The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In 1963, when the bloom was still on the rose, Bob Dylan described Woodstock as a place where ‘we stop the clouds, turn time back and inside out, make the sun turn on and off… the greatest place’. Six years later, he wrote in Chronicles: Volume One, ‘Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and technological advances of the 1910s and 1940s are obvious. Ben Wilson has been more thoughtful, and has chosen the 1850s — or, more specifically, the years from 1851 to 1862. It was a time when,
Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed her thumbs deep into her eyelids, allowed herself to visualise a chocolate brownie and started to salivate. After work she stopped at the supermarket and bought some brownies… along with a chocolate loaf cake and
The other day, some anti-imperialist students were questioning the presence in their institutions of statues of Cecil Rhodes, a West African cockerel and, very strangely in view of her conspicuously anti-racist convictions, Queen Victoria. In response, a Guardian columnist, who has probably made less effort to learn Hindi than Queen Victoria did, amusingly said that
One of these days I will probably see a production of Don Giovanni set in a research station in the Antarctic. English Touring Opera, ambitious and valiant, haven’t gone that far yet. But Lloyd Wood’s new staging, part of an ETO threesome now hopping round the country, still makes the eyebrows shoot up. This time
To the extent I have ever thought about him, I have always viewed Jeremy Clarkson as a slight irritant. This is largely because he personifies what a type of lazy leftist believes right-wingers to be like (uninterested in culture, cultivatedly thick, casually racist). But this weekend we learnt what some of us had long-suspected: that
This is the first exhibition I’ve been to where the Prime Minister joined the hacks at the press view. A week after the Irish general election, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, came to the biggest show in Ireland devoted to the centenary of the Easter Rising. Kenny’s presence at the press launch just goes to show
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the understanding that they were authentic Sickerts. The painter took one look around, then announced genially, none of these are mine, ‘But none the worse for that!’ Were Giorgione to return to life, and take a
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: The end of raving” startat=1080] Listen [/audioplayer]At 19, I dropped out of university to pursue a career as a rave promoter. I went into business with a schoolfriend. We rose through the ranks of party promotion, founded a record label, and started an annual dance music festival. After more than
Four programmes, four very different kinds of radio, from a classically made drama to weird sonic ramblings, via the best kind of all: first-person narrative, straight to mike. On Syrian Voices this week on Radio 4 (produced by David Prest), Lyse Doucet has been talking to Syrians whose lives have been utterly changed by the
‘We have a problem. Yes. At the wind farm.’ Any conspiracy thriller with lines like that has definitely got my vote. Possibly most of you are unaware of this, because it’s not something I talk about often, but I happen to be not too fond of the things I call bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes — nor
The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact sexually loaded fantasies while dressed in the clothes of their employer, Madame, whose murder they are secretly plotting. This macabre sketch still resonates because it analyses and presages the key social transition of the 20th
The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original 1869 version, with no modifications or additions from his revised 1874 edition, which used to be called ‘definitive’ but which seems to be under a cloud nowadays. Rimsky-Korsakov’s version has been pushed right to the
High-Rise is Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, and it is deeply unpleasant, if not deeply, deeply unpleasant. (Ideally, I would wish to repeat ‘deeply’ several hundred times, but I do not have the space.) Based on the dystopian notion of tower-block residents regressing into a primitive state once societal norms and the class
You revisit an old love with wariness. Time’s passed for both of you — sharp edges have been smoothed, and reputations built. But seeing Kaash again last week, Akram Khan’s tremendous debut ensemble work, made when he was 26, revived at Sadler’s Wells now that he is 41 and a world name, I felt the
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope,
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist and sharp observer of the body’s frailties, and the mind’s — zanily explores it through the imagined senility of Vladimir Putin, once supremely powerful, now struggling to tie his laces. The horror, sadness and momentary
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked as a personal assistant to Michael Stipe, the singer in REM and, later, to Mickey Rourke. He also worked as a limo driver in Hollywood. A drug addict, he gravitated toward crystal meth, which can
Poor old Henry IV: labelled (probably unfairly) as a leper, but accurately as a usurper, he has been one of England’s most neglected monarchs. He is best known through his Shakespearean starring roles — which little resembled the real man, according to Chris Given-Wilson — and as the father of the ultimate warrior-king, Henry V,
This is a quite remarkable book. Badly written, devoid of anything even vaguely approaching a methodology, patronising, hideously mistaken on almost every page — and yet it does, inadvertently, answer the very question posed in its introduction: why are certain sections of the white working class so angry about immigration and Islam? The author is
Helen Stevenson’s daughter Clara has cystic fibrosis. Love Like Salt is an account of living with the disease, but it is much else besides. Stevenson calls it a memoir, because it is an intensely personal version of events. It is also a scrapbook, a commonplace book, a series of meditations, an exercise in self-scrutiny. It
You have to get nearly halfway through this book before it starts to show some life. Until that point, as Rowan Moore ambles in his wry manner through pages of familiar description of the capital’s built and social history, you find yourself wondering what it is all for. After all, if you choose to write
When Virgil died at Brindisium in 19 bc, on his way back to Rome from Greece, he left the Aeneid unfinished. When Seamus Heaney died in Dublin in 2013, his translation of Book VI was also unfinished, but like the whole of the original, his 1,222 lines were found to be in a publishable condition
The latest competition marked the tercentenary of Thomas Gray’s birth with an invitation to submit an ‘Elegy on a Country Churchyard’ written in the metre of his famous and enduringly popular poem. General Wolfe was a such a fan of Gray’s meditation on death and remembrance that in 1759, on the eve of the attack
When the Japanese conductor Masaaki Suzuki leads his forces in a performance of a Bach cantata, does he worry that the non-Christians in his audience will face the fires of Hell? That seems a bizarre question to ask any conductor of Bach’s music, especially one from Japan, where only one per cent of the population
Laurence Fox has this week joined an increasing band of actors hitting back at misbehaving audience members who seem to forget that they are in public rather than their own living room. He ramped up the drama by launching a foul-mouthed attack on a heckler before storming offstage during a live performance at a London theatre.
Every now and then, a costume drama comes along that’s so daringly unconventional as to make us re-examine our whole idea of what the form can achieve. ITV’s Doctor Thorne, though, isn’t one of them. Instead, Julian Fellowes’s adaptation of Anthony Trollope observes the usual rules with almost pathological fidelity. Extras dance gamely in ballrooms,
Hurrah for Radio 3 and its (long-overdue) efforts to give us music not just performed by women but composed, and conducted, by them too. Last year’s innovative day of programming for International Women’s Day introduced us to composers many of us had never heard of, such as Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Barbara Strozzi,
Anomalisa is an animated film written by Charlie Kaufman, and while the temptation is to label it a midlife crisis movie, because labels make life so much easier, it is not that clear-cut, just as it never is with Kaufman, who has always refused to explain himself. (Asked what his films are about, his stock