The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I have always loved Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. I now have an equal fondness for Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material (Heinemann, £14.99), which is a reworking of the Black Country classic translated to a Punjabi corner shop in Wolverhampton. Every bit as rich and sad and comic as the original. Meanwhile, back in the subcontinent, M.J. Carter’s The Strangler
I’ve reviewed only a handful of books in 2014, but have struck lucky twice. Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (Quercus, £25) is one of the most moving books I’ve read for ages: a brilliant portrait of Leningrad in the Nazi blockade, culminating in the astonishing events surrounding the first performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony by a
I haven’t read any books published this year —or last year, come to that. That disqualifies me — doesn’t it? Read the other Spectator books of the year
Newsnight‘s decision to interview misogynist comedian Daniel ‘Dapper Laughs’ O’Reilly has been slammed as a cynical ratings grab, a descent even from the depths plumbed by devoting 15 minutes to Russell Brand’s latest booky-wook. The criticism is misplaced, however. In both interviews, the respective hosts, Emily Maitlis and Evan Davis, dissected their subjects’ work and
We know what to expect from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. Africans in tribal dress. Flame-haired girls posing with animals. Nudes, generally grotesque: obese hanging bellies, a limb missing here or there. Wizened (but wise!) faces. Low-level child pornography. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery was fortunate to avoid the wandering gaze of Operation Yewtree.
The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs by Mikita Brottman (William Collins, £16.99). I have read thousands of books in my 81 years and this is the only one that has made me happy. Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the real world
Sheridan Morley was an old enemy of mine, so I was thrilled to see him brilliantly denounced and called to account by Jonathan Croall in his first-class book about writing a book, In Search of Gielgud: A Biographer’s Tale (Herbert Adler Publishing, £10.95). Morley is called an ‘arrogant, self-important and spectacularly lazy hack’, whose work was ‘sycophantic
Arnie mania struck the capital last night. A thousand fans crowded into the Lancaster London Hotel to see Schwarzenegger in conversation with Jonathan Ross. He came bounding on stage, in a Club Class business suit, and peered out at us with a glazed, lipless smile. He has dark tufty hair, an ochre tan, and a
I couldn’t work out whether Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (Ebury, £14.99) was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Tamar Cohen’s The Broken (Doubleday, £6.99) was that miracle
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison (Collins, £25). Brave man to take on the biography of Vita, and he has brought it off superbly. So many facets, so many talents, so rich and full a life. Where do you start? Aristocrat, writer, greatly underrated novelist, garden creator, poet, wife, mother, friend, lover —
Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins (Simon & Schuster, £20). We’ve had biographies of great artists and writers, their spouses and children and their children’s pets. Here’s one about the place where most of them, from Jack Kerouac to Sid Vicious, seem to have hung out: the glamorously seedy Chelsea Hotel in New York. Not
Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire (Allen Lane, £25) is a stylish history of the British empire, told through its cities in sunny, civilised prose. He begins with the bungling of the American colonies and ends with Britain’s bewilderment as its own cities in turn become ‘colonised’. Constantine Phipps’s What You Want (Quercus, £20) is a verse
Being a slow reader, I first try the shortest, or anyway shorter, works of famous novelists unknown to me. This year, with many misgivings, I read The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (Penguin, £8.99) and was shocked and impressed by the intensity of the sex and violence he describes at a military boarding school in
Monsieur Dior: Once Upon a Time by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni (Pointed Leaf Press, £47.50) is the most exotic book I have seen this year. It came in a box, with a slinky silk ribbon. The text, by Antonia Fraser’s fashion-expert daughter, is excellent, but it is the superb photos which make the book. They show Dior dressing
If you follow dance or music closely, make them part of your life, you look on certain performers as your daemon. These are the artists who become part of your inner landscape. They act as a tuning fork for your emotions and imagination. And you mark their progress with particular hope that you won’t be
Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued, warming to his theme, ‘even in later times, and in periods of miserable decline, that country, Mother of the arts, never had a son so uninventive, nay, so palsied, directly the model failed him’. It
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic soloists in flamenco and Indian kathak, the front-page news of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement, and, even more astonishingly, English National Ballet’s announcement of its new Giselle next year by Akram Khan. Consequently I have to short-change
Go slow at Dagenham. The musical based on the film about a pay dispute in the 1960s starts as a sluggish mire of twee simplicities. We’re in Essex. Grumbling Cockney wage slaves inhabit cramped but spick-and-span council flats. Russet-cheeked kiddiwinkies are scolded and cosseted by blousy matriarchs married to emotionally reticent beer guts. The doll’s-house
The Imitation Game is a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who broke the German’s Enigma code during the war, created the blueprint for the modern computer and was then hounded to death by the authorities for being gay, the bastards. It’s a fascinating story, as well as one of those
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was effete, pink-and-white pretty, theatrical and mother-adored, with a stodgy brother (but a couple of compliant sisters) —a cliché of post-Edwardian sniffiness, a leer through raised lorgnettes. A humdrum early education followed by Harrow might have
Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as a festival work, celebrating qualities that we rarely reflect on, but are of the utmost importance. In his fine essay on the opera, David Cairns writes that it encompasses ‘love, joy, physical and spiritual contentment,
At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British troops and held in a German PoW camp stepped up to the microphone and began to speak. Not in Hindi or Urdu, Telugu or Marathi but in perfectly clipped English. He tells his audience, a
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our war in Afghanistan was largely the creation of the Army, which sorely needed a renewed sense of military purpose after the debacle in Iraq. As a taxpayer, this appals me. As the parent of a
Where did they all go? Thickets of love and pain rustle in a dry light and skeins of corvidae traipse to a dusk roost. Time is a flip book. Lift your dear hand and feel the pages purr as years fan by in their lost variegations of green, gold, brown, and an old cat, white
Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-style erotica, what keep the tills ringing are misery memoirs. The shelves are groaning with them. Their titles can vary from the merely toe-curling (Cry Silent Tears) to the queasily exploitative (Please, Daddy, No), but
I had the misfortune to meet Lord Richards on probably the darkest day of his 42 years in the military. In July 2009 I went to visit the then Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces in his office on the edge of Salisbury plain and we spoke about his career, and the army in general. All the
A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’. History is ‘littered’ with such heads. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica
We live in a world in which nuance is trampled on and cannot survive. Is that true? I don’t know. But the further point is, must authors now preface their novels with introductory letters, in which they carefully explain the central themes of their work? Epistolary prefaces in general are not remotely new: you often
A comet streaked into France in the 1930s, its fallout sending the staid echelons of haute couture into a tailspin. A mere 30 years later a rogue missile blasted into London, blowing dainty English clothes sense to smithereens. Both these thunderbolts shot the stuffing out of cloying conventionality, one with an arrow-narrow silhouette, the other