Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

A Pole’s view of the Czechs. Who cares? You will

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When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his editor that it was likely to fail miserably. As Mariusz Szczgieł explains, the doubts were reasonable. No one was sure if anybody in the west would be interested in what a Pole had to say

Sam Leith

A horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York? No problem!

Lead book review

Aimé Tschiffely was what I have seen in other contexts called a ‘doublehard bastard’. In the middle of the 1920s, this Swiss-born schoolteacher at the age of 30 feared that he was getting stuck in a groove and that he wanted ‘variety’. So he set out on a solo horse-ride from Buenos Aires to New

When The Spectator helped butcher Richard Strauss

To be honest I’m not certain that Michael Nyman, The Spectator‘s music critic in the late 60s, was one of the performers on this infamous (and in my opinion greatest) recording of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. But what is certain is that Nyman (alongside Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars) did become an enthusiastic member

Camilla Swift

Why do so many of our MPs feel the need to write books?

It sometimes feels like there is a never-ending flood of books written by politicians delivered to the Spectator offices. Almost every week a new one – or the invitation to a book launch of a new one – comes through the door. As I type, for example, I can see Fraser’s invitation to the launch

Was Kenneth Clark wrong not to ‘understand’ the value of abstract art?

Kenneth Clark’s view of culture may by now be ‘outmoded’, but I was surprised to read that it was also ‘narrow’. An exhibition at Tate Britain about Clark’s influence, Looking for Civilisation, and the BBC’s threatening to remake the Civilisation TV series, have given rise to some depressing comment. Much mention is made of Clark’s ‘stiff’ presenting style;

Lara Prendergast

Uncovering a Royal treasure trove

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It’s rare for the public to be given access to the Royal Archives. They are housed in the forbidding Round Tower at Windsor Castle, and direct contact with them is normally reserved for erudite academics adept at buttering up the Keeper. With about two million documents relating to 700 years of the British monarchy, it

Lloyd Evans

When the big-boobed whisky monster met the upper-class snoot

Theatre

Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and destroying fortunes. He anoints a masterpiece, here. He defenestrates a forgery, there. He visits the Californian city of Bakersfield (code in America for Nowheresville) to determine the authenticity of a Jackson Pollock bought for three

Research Centre

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Beyond the measured stretch of lawns and hedges are cultivated rows where snug plastic tunnels creep. Indoors, the fantastic spores fluff up on jelly: fungus rages under glass and germination bristles. In a sealed hot-room, in tanks lined with foil predators quietly chew and scrat; aphids suck their fill of sap. A forest of corn

Steerpike

Nadine Dorries’s book is a surprise bestseller

Nadine Dorries’s novel, Four Streets, may have been unilaterally panned by the critics, with the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse labelling it the ‘the worst novel I’ve read in 10 years’, but Nadine’s first official journey into fiction has been a runaway success. It spent the last 43 days in the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon,

How to survive the rain-sodden Welsh Marches

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The Welsh Marches, gloriously unvisited amid their wooded hills and swift-flowing streams, have remained mysteriously off-limits to the sort of novelist eager for territorial rights to a particular landscape or locality. Apart from Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill and Mary Webb’s torrid 1920s sagas of heartache and claustrophobia in field and farmhouse, fiction has

Read this book and you’ll see why our meadows are so precious

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This book is a portrait of one man’s meadow. Our now almost vanished meadowland, with its tapestry of wildflowers, abundant wildlife and rich human history, has long attracted English writers. Modern meadow books are usually copiously illustrated in colour to reach the coffee-table market, but John Lewis-Stempel bravely relies on lively elegant prose. His thoughtful,

When the English cricket team toured Nazi Germany – and got smashed

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Why have the Germans never been any good at cricket? This entertaining account of the MCC’s 1937 tour to the Fatherland gives some clues. Any country po-faced enough to have a ‘Society for the Encouragement of Playing Ball’ will struggle from the start. Certainly the Germans back then seemed to understand neither cricket’s equipment (‘why

Reliving the most famous last stand of the French Resistance

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Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance in the second world war, there is an awful inevitability to this book. Tragedy looms like the great plateau itself, overshadowing the individual stories of the people who lived, fought and died in these mountains.

Melanie McDonagh

The best new children’s books

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A children’s author and illustrator, Jonathan Emmet, created a stir recently by saying that women are effectively gatekeepers of children’s books — chiefly picture books. They constitute the majority of the buyers, reviewers and prizegivers – and the result is that boys are shortchanged. Too few pirates and dragons — or the wrong sort —

What made Romans LOL?

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At the beginning of The Art of Poetry, Horace tells a story that, he promises, will make anyone laugh: ‘If a painter wanted to put a horse’s head on a human neck, would you be able to keep your laughter in?’ Would you? I certainly would. That’s the thing about Roman jokes: they’re not really