two marriages end in divorce — the film makes for uncomfortable viewing. Spielberg refuses to indulge those parents who depict marital breakdown as just another milestone in a child’s life. He portrays it as a tragedy that casts a long shadow. ‘Everything in his career is marked by his parents’ divorce,’ one critic concluded. This is true of many of us who have experienced divorce. I was 13 when my parents divorced. Their lawyers marvelled at how

‘A mother hen watching all her chicks, a sassy old lady full of tricks’. Mrs Brown’s Boys recently returned to BBC One for yet more festive specials. Astonishingly the last actual full series of non-seasonal episodes was transmitted ten years ago, though a new one is imminent. This Christmas’s were, reassuringly, exactly the same as they always have been. In this case, ‘always’ goes back a long way. Although it only surfaced on the BBC in 2011, the ‘franchise’ – as we are now expected to call TV programmes, as if they were concessions for burger vans – originated in the mind of Brendan O’Caroll in 1992. But I think

I grew up in a traditional English family, surrounded by cousins, chivvied by aunts, presided over by my grandmother, who insisted on Sunday church. We weren’t religious but Anglicanism (of a 19th-century sort) was in the air. We read the Revd Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and if I thought about Jesus it was in an English setting. I imagined him barefoot walking through fields, rescuing the lambs that had fallen into cattle grids. Our family viewed Catholicism with suspicion. For us it was voodoo: foreign and crowded with unnecessary intercessors. The aunts would tell us that our great-great-grandmother had refused to let Catholics in the house and