The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It is coming to something when relatively young pop stars die not of drugs or misadventure but, essentially, of old age and decay. Frankie Knuckles, the house DJ and producer, breathed his last recently at the age of just 59, and several ageing ex-clubbers of my acquaintance told me that it was the end of
South Kensington is teeming with butterflies at the moment, or at least the specially constructed tropical enclosure at the Natural History Museum is. Sensational Butterflies (until 14 September) takes you on a journey through the life cycle of, you guessed it, the butterfly: from egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly. Butterflies had a good
Four could have been dubbed the Frank Radio network this week as the sharp skills of Sue MacGregor, Alan Dein and Fi Glover teased out some stark opinions and revelations. MacGregor was back on Sunday morning with a new series of The Reunion, daring to bring together round the same table in an enclosed studio
The gravestones are laughing. They tilt at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen blotching their honourable faces. Seated in uneven rows in their auditorium they note church-goers squinch the gravel path to the embossed door. Some lean backwards in mock amazement, others forward, study the half-mown grass or slap their thighs, whisper behind their
When writing a novel, there comes a time, in the process of gestation and planning, when other books are required. It is almost as though, Middlemarch-like, your little attempt at writing cannot be separated from what others have written. The world is a great web. Books speak to books. They cry out, call, whisper. I find
Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of this journal — could confidently answer the question? I guess, not many. One of the paradoxes of Britain’s intellectual history is that a country which, alongside the Greeks and the Germans, has contributed more than
Everyone knows about the Spanish civil war, first battlefield in the struggle that broke out in 1936 and ended nine years later in the ruins of Berlin. It has been immortalised in the work of Hemingway, Orwell and Koestler and commemorated in the heroic deeds of the International Brigades. This is how it is remembered
The first visitor to take a break on the Bay of Naples was Hercules. He had just defeated some rebellious giants and buried them beneath Mount Vesuvius. To celebrate, he staged a procession across the mountain’s slope — in Greek, a ‘pompe’. He also founded two cities: one named after the procession, the other after
No actual birth certificate for Charles Spencer Chaplin has ever been found. The actor himself drew a blank when he went on a rummage in Somerset House. The latest research suggests that he was born ‘in a gypsy caravan in Smethwick, near Birmingham’. But surely the truth has been staring people in the face ever
When Nick Hunt first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful trudge across Europe in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, he knew ‘with absolute certainty’ that one day he would make that journey himself. When I embarked on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s biography, I made an equally firm resolve
In March 1915 the 27th Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, with an already distinguished political career behind him, took the unorthodox step of enlisting, aged 43, as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In 1916 he returned to England from France to take up important government duties, but for 14 months he had
Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens is a beautiful book. Lovers of early 20th-century British art will find it hard to stop gazing at the painted board cover under the dustjacket. It is so sheenily brilliant that you want to frame it and hang it on the wall at once. Every page, including the endpaper plans of
One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way, not extracts. This morning I went into the park I often pass on my journeys to somewhere else. I can now say that I have been into this park and not always passed it by.
Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For me they happened around the same time, aged 18. The dramatic initiation was a Colchester rep performance of Waiting for Godot, in 1956. Twenty-five years after his first mature work was written Beckett had hit
In 1993, John Borrell, a longtime foreign correspondent with no permanent home, decided to abandon journalism. Tired of writing about wars and violence — he had been in Beirut, Rwanda and Nicaragua — he determined to throw himself into European rural life. But instead of a year in Provence, he chose 20 years in Kaszubia,
A-Huff’s career has been remarkable for the contrast between hard-headed social advancement (‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’) and addle-pated spiritual questing. In this she resembles an older, colder Gwyneth Paltrow, who coincidentally came out with her ‘consciously uncoupling’ corker as I was ploughing my way through Thrive — such a G.P. cookbook title!
I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their cooking. During the course of her research for this book I met, got to know and became friends with Jan Ondaatje Rolls. She has certainly chosen a novel way to portray that well-known group of
I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or adults. It was originally published on an adult list but I read it when I was about ten, Lovejoy’s age. She’s the heroine of this book, a small, strong-willed girl with the tenacity and determination of 20 adults. She’s got a feckless mother,
In his essay on the ‘Peculiarities of the English’, E.P. Thompson gave his theoretical definition of class: When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class,
It’s been a spring tradition for several years now for English National Opera to present small-scale productions in various venues around London. But this year the Royal Opera followed suit, heading across the Thames to the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe. Ahead of the announcement of its solid but mainly safe 2014–15 season,
You may not have heard of Goldie. He’s an actor and singer whose name refers to the bullion with which a cosmetic mason has decorated his incisors. A recent James Bond also featured a glimpse of the Fort Knox gnashers, and they’re currently on display at Stratford East in Roy Williams’s new drama Kingston 14.
The arts world will not shed a tear at the news that Maria Miller has resigned. Though it was Jeremy Hunt who wielded the axe to the arts budget, it was Maria Miller who spearheaded a shift in philosophy in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport that arguably annoyed the luvvies even more than
When Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles died last week, a novelty number by a Brylcreemed Aussie pop punk group had just reached number one. It displaced Duke Dumont & Jax Jones’s I Got U and ended a three week-run of house singles at the top of the charts. I suspect the following statement may piss off
Thanks to BBC1’s new World War One drama The Crimson Field, I know now how to fake the symptoms of syphilis. All you need is a red hot needle, to create a genital blister, and some condensed milk, for realistic-looking discharge. You had to do this if you wanted to get sent home from the
When I was a boy I used to love the stories of the old kings of England, devouring book after book on the subject until I could rather involuntarily memorise all the dates (which has stuck with me, useless though this knowledge is, and stretches back before the Conquest, although once we get to the
‘If you meet anyone in a pub or at a party who says he is an architect,’ advised Auberon Waugh, ‘punch him in the face.’ Typically, the late, great Spectator columnist articulated an important truth: modern architects have scarred our cityscapes with some truly horrendous buildings, none more so than Glasgow’s notorious Red Road flats. What better
William Congreve wrote, in the Epistle Dedicatory to his 1693 comedy The Double-Dealer, that it is the business of a comic poet to paint the vice and follies of humankind — so I thought I would give you the opportunity to do just that. The task I set in the most recent competition was to
Has anything ever been more luvvie than this?
Every politician who engages in major reform ends up with scars on their back. Tony Blair famously complained about those scars from grappling with the public sector, while Michael Gove mostly relishes his tussles with the education establishment that he likes to call the ‘Blob’. But the education world isn’t the only one with a