The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is a cathartic denunciation of the private boarding school system, and his rage is on two fronts. The first is how being sent away at the age of eight damaged and twisted him and just about
We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or Bob Dylan performing with an electric guitar. The change is identified as a discrete moment for which there is a distinct before and after. But this is not always the case and, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs for cover. Few Germans were brave or reckless enough to resist the Führer. Once Hitler’s lunacy had become manifest, however, the dilemma for German patriots was painful: to love the Fatherland yet desire the downfall
Like department stores, empires and encyclopaedias, the multi-volume narrative national history is an invention of the later 18th century. It reaches its apogee, promising to bring everything important within a single enclosure, in the 19th and early 20th century. After that, ambitious examples appear to be fighting against a general lack of enthusiasm. Most of
When Oscar Wilde famously claimed: ‘All art is quite useless’, he may not have had artistic subjects in mind. But it’s certainly true that since the Romantic era, artists have had a special affection for the superannuated. An image of an abandoned building with some sort of past, not necessarily glorious, appeals to our emotions,
Our occasional series on cinema’s most underrated films arrives at what many have considered the peak of misogynistic trash. We’re in 1980s America, and a bunch of Hollywood execs are puffing on cigars, sipping scotch. ‘You know, I’ve been hearing a lot about these so-called “liberated women”. What do you think they’re like?’ And thus
Great Swiss artists, like famous Belgians, might seem to be an amusingly underpopulated category. Actually, as with celebrated Flemings and Walloons, when you start counting you discover there are more of them than you thought. Paul Klee, for example, and Alberto Giacometti. A third, whose work is reassessed in a large exhibition at Tate Modern,
When it comes to history programming, television’s loss is increasingly audio’s gain. People moan to me most weeks over the lack of really good, rigorous, eye-opening documentaries on the screen, and I can only nod along in agreement. Oh for a Kenneth Clark-style lecture! More Michael Wood! There’s an especially strong appetite for the adventurous
This year we must love Edinburgh for her soul rather than her looks. The EIF should be commended for making the best of a tricky hand, but the lodgings for its music programme bring to mind a fallen society beauty forced from her New Town villa into a rented bedsit. Edinburgh Park is a cathedral-sized
Opera buffs enjoy their jargon. We all do it, scattering words like ‘spinto’ and ‘Fach’ like an enthusiastic pizza waiter with an outsize peppermill. It’s principally a means of signalling that you’re part of the club. But occasionally it’s genuinely useful, and Glyndebourne’s new production of Verdi’s Luisa Miller had me thinking about the concept
The new Lily Allen vehicle opens in a spruced-up terrace in the East End. Allen plays a self-satisfied yuppie, Jenny, whose cynical husband has invited two ghastly friends over for a bitchy booze-up. At first sight this looks like a Hampstead comedy from the 1970s but it’s a horror story, and it has a huge
Nigel Planer is on a mission to bring farce back to the West End. ‘There’s a lot of snobbery in comedy,’ he tells me when we meet at a hotel bar near the Old Vic. ‘People say, “Oh that’s comedy. It can’t have any meaning”.’ The actor and writer is still best known for playing
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles of Self-Help fame, they admired this industrious, inventive, uxorious and religious man as a harbinger of their own age. It surely helped that his story, if not exactly one of rags to riches, was certainly
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being taught at kindergarten: fathers are fathers, not because they are filled with some ‘essence of fatherhood’, but because they have children. Fast-forward a few years, and the Pope is trying to have you killed. Not
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who believed that only by getting ‘up close’ to the ‘infinitely small’ details would it be possible to understand the truth about a Revolution that was stranger than fiction. Mercier (1740-1815) was
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near East is when he, a former journalist with a sharp eye for detail, visits El Wedy, close to the Nile south of Cairo, where just over a century ago his great-uncle Samuele Sornaga built a
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes’. By this definition, Elizabeth Knox’s genre-hopping fantasy The Absolute Book must count as oversized baggage; but it trundles along winningly, even if it’s a trifle stout at 640 pages. Taryn Cornick is our
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects — Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, say. Other books, though, would have done as well to stay lost. Did the world really need to set eyes on Harper Lee’s first draft of To Kill a
When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of light, laughter and danger went out of the British art world. Hoyland, who was born in Sheffield and trained at the local art college before coming to London and the Royal Academy Schools, was a
In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim, elegant volume the atmosphere and especially the conversation of an afternoon a quarter century earlier that he had spent in the company of the exiled Oscar Wilde. It was a conscious act of imaginative recreation,
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been walking in the Cuillin in Skye. As Norman rounded a boulder, it dislodged and rolled him off the mountain. He screamed: ‘David, save me!’ They were his last words. The Cuillin — or Black Ridge
And so the reckoning begins. As frantic Afghans wrestle with the agonising, life-and-death choice between staying in Kabul and risking execution by the Taliban or running the gauntlet of checkpoints around the airport in search of freedom overseas, it’s noises off in the West. Pundits and policy- makers pontificate, grizzled generals rue another foreign adventure
The interview podcast is a genre immoderately drawn to gimmicks, as the logical space of possible formats is gradually exhausted. The interviewee, quite often themselves a podcaster, might be, for example, invited to noisily eat lunch while nominating their top-five deceased childhood pets. The theory is that fanciful formats encourage the interviewee to open up.
The new music economy relies on cross-promotion and artists reaching out to different scenes. And the rise of streaming means everyone can hop between audiences with ease, hence those singles apparently by one person but with a cricket team’s worth of other names credited. As the Beach Boys once sang, ‘you need a mess of
When the apocalypse comes, I want it to be scripted by a 1970s screenwriter. That’s my conclusion after watching the first few episodes of Terry Nation’s landmark 1975 ‘cosy catastrophe’ series Survivors on BritBox. Everything was so much more innocent and charming back then, including the end of the world. Survivors establishes its MacGuffin in
What use does a fallen and corrupted world have for a man of integrity? This was not the question I had anticipated walking away with after viewing the new Nicolas Cage indie Pig, but much of the film, from Cage’s intensely quiet and soulful performance to the new ideas it has to offer a very
Glyndebourne is nothing if not honest. ‘In response to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions our 2021 performances of Tristan und Isolde will be presented as a concert staging, after the 2003 production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff’, says the programme, and what we get is not a full production but a compromise imposed by the peculiar circumstances of
The National Theatre has given Sophocles’s Philoctetes a makeover and a new title, Paradise. This must be ironic because the location is hell on earth. The action starts in a dirt circle sprawling with smashed military gear where a group of plump female vagrants are waking up in a clutch of filthy old tents. They’re
One afternoon earlier this summer we drove through Rugeley in Staffordshire. There, looming above the A51, were the cooling towers of the power station: a pinkish red, resembling terracotta, with curving convex sides, like modernist vases on a pharaonic scale. At 385 feet high, they were a little taller than the dome of St Paul’s