Culture

Culture

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

Classic tangled thriller: Sky’s Gangs of London reviewed

Television

There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however, wasn’t one of them. After decades of desensitisation, it’s not easy for any film or television programme these days to make its screen violence genuinely horrifying. Yet, by my reckoning, Thursday’s first episode managed to

Lloyd Evans

The best theatre of the 21st century

Theatre

Not looking great, is it? Until we all get jabbed, theatres may have to stay closed. And even the optimists say a reliable vaccine is unlikely to arrive before Christmas. As the darkness persists, here’s a round-up of my leading experiences over nearly two decades as a reviewer. There’s been a surge of output. More

Arthur Jeffress: bright young person of the post-war art scene

More from Books

The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but this wayward, flamboyant, controversial connoisseur and patron who left much of his ‘small but subversive’ collection to the Tate and the Southampton Art Gallery after his death in 1961 certainly deserves his footnote in history.

How Brighton’s gangs became increasingly radicalised

More from Books

Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes, travelled to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist militia and one of the main jihadist groups fighting the Syrian army. A dozen more young people from Brighton were also eager to go. Radicalisation had

The musical benefits of not playing live

Music

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He

The cult of Sappho in interwar Paris

Lead book review

I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for

The marvel of Mozart’s letters

Classical

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young

Our rivers, as much as our oceans, are in urgent need of protection

More from Books

Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers

We all need to be let alone —not just Greta Garbo

More from Books

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains

James Delingpole

The Amazon Prime doc that will convert anyone to cricket

Television

Imagine rooting for the Australian cricket team. If you’re Scottish, Welsh or Irish — or Australian obviously — it might not be such a stretch. But for an Englishman, I suspect, it’s nigh on impossible. It would be like supporting Germany in the (football) World Cup. Or yearning for the All Blacks to win the

Heated debate over Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition

More from Books

How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it. Ernest Coleman’s story of his search

The genius of Joe Rogan

More from Arts

Last month, just before coronavirus conquered the airwaves entirely, millions of Americans gave up two hours to hear a professor of epidemiology discuss the emerging pandemic. Despite its huge reach, not to mention its quality, the interview wasn’t broadcast on any of the news networks. Rather it was the work of a former martial-arts pundit

How to succeed in sculpture (without being a man)

More from Arts

Whee-ooh-whee ya-ya-yang skrittle-skrittle skreeeek… Is it a space pod bearing aliens from Mars? No, it’s a podcast featuring aliens from Venus: women sculptors. If the intro music to Sculpting Lives: Women & Sculpture sounds like Dr Who, its two jolly presenters — Jo Baring, director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art,

Sinister toy story: Little Eyes, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

More from Books

We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a

The dirt on King David: Anointed, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

More from Books

Michael Arditti has never held back from difficult or unfashionable subjects. His dozen novels, including the prize-winning Easter, as well as Jubilate, The Breath of Night and Of Men and Angels, explore faith in an increasingly secular modern world. Half a century ago he would have brushed shoulders with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but

Kashrut dietary laws are ill-suited to lactose-intolerant Jews

More from Books

Until fairly recently, all over the western world there were specialised eating places catering largely for Jews who respected the kashrut dietary laws. From family caffs to white tablecloth establishment, these called themselves ‘dairy restaurants’. They were nearly, but not quite, vegetarian, since they allowed (the kosher-defined) fish with fins and scales. This wondrously weird,

Excess and incest were meat and drink to the Byrons

Lead book review

‘Some curse hangs over me and mine,’ wrote Lord Byron, and thanks to Emily Brand, who is a genealogist, it is now possible to see why Byron was so darned Byronic: excess, incest and marital misery flowed in the bloodstream. The gloom that looked like a Regency pose was entirely pre-programmed; George Gordon Byron’s script