The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The most restless, resilient, rapacious rock & roll group in the world is on the move again. Less than two weeks after finishing a routinely Herculean tour of Latin America with an epochal show in Cuba, the Rolling Stones were back in their London hometown, disrupting traffic on the King’s Road as Mick Jagger, Keith
A few weeks ago, I looked out on the Cathedral of Monreale from the platform on which once stood the throne of William II, King of Sicily. From there nearly two acres of richly coloured mosaics were visible, glittering with gold. In the apse behind was the majestic figure of Christ Pantocrator — that is,
There was a genteel brouhaha last year — leaders in the Times, letters to the Telegraph, tutting in the galleries — about the British Museum’s decision to play Pan-pipe music into its exhibition Celts: Art and Identity. Did the gold torcs and coin hoards sparkle the more for the looped song of Pan-pipes? Not really,
In recent years there’s been a fashion for arts documentaries presented by celebs rather than boring old experts — presumably on the grounds that knowledge and insight are no match for vague enthusiasm and a touch of showbiz glamour. (In a particularly gruesome episode of ITV’s Perspectives, Pop Idol winner Will Young established his credentials
It was a toss-up on Sunday between the atmosphere in the Radio Five Live Sports Extra studio in Kolkata for the last over of the cricket world cup (England versus West Indies) and the high-velocity drama of that evening’s episode of The Archers. Which was the more dramatic? In one room my husband was shouting
Sunset Boulevard is a tale of fractured glory with Homeric dimensions. The movie presents Hollywood as a never-ending Trojan War that attracts fresh generations of dreamy youths in search of conquest and treasure. The lead characters have retired from battle, wounded. Joe Gillis, like Odysseus, is a vagrant warrior ensnared in the island-mansion of Norma
Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a combination of exorbitant expense and a languid disdain for the little Britons with their Johnny-come-lately ballet tradition (not even one century old, let alone three and a half). So if the mountain won’t come to
The French master film-maker Jacques Audiard has never been anywhere near Hollywood plot school. His films contain gathering menace — something somewhere is going to go horribly wrong — but where the menace will come from, and who will get hurt, is anyone’s guess. In his astonishing prison drama A Prophet the threat to its
The intransigence of Maxwell Davies, Boulez and Stockhausen is coming home to roost. Here were three composers, famous if not exactly popular, who called many shots by the time they died yet whose works were little loved in their lifetimes by the concert-going public and stand little chance of performance now they are dead. How
Comic opera is no laughing matter. Seriously, when was the last time you laughed out loud in the opera house? The vocal slapstick of Gianni Schicchi, laid on six banana skins deep? The farcical plot convulsions of Il barbiere? What about the arrival of Mozart’s ‘Albanians’ in Così? (Oh, those moustaches! Oh, those naughty boys!)
Peter Popham is commendably quick off the blocks with this excellent account of the run-up to last November’s Burmese general election, in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept the board. At the time of writing this review, Suu is taking four ministries, including foreign affairs. So she will do what she
All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress of a riot as it spreads across a rundown London estate. When Ruben, a black man of fragile nature, is accidentally killed in a police action, his friends and neighbours gather to protest his needless
Many of the great faith narratives (the Holy Quran being a notable exception) are clumsy, rough-hewn things; makepiece amalgams of different texts from an abundance of sources that have been gradually hacked together over hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of years. Most have been found useful or resonant (spiritually and politically) at various stages
This is a very upsetting book. The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond spent a year and a half living in low-income housing in Milwaukee — first in a trailer park on the mostly white South Side and later in a rooming house in the black inner city. Desmond himself plays no part in the body of
The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it could. The ‘Homintern’, a wry play on that, was first coined at Oxford by Maurice Bowra and gladly passed on by Cyril Connolly, Auden and others, inferring an international homosexual network of mutual interest and
While reading this book in a London café, I was politely buttonholed by an Irishman: ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I saw what you were reading and wondered how far back it went.’ I answered that, as it was a group biography of the men who led the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, it began
Garth Greenwell’s debut novel is as dreary and oppressive as the Soviet-era apartment buildings among which it takes place. But presumably this was intentional. Having grown up in a rural backwater where ‘disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me’, the book’s American narrator, a teacher in Sofia, seeks to escape
Every second novel is fated to be measured against its predecessor; and that comparison is particularly hard when the debut in question was acclaimed (Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize) or held to exemplify some modish literary sub-genre. Fagan’s style was tagged as ‘gritty Scottish realism’, and ill-served by comparisons
His professional achievements aside, Quentin Blake’s life has been rather short on biographical event, so this book is not a biography. (That gets dispatched briefly in a six-page timeline.) Rather, it’s a grateful appreciation — partisan, certainly, but well argued — of all that this remarkable artist has given us. Through his books, his pictures
Spectator readers know Andrew Taylor from his reviews of crime fiction. Many will also know him as an admirable writer of the stuff. In a recent issue, however, he remarked that there are fewer murders now, and added that this made things difficult for crime novelists. Detection has been taken over by the scientists, DNA
The Iliad begins with a grudge and ends with a funeral. In between are passages, if not necessarily of boredom, to alter the war adage, of lists, pathos, sex, humour, fairytale strangeness (golden fembots, a talking horse) and lyric images, punctuated by moments of pure terror (eyes popped out of heads, a spear throbbing in
This biography of the craven Romantic and self-confessed ‘Pope of Opium’ concludes with the ominous words: ‘We are all De Quinceyan now.’ His life was shambolic but his legacy is strong. Many spores from his fevered mind have lodged in modern popular culture: his narcotic excursions inspired Baudelaire and Burroughs, his sensitivity to place influenced
Sunset Boulevard Coliseum, in rep until 7 May Sunset Boulevard is a tale of fractured glory with Homeric dimensions. The movie presents Hollywood as a never-ending Trojan War that attracts fresh generations of dreamy youths in search of conquest and treasure. The lead characters have retired from battle, wounded. Joe Gillis, like Odysseus, is a
I’ve turned up at my local cinemas for quite a few of the live ballet relays that now represent a major arm of outreach to the masses by the Royal Ballet and other world companies. Wending my way through the blockbuster queues at Odeons and Empires, I’ve alarmingly often found myself among only 15 or
His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite toy: they tried to tempt him with Meccano, but fate had struck’. Trench is a dentist, trapped by his chosen profession in a godforsaken Central American hellhole. Greene ponders the way, when we are very
Faith, has it really been two score years and ten? It has you know. Well, would you credit that? I know. Fifty years! Seems appropriate, though. What? That he’d leave this day. For sure. I mean, of all the days to pick! This one would be among the best. Possibly the very best. You’re not
The invitation to supply a short story entitled ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’ was inspired by Ivan Turgenev’s novella of the same name. Turgenev’s Tchulkaturin; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; Goncharov’s Oblomov: these ‘superfluous men’ are not simply literary types, says the critic David Patterson, but represent a ‘paradigm of a person who has lost a point,
Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this week is the first stirring of a future stuffed with virtual reality headsets. The hope of its Californian engineers and their bitcoin backers is that we, the consumers, will soon use them to spend a
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile. But it turns out it was another writer of a different type of fiction who was directly involved. M.R. James, author of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, amassed some of the exhibits in his