The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
As fewer people write by hand, some of us who do venture to squeak a thin call of alarm, like mice behind the frescoes during the last days of Pompeii. Philip Hensher (novelist and university teacher) voices dismay more manfully in this eloquent account of what has been and will be lost by the ending
New York is a strange place for dogs. As I walked back from an early morning art-world breakfast — black coffee and untouched fruit, untouched granola — the apartment buildings of the Upper East Side were disgorging perfectly groomed hounds and their staff for their walks in Central Park. I’m used to south London dog-walking,
The online accessibility of British population censuses has resulted in an outpouring of ‘who and how we were’, keeping amateur genealogists, local historians and social commentators extremely busy. Barry Anthony’s book relies heavily on the censuses of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, combined with a close reading of the astonishingly detailed stage magazines and
Adam Gopnik’s dazzlingly knowledgeable and beautifully told essays on winter began life as the Massey Lecture Series on Canadian National Radio, the Canadian Reith lectures. But dismiss from your mind any of the rather stodged up seriousness that always seems to hang around Important Radio Talks on the BBC. Gopnik is serious, and believes and
Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd
What is it with dead American writers? Years after they’ve popped their clogs, some of the biggest names in crime fiction continue to produce novels from beyond the grave. Mario Puzo has been sleeping with the fishes since 1999, but that hasn’t stopped him clanking out Omertà (2000) and The Family (2001), the latter of
What is this I hold in my hands? Is it just a book? It’s quite heavy, but somehow, instinctively, one feels its light heart. When I eventually prize its even glossier inner core from its glossy padded outer shell, I still ask: what is this? It looks like a book, but its pages don’t shut
The British Museum contains more about trees than one might expect: trees in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and all kinds of small artefacts of wood and bark. Frances Carey, sometime Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings, discusses trees as viewed through the collections. She deals not with trees themselves — for that one goes to the
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an act of frivolity without parallel in United States history. The destruction of the Baathist state caused Iraqis to flee into their ancient sectarian and racial communities, and laid out a killing-ground where animosities suppressed in other Muslim countries could be fought out to the last Iraqi.
The passing of Jonathan Miller’s father Emanuel Miller — a very distinguished psychiatrist — was terrible. ‘His last words, as he reared up on his deathbed, were: “I’m a flop! I’m a flop!” ’ One should be cautious about being Freudian here — Emanuel might approve; his son wouldn’t; his son’s biographer might, slightly —
The Chinese writer Mo Yan collected the Nobel Prize for Literature last night. In his acceptance lecture, he reiterated his view that a degree of censorship is ‘necessary’ in the world, and compared it to airport security. The comparison is utterly base. Airport security is a fleeting restriction on personal liberty; a social contract entered into freely
There is a Persian proverb which states that ‘books are a man’s best friend.’ Persian literature from the kings of antiquity to the last Shah of the Peacock Throne has, for the most part, been dominated by its proverbial male companion. When presented with today’s Islamic Republic, an unfamiliar Western reader can easily believe that
In December 1936, following the Abdication of Edward VIII, a rhyme circulated about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang: ‘My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of Christian charity how scant you are! And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!’ Lang
Earlier this year I noted a piece by Michael Moynihan in Foreign Policy. He looked at how the authors of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guide books were producing apologias for tyranny. I argued that the kind words for Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and the Khomeinist Iran, were a result of the capitalist leftism
No Obama policy – not even ‘Obamacare’ – has been derided quite as much as his stimulus package and the $787 billion Recovery Act passed in February 2009. It became a byword for failed big-government liberalism, and the Republicans’ staunch opposition to it underpinned their 63-seat gain in the House of Representatives in 2010. Yet,
The Hepworth has been garnering plaudits right and left as a new museum to be welcomed to the fold, and my first visit to this monolithic structure with its feet in Wakefield’s River Calder exceeded all expectations. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the ten linked blocks that make up this new suite of galleries are
In 1997, the Russian Academy of Sciences gave the names Hermitage 4758 and Piotrovsky 4869 to two small planets discovered 500 million kilometres from earth. The signal honour paid to the State Hermitage Museum and Boris and Mikhail Piotrovsky— its dynastic succession of directors — heralded a new era of post-Soviet expansionism for the former
Come December, I often find myself writing a lot of quizzes. Not that I’m complaining: I love writing quizzes, and I really love being paid for writing quizzes. There’s a definite skill in crafting a decent question, and therefore considerable satisfaction in getting it right, tempered only by the unceasing fear of getting it completely
The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that
Once, I met Priscilla Tolkien, the daughter of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was at the Oxford Catholic chaplaincy, and she was giving a talk about her father. She was charming, something of a hobbit herself with her neat figure, and an engaging talker. But she seemed taken aback by some of her audience. It was divided
In the ‘psychotherapy ward’ of a secret venue somewhere in east London, watercolour portraits of troubled male faces line the wall. Nearby in the ‘court-room’ a sound installation broadcasts an ominous tick-tock into the airy acoustics of a large hall, while the ‘Warden’s Office’ below is furnished by quilts handmade by inmates. This is Secret
Two really scary programmes this week, and not a vampire or psychopath to be heard. Both gave personal accounts of catastrophic hearing loss. Not something you’d expect to work on radio, the aural medium. How can you explain what it’s like to stop hearing when there’s no pictures, no other way to explain the absence
For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’. No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a
Tough play, The Taming of the Shrew. Uniquely among Shakespeare’s comedies, it moves audiences to pity and fear. It’s a video-nasty in the garb of a marital farce, an uncomfortable romance whose closing reconciliation scene invariably draws lusty hisses from female play-goers as Kate renounces her autonomy and bows to the will of her brutal
Five minutes into You Will Be My Son (or Tu seras mon fils in its original French), I expected a very different film from the one that eventually emerged. The first scene takes place in a crematorium, as a coffin and its occupant are cooked to ashes. A relative of the deceased picks at a
The way the director James Conway sees it, Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is about that most delicate of subjects, adult abuse by youngsters. That isn’t what he says in his programme note for his production at the Royal College of Music, where he claims that the opera is about power, ‘love, yes, but
I reason with the crown of the tree. Surely from this fourth floor window, we are equals now. I calculate the trajectory, whether it would catch me if I threw myself at it. I comb for clues from the uneasy rocking of the branches, the slow swimming of its fingers stirring the air. There must
Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, has announced that her next book will be a picture book. Rather than writing a follow-up dystopian adventure for her teenage readers, she has decided to engage with four-year-olds in Year of the Jungle, a story about how her family coped when her father spent a year serving
C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court. But he has also written two successful novels with 20th-century political themes. The first, Winter in Madrid, is a compelling evocation of Spain in 1940. His latest, Dominion (Mantle, £18.99), is set in Britain in