The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Funny Girl is the story of the early career of the vivacious, hilarious Sophie Straw, star of the much-loved BBC situation comedy Barbara (and Jim), the television programme that ran for four series in the mid-1960s, helped define its era and, crucially, does not exist. The imaginative kernel of Nick Hornby’s new novel is a
I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world war when New York supplanted Paris as the cultural capital of the world? One thinks of the Beats, of Dylan and Greenwich Village, of Sontag and Trilling. Well think again, for none of the above
Early on in this ‘Biography in Conversations’ we’re told that the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño ‘continued to see himself throughout his life as a literary character, a fictional person.’ It’s a dubious claim: we might believe that about any number of Hollywood actors, pop stars, or historical monsters, but not of the author of books
Phrases such as ‘Some aspects of…’ are death at the box-office, so it is not exactly unknown for the titles of scholarly works to promise far more than they actually deliver. Most unusually, the actual reach of Ruth Guilding’s mighty and compelling new study is far wider than the already large subject of ‘Why the
Rose Tremain walks on water. Her historical novels are absolutely marvellous, brilliantly plotted, witty and wise, with some of the best characters you’ll find anywhere. Indeed one of their number has a good claim to being the natural heir to Falstaff, his bawdy antics giving way to a more melancholy conclusion: he is to be
Something odd happened between the advance publicity for this book and its printed appearance. Trailed as addressing the troubled history of Australia’s relationship with the USA, it is actually about the troubled relationships between a cat’s cradle of everyday radical folk and set almost entirely in the suburbs of Melbourne. A washed-up old left-wing journalist,
If Stalin had been a theatre director he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood. What an outstandingly unpleasant woman she was — yet I must admit it was fun making notes on her spitefulness. Few escaped her scorn and derision: Sybil Thorndike (‘a shocking actress’), Rachel Kempson (‘she had a face like a scraped bone’), Laurence Olivier
This is a big book, a monumental text with 800 illustrations, 400 of them in colour, to be contemplated more easily on a lectern than in bed, celebrating the 75-year history of the greatest record company devoted solely to the variegated music called jazz. Blue Note Records, with headquarters in Manhattan, originated in the romantic
Economics is known as ‘the dismal science’, and certainly there have been — and indeed are — economists whose day seems to have been wasted if they have left their readers with a smile on their face. Happily such puckered-brow, down-turned-lips fellows are rarely admitted through the doors of The Spectator. For more than half
The Mediterranean glows in our conception of the Continent, the warm source of everything that is best in us, the seat of civilisation, from which one delicious wave after another has washed up on our shores. But what about the Mediterranean’s twin, the other great lobe of the Atlantic which defines the northern edge of
Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer of the 1960s, being asked to define ‘the Nashville sound’. Atkins reached into his pocket, pulled out some coins and rattled them in his hands. ‘That’s the Nashville sound,’ he said with a slightly rueful
What happens when a torrent of exceptional male stars leave the stage and flood the jobs market? Especially in a world when classical ballet appears to be becoming less fashionable, eclipsed by contemporary fashions and nervousness about audiences? The titan of the Royal Ballet and Bolshoi, Irek Mukhamedov, was renowned at Covent Garden in the
A spoof in the Israeli Daily recently had Eminem planning to convert to Judaism and move to Tel Aviv. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that any time soon – he’s not really waiting for the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Still, stranger things have happened. I was very amused by the
Allen Jones (born 1937) has been demonised. In 1969 he made a group of three sculptures of scantily-clad female figures. They were slightly larger than life and arranged in positions that enabled them (with the addition of a glass top or padded seat) to be turned into a table, a chair and a hat stand.
A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft leather skin and flexible, jointed limbs. The top-of-the-range article — described in Roberson’s catalogue as ‘Parisian stuffed’ — was pricey. Nonetheless, painters often felt they just had to have one whatever the cost. Many such
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a small display of early Soviet avant-garde theatre and film design, tucked away in the V&A’s ‘Performance’ area, proves that they beat us hollow in matters of the dressing-up box too. When you arrive (that is,
Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in any ‘formalist’ sense. If a critic called him a ‘colourist’, he would bristle; if they admired his sense of composition, he would complain that this was not what he was about at all. His was
Out on the crumbling landscape’s farthest edge, Their winter journey starts, and while I know Some names, I can’t recall from stripe of wing Or sobbish cry which honours which. And so This panic by a fading coastal ledge Is all that’s left — an urgent need to bring Old screams back round in one
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/apollomagazine/Apollo_final.mp3″ title=”Tom Marks, editor of Apollo magazine, talks to Mike Leigh”] Listen [/audioplayer]Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr Turner (Timothy Spall) as he sketches, paints, gropes his housekeeper, woos a Margate landlady, winds up John Constable something rotten. But what
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some very interesting stuff to say — as he’s demonstrating yet again in his highly entertaining new series Who Are You? (C4, Wednesdays). It ought to be ghastly and it ought to be pretentious: a trendy
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth opera and first really great, though uneven piece, Macbetto (as I think it should be called; that’s what the central figure is called throughout). Fabio Luisi showed that he is far more at home conducting
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how good they are at business, perhaps finding the prospect of them rushing into our world rather daunting. However, a part of this process has been the sudden curiosity there for western art-forms. Not long ago
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann, colleagues but of different instincts, one for dance, the other for drama. The case is currently being made for each by the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet. But how to revive the sensations
We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t it? Well it’s a pun, at least, on Devil’s Island. Tim Firth’s play, regarded as a modern classic, premiered 22 years ago in Scarborough: Ayckbourn country, and it shows. Four corporate numbskulls on a team-building
‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different points of view; where you can understand that the world is infinitely complex.’ Alana Valentine, an Australian writer, was talking about the BBC World Service with such passion it was inspiring. You might think she
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book. She’s wearing a blindfold bearing the legend ‘On Liberty’, which seems to cast her in the role of Justice — blind, and all that. The title is the same as John Stuart Mill’s famous essay
A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which farming invention had most changed their lives. Was it the tractor? Fertilisers? Pesticides? Silos? No, they agreed, it was the Wellington boot. Mortimer tells this old story to illustrate that ‘it is not always the
Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of cinema’s most literary filmmakers. He has adapted for the screen — often brilliantly — novels by J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo. In each, he has paraded his obsession with lurid mutations in human