The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold Coast. We experience everything through the senses of ‘temporary gentleman’ Jack McNulty — an Irish officer in the British army with a short-term commission. Brimful of whiskey, his racing winnings jingling cheerily in his pocket,
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides. Judith Flanders’s career bridges this divide. She is now best known as an author of innovatory and formidably detailed books on Britain’s social history in the 19th century. But she also has worked as a
Lucian Freud once said that ‘being able to draw well is the hardest thing — far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters — Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, just a few.’ Christopher Lloyd’s new study of
Land sakes! Another book about Winston Churchill? Really? Give us a break, the average reader may think. Actually though, as title and subtitle suggest, this isn’t just another biographical study. It’s at once odder and more conventional than that. More conventional because, in some ways, it is just another biographical study. Odder because — instead
‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows…’. These were the instructions handed down to churches in the reign of Edward VI, the death-knell for medieval church wall
This week, I have been mostly listening to Parsifal. Not the St Matthew Passion, which is my usual Passiontide fare. And, boy, it’s been quite an experience. You have to be in the mood for the Bach, but for the Wagner you really have to be in the mood. Parsifal is nearly five hours long.
Spoiler alert: this is a review of last night’s episode Anyone watching Game of Thrones for the first time last night would not have been dissuaded of Peter Hitchens’ argument that the show is cruel and will promote cruelty. It opened with Lord Bolton’s bastard Ramsay Snow, who in the last series did that thing with Theon
I’m not one of those who automatically think the book’s better than the film. Efficiency is a good thing and if a film can successfully cram 500 pages into two hours, it’s to be applauded. We all have things to do. So, I was looking forward to watching Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a
The suggestion, made by the poet Michael Rosen and others, that Sajid Javid is not sufficiently cultured to be Culture Secretary is as ludicrous as it is pompous. The secretary of state does not write poetry – even bad poetry. He decides how best to make the arts flourish, both as a source of spiritual
The recent challenge to compose the most off-putting book blurb imaginable elicited an avalanche of entries. This was one of those competitions that is both a pleasure and a pain to judge: a delight to read through but devilishly difficult to whittle down to just half a dozen winners. Virginia Price Evans’s entry was a
How important is William Kent (1685–1748)? He’s not exactly a household name and yet this English painter and architect, apprenticed to a Hull coach-painter before he was sent to Italy (as a kind of cultural finishing school) by a group of patrons who recognised his abilities, became the chief architectural impresario and interior decorator to
When the New York art dealer David Zwirner opened his London gallery in October 2012, observers expected him to make a statement of intent. Zwirner, who the magazine Art Review placed at number two in its 2013 Art Power 100 survey, is one of the art world’s most important three gallerists (the others are Larry
Scarborough 1939 Mum’s slipping on her see-through dress. Outside our council house a chauffered Rolls is waiting. It’s a beautiful summer. There’s been so much yearning. At the Floral Hall violins are fainting and the black-and-white minstrels have ripe red lips. I’ve won third prize for my Bluebird sand- carving. Soldiers are wrapping barbed-wire round
Sunday nights. What are they for? Eggs. Tea. Toast. Nerves about the week ahead. Something comforting on TV. But comfort comes in many forms. For some, it’s twee life at Downton Abbey. For others, it’s the thrill of Homeland. With the BBC’s latest Sunday-night offering, comfort takes on a new guise: one that includes gas
If the very first scene of Calvary doesn’t immediately draw you in there’s every chance there is something seriously wrong with you and I would urge you to book an appointment with your GP. It is a terrific opening and it takes place in Ireland, in a Catholic church, within the dark, intimacy of a
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