The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Two months ago I was sitting beside the tomb of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, telling a story about the last week of the Prophet’s life. It was detailed enough to paint an imaginary portrait of him and included a mildly ribald joke from one of his wives, told to him on his deathbed
It starts in darkness. And no, it’s not a metaphor for the crooked timber of the human heart, it’s just bad lighting. Stanley Kubrick sourced his cameras from NASA in order to capture candlelight in his eighteenth-century epic Barry Lyndon; director Peter Kosminsky’s techniques in Tudor drama Wolf Hall seem decidedly sublunary by comparison. And it’s not just
In the summer fields your life left you. She ran out from under the hood of your heart and tottered across tarmac on clippy-cloppy hoofs like a teenage girl in heels. No time to notice the strange evening light, the sun low down on the green high crops, only time to brake and watch her
I’ve never been into shoplifting, though I once had a friend who was. And, no, before you ask, I’m not using that old ‘friend’ device to hide my own identity. She was a girl I met at university. Bookshops were her hunting ground. I’m assuming she was driven by some sort of compulsion because she
A knockout show at the Young Vic. Literally. The stage has been reconfigured as a boxing ring to make Mike Bartlett’s play, Bull, feel like a sporting fixture. This is a common conceit, even a cliché, but here it’s done superbly. The auditorium floor is squash-club yellow and the stage is surrounded by a casual
A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what it actually is. (What’s new?) Set in New York City in 1981, against the improbable background that is the heating oil business (it’s sexier than you’d think), this isn’t quite a gangster film and it
Probably the two greatest advances in western culture in my lifetime have been the Sopranos-style epic serial drama and the advent of TV on demand and/or the DVD box set. I don’t think I’m saying anything weird or contentious — or indeed original — here. For example, I’m writing these words at the end of
To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on New Year’s Day must have been both wonderful and a bit weird. Like soaking in an ever-replenishing warm bath, indulgent, luxuriant, all-absorbing. Yet at the same time I imagine it was quite hard by the
‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’ He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that
Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian maharajah who had been exiled to England, her mother the Cairo-born illegitimate daughter of a German merchant and an Abyssinian slave. The young princess was brought up in considerable splendour on a vast Suffolk estate
I would love to sit in on a Jonny Steinberg interview. Over the years this South African writer has perfected a form of reverse ventriloquism, in which he becomes the mouthpiece for the Africans whose lives intrigue him. I’d like to know how he does it. The process must require relentless badgering, as interview is
Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress, then tie them up and gag them with their own underwear, and set fire to the place. However, See How Small is not interested in the why or the who, but rather in the lives
What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea explored in Brian Aldiss’s sassy retelling of the stories of two prominent women of Thebes. In two novellas, Jocasta, Wife and Mother and Antigone, Aldiss puts both women and their emotional lives centre-stage, as they
I have a rule: to ignore the prologue of a crime novel, especially if it’s printed in italics and written in the present tense. Almost always it will be violent, unnecessary and will give far too much away about coming events. I like to be unsettled. I like a story to build at its own
One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book, particularly if it comes into the category of ‘not a suitable present for your great-aunt’. I always dislike this duty, since it spoils surprises, which are the essence of enjoyment in reading; but Adam Thirlwell’s
Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will Boast spent years trying to turn his life story into fiction, but eventually gave up and wrote an autobiography. In Epilogue, he describes how his mother died of brain cancer when he was in his
As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless enterprise involved things like staining paper with tea or vinegar, together with plenty of burning, and creasing, and copying of random texts with a scratchy old inkwell pen. Typical silly small boy stuff. Reading this
This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends with his breakthrough novel, Changing Places, in the rather better year, 1975. A master-practitioner of narrative, Lodge chooses to write with an artful flatness which recalls Frank Kermode’s similarly self-depreciative memoir, Not Entitled. Lodge’s career
The author of this primer to the long-overdue Chilcot report, a retired sapper (Royal Engineers) major-general, nails his colours to the mast in the opening paragraph. The British High Command made a number of judgments with poor outcomes in the decade from 2000 to 2010 when fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan… The outcome in some
For those who imagine the medieval period along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail — knights, castles, fair maidens, filthy peasants and buckets of blood and gore (you know, all the fun stuff) — Johannes Fried’s version may come as something of an aesthetic shock. His interests lie in the more rarefied
One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear the master, the stranger questioned Tolstoy about his latest beliefs. Satisfied, he left later that day. But then he returned with a written confession. He was an undercover policeman, sent to check on what Tolstoy
Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in the present where the pen as a weapon against bigotry and hypocrisy has suddenly achieved iconic status. But hold up, let’s not get carried away. We’re talking about Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Though its eponymous poet
Andrea Chénier Royal Opera House, in rep until 6 February Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in the present where the pen as a weapon against bigotry and hypocrisy has suddenly achieved iconic status. But hold up, let’s not get carried away.
Yesterday saw Labour’s shadow minister for the arts, Chris Bryant MP, amusingly and justly savaged by the pop star James Blunt for some ill-advised remarks about the predominance of public school boys in the arts: he cited both the Old Harrovian Blunt and the Old Etonian Eddie Redmayne as evidence of a lack of diversity. Now,
The Merry Widow Met Opera Live ‘Even today, at 75, the waltz from The Merry Widow sends me into a fit of rage,’ wrote Richard Strauss to his close collaborator Clemens Krauss in 1940. In a brilliant piece in his book Essays and Diversions Robin Holloway discusses why that waltz, and indeed the whole of
Normally, few things in life are quite so tedious as listening to a bunch of academics discussing pop music. However this week’s Kraftwerk Konferenz at Aston University may be the chinwag that refutes this rule. Why so? Well, speakers includes former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flur, plus Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire and Rusty Egan of
The recent call for publicity blurbs that sell the bible to a modern audience attracted a host of new competitors as well as the old-timers. Kieran Corcoran’s entry presented Jesus as a social media sensation — ‘He used to have 12 followers but now he has TWO BILLION!’. Derek Morgan’s pitched the Good Book as
Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this
Almost a decade ago, David Cameron informed Tony Blair, unkindly but accurately, ‘You were the future once.’ A visitor to the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square, might mutter the same words in front of the first exhibits. It is now a century since Kazimir Malevich painted the starkest abstractions in the history