Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Why has the world turned on the Waltz King?

Arts feature

On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way

Magnificent: Stevie Wonder at BST Hyde Park reviewed

Pop

The highs of Stevie Wonder’s Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated, swampy funk, horns stabbing through the synths, the backing singers adding gospel fervour. And Wonder – now 75 – sang like it was still the 1970s, his voice raspy one minute, angelic the next. Anyone

Rod Liddle

Irritatingly, Wet Leg’s new album is pretty good

The Listener

Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of their lyrical canon, for starters – vapid and petulant millennial inanities, 50 per cent performative braggadocio, 50 per cent adolescent carping. Or there’s the commodification of their sexualities: they’ve traded up to being bi, just

I watched it between my fingers: Bring Her Back reviewed

Cinema

The Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou started off as YouTubers known for their comically violent shorts – Ronald McDonald Chicken Store Massacre (2014) has accrued 67 million views. They then raised the money to make their first feature. This was the quietly disquieting Talk To Me (2022), which cost $4.5 million and made $92

The podcast of the summer

Radio

The cover painting for The Specialist, a new podcast from Sotheby’s, looks like a scene from Mad Men. The people are so good-looking and so well dressed that you barely notice how odd they are. One chap’s walking along with a porcelain bowl as if it were a macchiato; a lady holds a plant in

Lloyd Evans

The National have bungled their Rishi Sunak satire

Theatre

The Estate begins with a typical NHS story. An elderly Sikh arrives in A&E after a six-hour wait for an ambulance and he’s asked to collect his own vomit in an NHS bucket. The doctors tell him he’s fine and sends him home where he promptly dies. His only son, Angad, inherits all his property,

Mothers’ union: The Benefactors, by Wendy Erskine, reviewed

More from Books

This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics. Erskine teases out narrative strands through a

Pity the censor: Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, reviewed

More from Books

After her America is Not the Heart was published in 2018, Elaine Castillo was named by the Financial Times one of ‘the planet’s 30 most exciting young people’, alongside Billie Eilish and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That debut novel told the story of three generations of women torn between the Philippines and the United States. In Moderation,

With glee to the silvery sea

More from Books

Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great

A summer of suspense: recent crime fiction

More from Books

Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying ‘Prithee Sir’ a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen. The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by

What I saw at Ozzy’s last gig

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath did something British groups had not done before. Before them, the British Invasion groups – from the Beatles, the Stones and The Who down to Herman’s Hermits and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – had taken American music and sold it to the British public as the American

Ozzy Osbourne, the accidental rock star

To conjure an image of England on Thursday 16 October 1969 you could do worse than compressing all of Withnail and I into one day. The country was crippled by strikes. The bubble-gum pop track ‘Sugar Sugar’ was number one. And the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had just aired.  At Regent Sounds Studios in London’s Denmark

Assassinations have an awkward tendency to backfire

Lead book review

Plutarch says that Julius Caesar dined with friends the day before he was assassinated. When conversation turned to considering the best way to die, Caesar looked up from the papers he was signing (being in company never stopped him working) and said, without hesitation: ‘Unexpectedly.’ Thanks partly to Shakespeare, Caesar’s has a claim to be

The joys of mudlarking

Arts feature

Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? ‘Vapes,’ says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. ‘Lots of

Definitely the film of the week: Four Letters of Love reviewed

Cinema

In the brief lull between last week’s summer blockbuster (Superman) and next week’s (Fantastic Four) you may wish to catch Four Letters of Love. Based on the internationally bestselling novel (1997) by Niall Williams, it’s a quiet, lyrical, Irish love story featuring a superb cast (Helena Bonham Carter, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne) and no dinosaurs

The Alfred Hitchcock of British painting

More from Arts

Carel Weight, the inimitable painter of London life and landscape, was my godfather. I remember a clownish-faced elderly man with an air of mild quizzical enquiry, who for 16 years held one of the most important teaching jobs in Britain. In charge of painting at the Royal College of Art when David Hockney passed through,

James Delingpole

Turgid, vacuous, portentous: The Sandman reviewed

Television

One of the great things about getting older is no longer feeling under any obligation to try to like stuff you were doomed never to like. Steely Dan, Dickens, Stravinsky, Henry James, George Eliot, Wagner, the Grateful Dead, Robin Williams, the collected films of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, Graham Greene, the Clash, The Young