The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘Twenty-six million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after?’ asks the Ukip poster for the euro-elections, beside a Lord Kitchener-style pointing finger. Obviously, Ukip thinks the answer is ‘Ours’. But this isn’t true. Twenty-six million people are not looking for British jobs, but for jobs in general. And even
‘London,’ says Jean Paul Gaultier, ‘was my vitamin. I love the freedom of London…The energy, the character, all the people that are different.’ It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the first major exhibition of his work should come to the city that so inspires him. From the moment you enter the Barbican, you are struck
It’s a shame Dolly Parton has never gone into politics. She’s someone who’s lived her life very much in the public eye and yet has never lost sight of who she is, of her claim to fame as a country singer. You can tell by the way she sings, even now after more than 50
Television executives must be longing to make a programme about estate agents that casts the agents in a good light. There would be a national outrage, and in these Twittering, Facebooking times nothing is more appealing to a producer than a bulging digital postbag. Under Offer: Estate Agents on the Job (BBC2, Wednesday) is, sad
The Other Woman is not just an extremely bad film but also a wholly reprehensible one (she says, with her most disapproving hat on). It’s a comedy, although if you find any of it funny, that’s all I will ever need to know about you, but its unfunniness isn’t what upsets me so much. It’s
Rewrite the history books! Tradition tells us that kitchen-sink drama began in 1956 with Look Back in Anger. A season of lost classics at the White Bear Theatre has unearthed a gritty below-stairs play that predates John Osborne’s breakthrough by five years. Women of Twilight by Sylvia Rayman (which has transferred to the Pleasance) was
One of the proudest boasts to come from Britten HQ in Aldeburgh during the composer’s anniversary last year was that performances of his works were proliferating across the globe — and not just in the UK — as never before. If the Opéra de Lyon might be a little late to the anniversary party in
Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from a camp in New South Wales. This intrinsically thrilling incident, triggered by a fascinating clash between mutually uncomprehending cultures, is an obvious gift to a writer. There may be some who claim that any novelist
In 1964, as part of his railway cuts, Dr Beeching ordered the closure of Duncraig, a small, little-used station in the Scottish Highlands. The train drivers working the line simply ignored him. They continued to stop there, and the station remains open to this day. A world where nothing ever changes, or indeed happens —
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to Burn (John Murray, £12.99, Spectator Bookshop, £10.99) is a dystopian thriller set in an all-too-plausible version of contemporary London. Three members of the establishment have shot dead innocent bystanders. The weather is broiling. A plague-like
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau. Aptly, since he is in a place filled with mock-Venetian canals and poor reproduction paintings, he himself is a fake: the man is not a real lord, and the money is not his own. He
Servicemen used paintings as dartboards. Schoolchildren dismantled banisters and paneling for firewood. Architects from the Ministry of Works acted like pocket Stalins. Sarcophagi were dumped in gardens beside beheaded statues. And overhead, Luftwaffe Dorniers droned with menace. Such hazards ravaged requisitioned country houses during the last war. Yet nothing imperilled them more, in the 20th
What should a writer write about? The question, so conducive to writer’s block, is made more acute when the writer is evidently well-balanced, free of trauma and historically secure. It is made still more urgent when that writer is solipsistic in tendency and keen to write, not about the world, but about perceptions of the
The vast majority of books written about British gardens and their histories are concerned with large ones, made and maintained, sometimes over several centuries, by people with money. ’Twas ever thus. In this country, recognisable gardens began in monasteries, as well as the surroundings of palaces and noblemen’s houses, and it is only in the
As children, we learn very quickly that a blame shared is a blame halved – but in the long-term, the ruse works only with the co-operation of the co-opted. This is a lesson that must have escaped David Moyes, whose public pronouncements regularly identified unwilling conspirators, illustrating precisely why he failed at Manchester United. Which
We (the English that is) share our patron saint’s day with the Catalans. On Sant Jordi’s day Barcelona fills up with bookstalls and flower sellers. The men give their women flowers and the women their men books. I lived in Barcelona a few years ago and found the whole thing charming but also a bit sexist.
Today, 23 April, the world celebrates the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s presumed birth (and marks with less joy the date of the Bard’s death in 1616). That double date obscures another: the 99th anniversary of the death of a less celebrated Warwickshire-born literary lad, the poet Rupert Brooke. Brooke, like many of his friends
Earlier this month, when a 54-year-old man with the birth name James Brian Hellwig died of a suspected heart attack outside a hotel in Arizona, a million boyhood fantasies also clutched their chests and fell to the ground. To fans – and former fans – of professional wrestling, Hellwig was The Ultimate Warrior, the man
It’s twenty years since the height of Britpop, but does anyone still care about it? YouGov has carried out some polling on the subject today. Although 35 per cent stated that they like or really like Britpop (compared to 20 per cent who dislike/really dislike), 44 per cent replied ‘don’t know’. There’s also a lot of
Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) is one of the great painters of the Venetian School, often joined in an unholy trinity with Titian and Tintoretto. But he was not Venetian, and only arrived in the city when he was well into his twenties. His formative years were spent in Verona, hence his popular name (he was also
The arrival of spring is not an unmitigated joy. The warmth is nice, of course, as are the fresh leaves on the trees and the general sense of rebirth and renewal after a dismal, soaking winter. And maybe, if you live in London, there is very little to complain about. There are delightful parks and
Intimacy these days discomforts. More our style is the park or the pub, or three-minded chess with young Kasparov. A bracket-dash-colon smile implies we have no longings to confess. Always, though, I’ll text a bunch of preset flowers on the eve of her six-month scan. ‘Thank you, dear heart, for remembering.’ Then come the hours
Have you seen that pizza with a cheeseburger crust? If not, just imagine a normal pizza, except where the pizza ought to end — and civilised society begin — there’s a ring of about ten miniature burgers, all encased in dough. On top of each of those burgers is a greasy discharge of cheese. There’s
Another Country was an instant response to Anthony Blunt’s exposure in 1979 as a Marxist spy. Julian Mitchell set out to explain how gay public-school toffs, reared in a system of hypocrisy and backstabbing, could betray their country. At a time when Soviet communism was a potent and growing menace, this issue grabbed play-goers by
God bless the BBC. And I’m not being entirely sarcastic here. There are some things the BBC does very well and one of them, sadly, was The Review Show, its monthly critical round-up of theatre, film, books and new art exhibitions, that it has now, in its wisdom, decided to scrap. Presumably, the decision was
In a dance world that has chosen to dispense with stylistic and semantic subtleties, ‘narrative ballet’ and ‘story ballet’ are often used as synonymous. Yet there are differences — and major ones at that. In a ‘narrative ballet’ it is the choreography that carries the story. Each movement idea is thus conceived in relation to
The Blyth Gallery is situated in the Sherfield Building, deep in the South Kensington campus of Imperial College London. The Sherfield Building is a labyrinth of concrete, linoleum and glass. Its atmosphere is oppressively institutional. You walk around to the percussion of slamming fire doors and the click-clock of unseen footsteps. The air carries the
The day before I’m due to meet Ferdinand Kingsley, actor son of Sir Ben, he sends me a message to introduce himself via Twitter. ‘I’ll try not to be a complete a***hole!’ he quips merrily, for absolutely no reason at all since I hadn’t actually imagined that he would be. Does he normally behave badly
Given the decline of Christian belief in the UK, it’s surprising to discover there’s quite so much about the Easter story on the airwaves this week. You might have assumed that no space would have been found in the schedules for a retelling of the central but yet most difficult Christian narrative. Christmas is easy