The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
David Sedaris is my new hero. Not because he’s such a funny writer, but because he’s obsessed with litter. He told a group of MPs last week that he spends up to five hours a day picking up fast food containers and fag ends around his home in Pulborough, west Sussex. Thanks to his unstinting
Truth, Lies, Diana Charing Cross Theatre, in rep until 14 February John Conway’s sensationalist play, Truth, Lies, Diana, is a forensic re-examination of the circumstances surrounding the princess’s death in 1997. The issue of Prince Harry’s paternity, which earned the play much advance publicity, reaches no conclusions. James Hewitt co-operated with the show and Conway portrays
Reading Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, as I have recently, you cannot help but be struck by what a perfectly idyllic place rural England must have been (at least for a young man of independent means) in the run-up to the first world war. Sassoon wrote it, of course, in middle age after he’d served
‘If I see something I like I wish to tell someone else; this… is why I paint.’ Patrick George is 91, still painting ‘some of the best work he’s ever done’, in Andrew Lambirth’s view. ‘His principal aim is to point out, to those of us less well-trained to observe, how marvellous the appearance of
Which of us, as an adolescent, did not experience at some point a terrible sense of not belonging? Which of us did not yearn for a door to open into a place entirely elsewhere? At that liminal time in our lives, we constantly search for new thresholds, over which we might find ourselves — or
Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel, imagining an Islamic government taking power in France in 2022, has been widely assumed to be an act of pure provocation. He is, after all, the author who faced legal trouble after having said in an interview in 2001: ‘La religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam.’ Soumission (Submission) was
In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had been sent by the Bibliothèque Imperiale to bid on their behalf at the sale of the Savile collection of rare manuscripts, and though he did not have the funds to compete with the big players
The long, happy and unlikely marriage of the great Conservative leader Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne, 12 years his senior, is analysed thoughtfully in Daisy Hay’s new book. Reading between the lines, it is possible to see the Disraelis as a Victorian power couple not unlike the Underwoods in Netflix’s remade House of Cards
Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those of a creative kind by high-profile writers: De Quincey, Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, Henri Michaux, William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda. The most useful, so far as social policy is concerned, are those by low-profile operators in the
Proust had his cork-lined bedroom; Emily Dickinson her Amherst hidey-hole; Mark Twain a gazebo with magnificent views of New York City. Where, then, did the father of English poetry do his work? From 1374 till 1386, while employed supervising the collection of wool-duties, Chaucer was billeted in a grace-and-favour bachelor pad in the tower directly
Orfeo Royal Opera, Camden Roundhouse, in rep until 24 January What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of
Mr S’s colleague Tanya Gold writes in this week’s issue of The Spectator, that Eddie Redmayne is ‘very good’ in The Theory of Everything even if the Stephen Hawking biopic fails to mention that the physicist was ‘a very bad husband indeed’. Script issues aside, the judges at the Golden Globes were also won over by Redmayne’s performance,
‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ Groucho Marx wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1961 on receiving from him a signed studio portrait. The Missouri-born Eliot was the Marx Brothers’ devoted fan; three years later, in June 1964, Groucho called on the 75-year-old poet at his home in London. Eliot was interested in the
In 1933, two new students met on their first day at Glasgow School of Art. From then on they were inseparable. They lived and worked together. They became lovers. They stayed together throughout their lives. They shone at art school, then came to London, where their robust paintings soon became very fashionable. Yet a few
Michael Kennedy, who died on New Year’s Eve, was the Sunday Telegraph’s music critic when I was for a while assistant arts editor there about 20 years ago. He was of course musically knowledgeable beyond reproach, but his writing had the compulsive readability of a man who was always a journalist, a storyteller. He was elitist in
The moon comes knocking on our door; a slavish stalker who hangs around all night. The slowest of walkers, he matched at an equal distance each of our homeward steps. We close our door on him, push him out only to find he’s already skirted the house, taken the side alley, slipped the padlocked gate,
Foxcatcher is a crime drama (of sorts) that has already been dubbed ‘Oscarcatcher!’ as it barely puts a foot wrong. It is tautly directed, deftly written, thoroughly gripping and offers psychological heft as well as sublime performances all round, even from Steve Carell’s prosthetic nose, which deserves a nomination in and of itself. (Schnozzle of
There were two new albums I wanted for Christmas — the Bryan Ferry and the Pink Floyd — and to my delight I got both. Others may prefer the unknown and the experimental as presents, but at this time of year I favour the pop music equivalent of a decent scarf or a new pair
The Young Vic produces shows that please many but rarely me. Its big hit of 2014, A Streetcar Named Desire, won virtually every prize going apart from the one it deserved: the year’s deadliest assault on a much-loved classic. The modernised setting offered us a tactless, shirty Blanche DuBois, played by Gillian Anderson as a
God, it must be awful to have been at school with James Corden. As he sat fatly at the back of the class farting and flicking bogies and distracting the teacher with his relentless smartarsery, you’ll have consoled yourself with the happy thought that at least this repellent, maddeningly irritating waster was never going to
A few forgotten objects Dad passed on: copperplate pens with long nail nibs, still stained black, one coal-fire red, laid to rest for twenty years in the shed’s office chest; a Monopoly set yanked by a seaman uncle from his sinking merchant ship U-boat torpedoed at the beginning of the second world war, but minus
You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural
Despite it being a well known fact that Antonia Fraser had earthly parents, I had always imagined that she had somehow skipped infancy and emerged instead from a celestial cloud, surrounded by hordes of trumpet-wielding cherubim, a fully-formed Venus in pink and gold and white. Turreted castles, a constant shower of sovereigns, a title, a
In 1439 Abraham of Souzdal, a Russian bishop visiting Florence, was in the audience in Santa Maria del Carmine for the famous Ascension play, arranged by the members of the lay confraternity, the Sant’Agnese. Sitting in the body of the church, Abraham looked up and saw, on top of one end of the huge stone
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion sheep, and a field 1.6 times the area of the EU. Capitalism has spared us this itching, bleating nightmare. But capitalism, Sven Beckert writes in his hair-shirted history, Empire of Cotton, has wrought other horrors.
‘I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.’ When ‘The Bumper Book of American Foreign Policy’ gets written, General James Mattis’s line to Iraqi leaders after the 2003 invasion will be an obvious choice for the cover blurb, but meanwhile it makes a striking epigraph
I am not sure if it’s properly understood quite what a crisis the short story is now in. Superficial signs of success and publicity — such as Alice Munro winning the Nobel, or the establishment of another well-funded prize — are widely mistaken for a resurgence. But what has disappeared — and disappeared quite recently
Whether by chance or bold design, the Royal Opera’s two Christmas shows were written at precisely the same moment, between 1857 and 1859, and both mark a high point of refinement in their respective traditions. Both Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Verdi’s Ballo in maschera sometimes give the impression of being entranced by their abstract
‘So — take heart,’ said Alan Bennett, sending us out from his play, Cocktail Sticks, on a cheery note. The treatment for cancer had been gruelling, but that was 15 years ago, so… This Radio 4 production was adapted (and produced) by Gordon House from the stage version at the National Theatre but was perfectly