The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This biopic of Mary Magdalene is a feminist retelling that may well be deserved but it’s so dreary and unremarkable that the fact it is well intentioned and even, perhaps, necessary can’t come through and win the day. Or even part of the day. Just the morning, say. Directed by Garth Davis (Lion), and written
Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives in New York, apparently, and his bulging eyes goggle out from Gerald Barry’s programme note for his new Organ Concerto. Check him out: the Guardian published the full note a day before the performance, which
The Best Man by Gore Vidal is set during a fictional American election in 1960. Two gifted candidates seek their party’s nomination. Secretary Russell is a chilly but experienced political hack whose marriage is a sham. Senator Cantwell, a more attractive character, is an impulsive charmer married to a blonde bombshell who adores him. The
‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World Service) as we settled into our chairs. We were just about to hear the ‘world première’ of the latest podcast from the BBC World Service, launched dramatically in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in
The first book that Tomas Venclova read in English was Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not a bad start in the language, given his future career. Venclova is less well-known in the West than his late friends Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, but he’s something like their Baltic equivalent: a dissident poet of international standing, who spent many
Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech —Her Stepdaughter — or the elegant misdirection of The Beginning of a Romance. It encourages the suspicion that when Janacek christened his final opera, deliberately truncating the title of Dostoyevsky’s Siberian prison camp-inspired novel Notes
Babylon Berlin (Sky Atlantic), the epic German-made Euro noir detective drama set during Weimar, is so addictively brilliant that I’d almost advise you not to start watching it. After the two seasons to date you’ll be left feeling like the morphine-addicted hero Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) when deprived of his fix. That’s because they haven’t
‘I want to see Venice, and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses.’ So wrote Lord Byron in 1814, some two years before he settled — if that is the word — in the lagoon city. Even after his arrival in the winter of 1816, Venice retained its fantastical allure: he identified with its decay (which he
We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson’s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee’s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers
On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos
In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to N. T. Wright, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the theology of St Paul, about a new book — Paul: A Biography — in which he takes an approach to the man. He tells me what Paul was really like, how our understanding of him is
It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and self-proclaimed ‘bride of science’. Not the least of Lovelace’s fascination is the way in which her reputation and the claims for her significance have fluctuated so wildly during that time. She’s been hailed for her
Donald E. Westlake wrote crime books that were funny, light and intricate. Help I Am Being Held Prisoner (Hard Case Crime, £7.99) was first published in 1974. The protagonist is Harold Künt. (That umlaut, as you can imagine, is very, very important.) In reaction against his name, he’s become a serial prankster. After one of
Operation Columba was one of the most secretive arms of British Intelligence during the second world war. Between April 1941 and September 1944, its agents made 16,554 drops over an area stretching from Copenhagen to Bordeaux. Amongst Columba’s successes was the mapping of Belgium’s entire coastal defence system, 67 kilometres worth of priceless, minutely detailed
After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s superb The Child that Books Built exists, we need this new memoir by Lucy Mangan, about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting. Where Spufford mined the depths of his childhood anguish in his
Taste has a well-noted ability to evoke memory, so it is curious how infrequently most wine writers mine their pasts for inspiration. You wouldn’t think that some had ever fallen in love, read a novel or even got drunk. Instead they obsess over scores, sulphur and diurnal temperature variation. Thank heavens for Nina Caplan, who
On the wall of her tumbledown house in central Baghdad, an elderly Christian widow named Elishva has a beloved icon of St George with his lance raised. She chats with the saint like an old friend, but wonders why, in the picture, he stays frozen mid-thrust and why ‘he hadn’t killed the dragon years ago’.
‘Dreaming spires’? Yes, but sometimes there are nightmares. Brian Martin, awarded the MBE for services to English literature, is at home in Oxford, where he spent most of his career teaching, and seems to know all about the professional and psychological complexities of the university. Holt College, his fourth novel, written with dedicated probity and
‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van
Sea Shepherd is a radical protest group made famous — or notorious — by the American cable TV series Whale Wars and by the support of numerous Hollywood celebrities and rock stars. Having previously concentrated on obstructing whale-hunting from Japan to the Faroe Islands, it now focuses on other devastating acts of marine plunder. In
I’m bored.’ ‘Read a book.’ This sequence more or less summarises my childhood (along with ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Eat some fruit.’) At the time, such instruction was loathsome and it never ceased to amaze me that the grown-ups didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I had obviously considered, and rejected, the idea of picking up
The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on
The latest assignment was to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Long before Twitter, so urban legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini-masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turned out to be a load
By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio in rue La Boétie, in the ritzy 8th arrondissement, owner of a country mansion in the north-west, towards Normandy, and was chauffeured around in an adored Hispano-Suiza. He stored the thousands of French francs from
In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art: Graham Sutherland was going to be the leading painter. ‘Then downstage left, picking his nose, Francis Bacon sauntered on. And the whole scene was changed.’ But how did it alter? What happened to figurative painting
You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the first thing to say is that it is exceptionally violent. I don’t say this disapprovingly but if your threshold for violence is as low as mine — I incurred a paper cut
He looks like an absent-minded watchmaker, or a homeless chess champion, or a stray physics genius trying to find his way to the Nobel Prize ceremony. He’s in his early sixties, tall and stooping, a bit thin on top, wearing a greatcoat and a crumpled polo-neck jumper. A blur of whiskers obscures the line of
By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas of 2016. Produced by Ryan Murphy, it laid out the story in a beautifully clear, largely chronological way that made us appreciate, all over again, just how strange the whole O.J. business was — not