The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent majority out there who daren’t speak for fear of the Twitter ordure that would fall on them. The box office and the empty seats attest to them. You’ll have not the smallest difficulty in booking
About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is
I am thinking about you Annie now that you are no longer a few miles of motorway and a couple of roundabouts from us here. I am remembering the meals, the easy chat and coffee; farewell coats and hugs in a doorway; that holiday we shared in Brixham, the fear of the foot noise on
Walking to the bus stop after a hospital visit, in an unfamiliar, dusty suburb, I pass a small park on the left with a stream which dives under the road, and here only a few feet away, by the water, is a heron — surely larger than life and with each feather accurately modelled. I
Knowing he was ill he offered a free choice of the books on his shelves, but for every one wanted said, ‘Couldn’t bear to let that go’, and died two weeks later. Seers That age when if out and about you rigorously avoid shop mirrors, or any reflective surface, not wanting to see who looks
Until Poland applied to join the EU in the 1990s, the biggest single influx of Poles into this country was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. Around 200,000 Poles who had fought for the Allies chose to seek refuge here, rather than return to their homeland and face life under Stalin. Many of
I wish I could pull off the Anthony Burgess stunt and recommend books of my own — Erotic Vagrancy, about Burton and Taylor, and Growing Up With Comedians, about, well, comedians. Both are doing well on Amazon and have garnered wonderful reviews. They are clearly my most successful and esteemed achievements. Unfortunately, neither title actually
Why is it that gardening in the public prints is so often treated as a fluffy subject for fluffy people? Writing that a plant is ‘incredibly beautiful’ or that everyone is ‘really passionate’ about their allotment/community garden/windowbox doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate substitute for telling thoughtful gardeners something they didn’t know already.
There can be no good reason why Graham Johnson’s marvellous three-volume encyclopaedia of Schubert’s songs has been so neglected by reviewers over the past year. There are two possible bad ones: the price, which at £200 may deter the faint-hearted (though at nearly 3,000 pages it would justify twice the outlay); and the fact that
Suddenly, the Maldivians are in the news. Earlier this year, they locked up their first democratically elected president, and just recently they declared a state of emergency. It never used to be like this. The Maldives was just a place you saw in brochures, looking expensively turquoise. It has a population no bigger than Barnet
Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged 21, I stayed frequently at the large north London house where Klugmann (1912–1977) stored the overflow of his vast library. My hosts, who treated me almost as family, were members of the Communist party, as
30-Second Shakespeare: 50 key aspects of his works, life and legacy, each explained in half a minute sounds trivial, but it isn’t. The purpose of this short, beautifully presented and fully illustrated guide is not to feed vain show-offs with sound-bites to give them something clever to say at dinner parties but, as Ros Barber
Beware hedonists bearing white powder. This, in part, was the message pressed in a short book about the excesses of the Jacobean court written by a Scottish Catholic physician and occasional counterfeiter, George Eglisham. The Forerunner of Revenge, published in Antwerp in 1626 in English and Latin, quickly gained notoriety across Europe for its particular
‘Mystery comes through clarity’, is how Rupert Thomson recently described the effect he was trying to achieve in writing. It’s an apt phrase for his latest book, Katherine Carlyle. Thomson has previously published nine novels but has never achieved wide public recognition, partly because of their lack of uniformity. This, though, is what has attracted
When archaeologists unearthed the battered mortal remains of King Richard III beneath a council car park in Leicester in 2012, they not only made the historical find of the century (so far) but unleashed a veritable frenzy of media attention on a ruler already the most notorious in English history. A stream of books, articles
Lord Palmerston is remembered today not for his foreign policy nor for his octogenarian philandering, but for his management of the press. He was the first prime minister to grasp that dealing with journalists was all about pragmatic negotiation and buttering people up. The deal between Palmerston and the newspapers was: ‘I’ll tell you something
Sir Alistair Horne, like that other great knight of military history, Sir Michael Howard, served in the Coldstream Guards during the second world war. According to Clausewitz (in Vom Kriege), his judgment will therefore be invested with insight denied to those who have never been shot over: As long as we have no personal knowledge
These Collected Poems, published halfway through Carol Ann Duffy’s time as poet laureate, make clear that she is a true Romantic poet in the tradition of Byron, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Ridler and Elizabeth Bishop. In his introduction to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined Romantic poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. And these
Nowadays a vampire is usually a Transylvanian in need of an orthodontist. But, as Nick Rennison demonstrates in this entertaining anthology, it was not always so. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was simply one of a crowd when it was published in 1897. Nor was the novel particularly successful at the time. It was only in the
‘Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army, or President of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr Custis?’ asked John Adams. The answer, says Flora Fraser, is no. We like to see our ‘men of destiny’ as striding the world alone before stepping onto the customary
Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (Heinemann, £20) is the year’s most surprising book. I expected a dour, lumbering tract about the dehumanising influence of new technologies, social media and information overload. Instead, I found a real flirt of a book. It’s full of impish gaiety, elegant and lithe
My top title of the year is Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Cape, £16.99), convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists, and that James Joyce, were he alive today, would be working for Google. I also enjoyed Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (Granta, £14.99), a self-deconstructing novel whose metafictional plot speaks of the
It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We knew how to fly before we realised it was no longer necessary to huff-and-puff baggage by hand. Even odder, steam and electricity were well understood before anyone got around to developing the ingeniously simple pedal-and-crank
‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing and portrait-painting.’ This doesn’t sound like a bad set of cultural baggage, even for those who don’t care for the races. There is clearly a lot to be said for trial by
It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign in Syria — and not a word was spoken. Martha Kearney called it an ‘audio graphic’ on the World at One on Monday and explained how Neal Razzell and James Beard for the World Service
The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt and turn on their evil captors, Ant and Dec. The sparky Geordie comedy duo will be imprisoned in a semi-submerged, rat-infested cage like the one in The Deer Hunter, fed on a diet of liquidised
Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like Clueless and Manhattan. He’s also a playwright whose new script has received its world première at the National Theatre. Lucky chap. He spent three or four years writing Evening at the Talk House and it
Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard film to feel anything for. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, this is a love story that, here, doesn’t venture below the waist, literally, emotionally or metaphorically. It glides across
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed. Those dark days — caught between Baroque