The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Walking down the sands to investigate what they might find, shells or stones, flotsam pieces abandoned by tides, two figures walking, slowly walking, beyond my sight. One small, one smaller, a boy and his mum in jeans and tops, an everyday disguise that makes them look quite like everyone else scattered about here between the
The Whitechapel Fiend is a psychic conduit for the vilest aspects of Victorian sex and class, and a creature mainly of the imagination. In 1888, the year of the murders, John Francis Brewer published The Curse Upon Mitre Square, and novels have followed from such writers as Edgar Lustgarten, Colin Wilson and Iain Sinclair. Many
Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter prattling away to us through one of the book’s famously interchangeable halves, will be glad to see her new book of short stories, Public Library and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). It looks reassuringly similar:
The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and have done with it. And indeed, Grandpa’s Great Escape (Harper Collins, £12.99), about the sympathetic friendship of a grandfather and grandson, is funny, productive of intergenerational goodwill and spikily illustrated by Tony Ross, though, as
It’s been a memorably productive year for art books (I have published a couple myself), but certain volumes stand out. Chief among the illustrated monographs is Maggi Hambling: War Requiem & Aftermath by James Cahill (Unicorn Press, £30), a spirited examination of this wonderfully unpredictable artist. The book focuses on her recent paintings and sculptures,
It might seem an odd choice, but after reading Jon Savage’s new book, I think if I had a time machine I’d now be tempted to set its controls for 13 January 1966 and the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Andy Warhol had been booked to give a speech, but
Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only afternoon delight you’re up to is a cup of tea and a soporific radio play. Wealthy New Yorker Vanessa Wonderman, Erica Jong’s 60-year-old narrator, isn’t there yet, but she can see it coming down Fifth
In March 1987, as Professor Robert Service records in his new account of the end of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow. She had been reluctant to do so, largely out of fear that such a visit would only make it easier for a credulous Reagan — as she saw him — to offer
Oliver Sacks’s autobiography On the Move (Picador, £20) is full of surprising details —for example, the eminent neurologist was a weightlifting champion in his youth who hung out with Hells Angels. Sacks — who died in August — was an inspiring person with an extraordinary breadth of interests and enthusiasms. I also enjoyed Anne Tyler’s
Richard Bourke’s Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, £30.95) is a monument of exact scholarship and careful reflection, by a long way the best book that we have on this profound and much misunderstood politician and philosopher. For those who want more thunder than even Burke can offer, Rory Muir’s Wellington:
This has been a good year for biographies, especially of all-rounders. Hugh Purcell did a lot of digging to uncover the nine lives of that secretive man John Freeman. A Very Private Celebrity (Robson Press Biteback, £25) lists them as follows: pre-war advertising executive, wartime officer (Monty called him ‘the best brigade major in the
Royalty Inc. by Stephen Bates (Aurum Press, £20) is a superb account of how ‘the Firm’ (Windsors rather than Krays) became ‘Britain’s best-known brand’. Bates is a veteran royal journalist, though much of his career was on the Guardian, which wouldn’t let him use that title. He reveals that the palace’s own term for their
At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene set in and by 1 September he was dead. He’d been on the throne for 72 of his 77 years. A new exhibition at Versailles looks at the elaborate rituals that followed. The Sun King
One day Julia Margaret Cameron was showing John Ruskin a portfolio of her photographic portraits. The critic grew more and more impatient until he came to a study of the scientist Sir John Herschel in which the subject’s hair stood up ‘like a halo of fireworks’. At this point, Ruskin slammed the portfolio shut and
Blind is an indie movie that has an original screenplay by John Buffalo Mailer and is directed by his older brother Michael Mailer. It stars Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore, and the cast includes yours truly. Personal feelings aside, and from all reports and rushes, this is going to be a really good one. Alec
Does the Queen only send telegrams to British subjects? If so, I guess the rest of us will have to celebrate Technicolor’s centenary without Her Maj’s involvement. I’ve already written about the occasion for last week’s issue of The Spectator; but I thought I’d return to it having spent most of yesterday gorging on films
Róisín Murphy, the Irish singer-songwriter, is currently touring Europe with her Mercury Prize-shortlisted new album, Hairless Toys. The album, with its odd disco-grooves, dub rhythms and dark, loopy synth sounds, combines pop futurism with a retrospective 1970s edge. The album is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an older woman looking
In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures, Elisabeth Frink’s son Lin is showing me his incredible collection of his mother’s work. More than 20 years since his mother died, he’s kept the vast bulk of it together. ‘I owe it to mum,’
Fifteen million pounds and a hefty slice of architectural vision have transformed the Whitworth from a fusty Victorian art temple into a sumptuous and thoroughly modern gallery. The space inside now channels the visitor from one gallery to another through split levels and along wide, glass-walled extensions. The great barrel-vaulted spaces at the gallery’s core
The trellis between her garden and her new neighbour’s garden is heavy with passion flower, honeysuckle and roses, so that only rare glimpses can be seen through it — a blue flower, a splash of grass, a dark cuff. She calls out politely to welcome him to the neighbourhood. Weeks later, she calls out to
Thomas Heatherwick is the most famous designer in the United Kingdom today and has an unquestionable flair for attention-grabbing creations. Before 2010 he was mostly known for a splashy public sculpture in Manchester, ‘B of the Bang’ (2005). Within weeks bits started to fall off. In 2009 it was dismantled. This was his most celebrated
Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal melancholy over the whole piece: the evanescent sweet-sadness of autumn, beautiful in its dying’. This being late autumn, I listened to the quintet on Sunday to see if its ‘distillation of Brahmsian yearning’ still made
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife to a litter of excellent things born out of curiosity and an unfussed love of culture, particularly music. A true artistic director (cf my complaint last time). On to the creative table at Rambert HQ
This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there are often times they probably wished they were. For two of them, Niklas and Horst, the journey is about confronting their fathers, who were high-ranking Nazi officials responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews,
Kenneth Branagh opens his West End tenancy with Shakespeare’s inexplicably popular The Winter’s Tale. We start in Sicily where Leontes and his queen Hermione are entertaining Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. The design is heavily Germanic. Crimson drapes shroud the grey marble columns. A massive fir tree, twinkling with candlelight, is rooted in an ornamental
The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf of the libretto in advance, which they only ever do when they think that the words or the plot are unintelligible. Thrilled to report that it was a double whammy. An introductory soliloquy was spoken
Not that long ago the BBC trumpeted a new Stakhanovite project to big up the arts in its many and various hues. And praise be, this it is jolly well doing with all sorts of dad rock docs, homages to painters and poets, while Sralan Yentob (as he surely ought at the very least to
It was as if Andrew Marr and his guests on Start the Week on Monday morning were standing on the edge of a precipice with no idea how far they would fall if they strayed too near the edge. Their conversation this week, Marr told us, would not, as usual, be a live discussion but
I am not ready for the temple but neither am I ready for the market. Leave me, I pray, a little longer amongst my icy candles that light my bitter lonely rooms. When spring comes (and the seasons follow no order) you’ll find me heading all queues of worldly bravery. Just give me a few