The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The most surprising thing about Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, for me, is that it merely fell rather flat at its first performance. The composer, we read, had insisted on its virtually official status as part of the coronation proceedings, and it seems to have been his major bid to be accepted as an establishment
Robert Schumann met a wretched end. He died in a lunatic asylum where he thought the nurses were feeding him human faeces. Meanwhile he drove his fellow residents mad by sitting at the piano and bashing out nonsense-music until he had to be dragged away — a grotesque indignity for the creator of the most
Twelve? Thirteen? She arrives in advance of her parents, fat as I was thin, wrapped in a towel, pattering to safety — a bench where she sits obscured before abandoning herself to the indecency of a walk towards water, (though who’s to see? To care? The retirees? Me with my puckered stomach?) My eyes meet
Elizabeth Stone, English professor at UCL, has long lived on ‘paper and words and thin air’. Single, friendless, dessicated, respected, she passes out during a faculty meeting and wakes to find herself ‘attached by a chain of spit to her own cardigan’. A brain tumour is diagnosed, and removed. Expecting death, Elizabeth receives the news
To Spaniards, the English must appear a highly contradictory people. The stereotype of the restrained, well-dressed gentleman (Spain’s largest department store is El Corte Inglés, ‘the English cut’) must contend with the binge-drinking phalanxes of tourists occupying Spain’s beaches every summer. Though generally thought to be fairly law-abiding, the English are still, mostly affectionately, referred
Mary Killen Gone Girl by the American writer Gillian Flynn comes recommended by both high- and middle-brow readers (Orion, £7.99). I want the reported total absorption from the off and the welcome relief from thinking about anything other than what’s on the next page. The Blue Riband, Peter York’s anecdotal history of the Piccadilly Line
So here we go again into a heart of darkness: the humbug and horror which is the history of Spanish South America ever since Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola. Now modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the island’s population had within a few decades of Columbus’ arrival, through genocide and disease, been reduced
At the grubbier end of my street in north London is the Somali mosque that was burned down earlier this month in an arson attack. The other day I asked at the police cordon if any arrests had been made. ‘Not that we know of’, said the duty officer. A smell of charred wood hangs
On her seventh birthday, Elisa Segrave’s five-year-old brother Raymond drowned in their grandmother’s swimming pool. From that day onwards, her mother Anne was emotionally detached and alcoholic. ‘My mother was only 42 when I, my father and my two remaining brothers lost her — to grief.’ Rebuffed by her mother in the days after Raymond’s
This bright, burning flame of a novel takes place in the art world of 1970s New York. Our guide to this scene of glittering parties and eccentric characters — such as the White Lady, who wears white and goes to a grocery store to buy ‘milk, white bread, a can of hominy, and two jars
Despite being so short, The Spinning Heart certainly can’t be accused of lacking ambition. Over the course of its 150-odd pages, Donal Ryan’s first novel introduces us to no fewer than 21 narrators living in or around the same small town in the west of Ireland. One by one, they reflect on their lives, past
The photograph on the jacket, reproduced above, says it all — or at least all of what most of us think we know about Sir Edward Grey. Patrician, reflective, dignified, he stares into the future with the uncompromising honesty of one who has never even contemplated straying from the paths of rectitude. In fact, he
On Christmas Day 1776, the ambitious, well-connected war hero, General John Burgoyne, soon to be appointed commander of British forces in Canada, agreed a wager of 50 guineas with Charles James Fox ‘that he will be home victorious from America by Christmas Day 1777.’ Nine weeks short of that date, on 17 October, Burgoyne surrendered
It’s hard to say anything about this uproarious show without falling into the appalling sexual wordplay which besmirches Sean Foley and Phil Porter’s version of A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton’s satiric comedy of 1605. Putting in its first ever appearance on a Stratford stage, Middleton’s play, as written, is itself as cornucopian a
Silly season is here. A minor row has broken out over which long-dead figures should appear on the reverse side of Bank of England notes. I can’t be bothered to relate the details because you’ve all got better things to do like water the garden, fix lunch or watch Loose Women. Basically, Sir Mervyn King’s
Recent convulsions in China’s banks will not, I suspect, have surprised Timothy Beardson, a sinophile, veteran Hong Kong financier and author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future. He argues that China’s extraordinary growth over the last 30 years has come in spite of its banking system. A dinner party might speculate where China
This week’s issue of the Spectator is packed with book reviews. Here’s a selection of quotes to whet your appetite. Old China hand Jonathan Mirsky finds much to applaud in Rana Mitter’s history of the Sino-Japanese war. ‘Into the Fifties, as Mitter outlines, a storm gathered in the US over ‘who lost China’; and those
In this week’s lead feature in the Arts section, Tom Rosenthal explains just why he thinks the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain is so long overdue. Lowry is one of our most popular artists – and it is exactly this that has been his downfall. ‘Can one disapprove of someone merely because he popular? Clearly
This is the first post in an occasional series about rediscovering old science books. Twins, Lawrence Wright posits, pose a threat to the established order. People have long been scared of, and intrigued by, them. The doppelganger holds a special place in the gothic canon, whilst some cultures have even seen men cutting off a
One day in Berlin, I saw the rerun of the RA’s Young British Artists exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s equivalent of Tate Modern. After that, I saw a superb retrospective of Lyonel Feininger at the Neue Deutsche Galerie. In the evening, I ran into the onlie begetter of the YBA show (which, with the
In the wake of the Roy Lichtenstein blockbuster at Tate Modern comes Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain, and what a contrast! Where Lichtenstein looks increasingly like a one-trick pony, an assessment driven home by the excessively large show, Caulfield emerges as fresh, witty and visually inventive. Undoubtedly this impression is fostered by the size of
It is nothing short of a miracle that this aptly titled exhibition could be shoehorned into just two rooms at the Royal Academy, such was the range of the irrepressible Hugh Casson’s work and influence during his lifetime. Architect, artist, designer and writer, he was a fireball of energy and a fount of ideas. He
Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound
Channel 4 is deep into its summer of love. It’s having a Mating Season and — unusually for the network — it’s not all about sex. Instead, it’s about those fluttery butterflies that occur before the birds and the bees come in, when two people meet for the first time and get to know each
To quote the watch adverts, here’s a timepiece that will last a lifetime: the Doomsday Clock. And the reason it will last that long? Because when it stops, so will your life. This is the figurative clock that has been maintained by a bunch of Chicagoan atomic scientists since 1947. The closer its hands are
Thomas Mann, Gustav von Aschenbach, Benjamin Britten, united in a common interest, one the expression of which is still taboo, yet which Mann succeeded in writing a bestseller about, and Britten his last testament. Mann surmounted the interest, just, by fantasising and remaining amazed that people actually ‘do it’, if his reaction to Gore Vidal’s
Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests
The word ‘concert’ means different things to different people. For some it evokes dinner jackets and not clapping between movements; for others, jumping up and down in a stadium, desperately trying to spot the band through a sea of blinking smartphones. But Secret Cinema’s latest brainchild, dubbed Secret Music, is something else entirely: its inaugural
Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant? I have to say, Nigella Lawson would be well down the list for me, as I’ve always rather liked her. It’s true that some of her recipes are a little precious, especially all that fairy cake stuff, but surely not to the