The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
No one owns a Kindle for very long without becoming obsessed by its social highlighting feature: unless you go into the preferences to turn it off, the glibbest and most epigrammatic sentences in any popular book begin to appear with dotted lines underneath them and the words ’19 [or however many] people highlighted this’. Our
Stars, playwrights and even set designers are constantly being lionised in the papers. But why not producers? They, after all, are the ones who choose the plays, the stars, and then make it all happen. Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliott are two veteran cigar chompers who’ve been in the business for 45 years. They’ve made
These days, as the sparrows and starlings so common in my youth are growing scarce, there’s less need for a rarity like the osprey or butcher bird (the red-backed shrike) to raise awareness of the plight of birds, and with Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day you might say that birds are in (or on)
I prefer the music and lyrics of Pharrell Williams’s Happy to Morrisey’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (because I loathe the smug insincerity of Morrisey more than anything else) but – in case you haven’t noticed – I’m still a miserabilist. Being a glass-half-full-and-cracked-and-laced-with-poison type of gal, I can’t abide the influx of positivists that appear
Richard Linklater’s observational chronicle, Boyhood, was 12 years in the making and is 166 minutes long — that’s nearly three hours, in real money — and I wasn’t bored for a single moment. Isn’t that miraculous? Have you ever heard the like? Me, who is generally bored at the drop of a hat? Me, who
Hampstead’s new play about the 1984 miners’ strike was nearly defeated by technical glitches. Centre stage in Ed Hall’s production there’s a clanking great iron chute that stubbornly refused to go up and down when ordered. A bit like the miners. The writer, Beth Steel, is a collier’s daughter and she romanticises the pit workers
‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually has buzzers. The other side has push-button bells, instead. I’ve been watching the programme religiously for God knows how many years without ever consciously noticing this. But, once you’ve been told, it’s obvious — in
It seems incredible now but when the BBC’s youth station, Radio 1, was launched in 1967 there were no female presenters. That’s right. Not a single woman’s voice to leaven the mix of Fluff, Blackburn and co. One-half of the young people the Corporation was hoping would stay tuned beyond Listen with Mother and Children’s
I am still listening to the new Coldplay album, and liking it more and more, and not just because everyone keeps telling me how terrible it is. There is perversity in all enthusiasm, for sure, but the unanimity of critical disapproval in this case seems to have mixed with popular ennui to create a bracing
There are festivals of everything, everywhere. So why get excited about the Ryedale Festival (11–27 July) apart from the fact that it happens on my Yorkshire home ground — and I used to be its chairman? Every summer music festival proclaims the richness and variety of its menu. Ryedale, under the artistic directorship of Christopher
London is lucky to have heard Joyce DiDonato at the height of her powers in two consecutive seasons. The American mezzo has arguably done less well out of the arrangement, however, finding herself at the centre of two disappointing new productions. Last year it was Rossini’s La Donna del Lago, an intractable non-drama which John
Aesthetically speaking, last week’s performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater 1 was one by the slickest of the season. Fashionably engineered juxtapositions of black and white, sets that stun on account of their elegant simplicity and mechanical complexity, chic costumes that de-gender dancers, scores decadently à la mode and clockwork dancing came together seamlessly to
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Lloyd Evans and Kate Maltby discuss the National Theatre’s funding” startat=1261] Listen [/audioplayer]Two glorious playhouses grace the south bank of the Thames. Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre stage the finest shows available anywhere in the world. Both are kept in business by the play-going public who last year helped the Globe to
It was the First World War. Her husband was away. So she knew fear, but also found new freedom in the day. On Thursdays, with the farmer’s wife, old basket in her lap, by butter slabs, she rode to Brigg, shawled, in the pony trap. Oh how I envied her! I whined to Brigg by
Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall the genocidal killing sprees of, say, Stalin and Mao, perhaps it would be more historically accurate to say ‘to the left of Genghis Khan’. In the popular imagination he is the despot’s despot, a one-man
Over the past 12 months, I’ve proposed to my girlfriend, moved house, got married, and become a father. The most stressful of these tests, without a doubt, was moving house. Forget strappado (a torture whereby you’re strung up by your arms behind your back) or flagellation or sensory deprivation. Moving to Acton: that’s what’ll break
Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to explore new territories, her experiences recounted in a sophisticated style that Jan Morris in her introduction refers to as ‘a kind of apotheosised reportage’. Bedford’s first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, describing an expedition
Once upon a time, a powerful unkillable beast menaced the nation. It had to be tamed. It could only be tamed by a robust ethos of the common good. This gradually emerged: a new democratic spirit was born! But soon critics popped up, complaining about aspects of the new order, calling it stifling, limiting, pompous
A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding
With Elvis has Left the Building, the longstanding editor of GQ has inexplicably written a book that could serve as a handy, if perhaps overly comprehensive, compendium of bad journalistic habits: from the over-arching flaw of failing to decide what you want to say to such specifics as the excessive use of the phrase ‘American
‘Phlogiston’ is an interesting, if obsolete, word. Of Greek origin, it referred to the ‘fire-making’ quality thought to be present in, among other things, the ashes gathered by London dustmen. In the mid-18th century these ashes were mixed with earth and even ‘excrements taken out of the necessary houses’ to create the vast numbers of
Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to
‘At the Sign of the Cross in St James’s Street, When next you go thither to make yourselves sweet By buying of powder, gloves, essence, or so, You may chance to get a sight of Signior Dildo.’ So wrote John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in 1673. But the era of having to go to St
What’s the difference between Kanye West and the space cadets of Speakers’ Corner? Without having access to their bank statements, the biggest distinction between the two parties is that when Mr West (‘Yeezus’ to his friends) played a gig in London on Friday, he was standing on a state-of-the-art stage set rather than a stolen
My Bed, one of the works that failed to win Tracey Emin the Turner Prize (she lost to Steve McQueen in 1999), made £2.2m at Christie’s this week, going to an anonymous buyer. Charles Saatchi, who put it up for auction, had bought it for £150,000 in 2000. It has apparently lost none of its
We may have had the verdicts and the sentences in the hacking trial, but the biggest question remains unanswered: who’s going to play everyone in the movie? There’s one clear and obvious frontrunner for the part of Rebekah Brooks: Bonnie Langford. Sadly, however, Ms Langford has heavy panto commitments and cannot be released for filming.
The illustrator Quentin Blake is uncannily like one of his own creations: tousled, bright-eyed, quizzical, and apologetic about his summer cold. He greeted me warmly and conducted me down a dimly lit hallway into his lair, a studio giving on to a leafy London square, piled high with the tools of his trade: papers teetering
As the boundary between auction house and art dealer blurs yet further, with auctioneers acting increasingly by private treaty as well as taking over commercial galleries, and as West End gallery space becomes ever more expensive, alternative exhibiting venues are being sought with growing urgency. One solution is to move further into corporate territory, and
A court-martial — followed by an execution: not exactly promising ingredients for a musical. But Ross Clark’s new music drama Shot at Dawn turns out to be unexpectedly moving. On the outbreak of the first world war, Adam, a farm labourer, enlists in the army, despite being underage, and is later shot for cowardice; his