The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are performing at the Albert Hall: playing their tiny instruments in a very big space. There must be 5,000 people here, but the orchestra’s friendly jokes, the modesty of the ukulele sound and the familiarity of the audience make the concert seem intimate. The Ukes have been going for
I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents. Why do I not
‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive,
Holy Motors is so mad, deranged, lunatic, bonkers, cuckoo and away with the fairies that, if you were on a bus, and saw it boarding, you’d pray it didn’t sit next to you, although, knowing your luck, it probably would. That said, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so prissy and stand-offish. This film is a
The Charing Cross Theatre has followed the trends of performance art for more than a century. It used to be a music hall. Then it put in a stint as a cinema. Now it’s a small theatre and it specialises in experimental comedies. The Man on her Mind fits the bill nicely. It opens with
If you want to make yourself unpopular with a classical musician, bring up the subject of performance anxiety. You can ask soloists how they remember tens of thousands of notes, so long as you make it sound like flattery. But don’t ask how they do it in front of an audience of strangers and critics
London was an industrial city until remarkably recently. It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station was built in 1947, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to burn oil right on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s. What’s more, Gilbert Scott’s other great power station, Battersea, built in 1929, is less than a mile
when the two-footed Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains The dignity of room, the value of rareness Robinson Jeffers Spengler was wrong: the world has become the West. Japan has bowed out now; in China they buy art, drink wine, play late Rachmaninov, groom themselves for decline in Prada or Bulgari, wonder
Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.
The question of how Europe stumbled into the horrific abyss of the First World War, the catastrophe which The Economist once called ‘the greatest tragedy in human history’ is obviously of much more than purely academic interest. (Though it is chiefly academics who have been arguing about it ever since). As we approach the centenary
Books – or lack thereof – are the latest manifestation of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The escalating dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has provoked some Beijing bookshops to remove Japanese books from their shelves. The most prominent book to be made to disappear is Haruki Murakami’s recent novel 1Q84, a critically acclaimed worldwide bestseller. Rather
It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and I have already read one. Nicholas Lezard’s The Nolympics (Penguin, £7.99) was originally planned as a counterblast, a fusillade of righteous rage against what we all expected to be an administrative and sporting catastrophe that
In February 1966, in the first flush of his fame, an interviewer asked Bob Dylan what his songs were about. ‘Oh, some are about four minutes,’ he responded. ‘Some are about five. And some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.’ The joke was justified, in a sense. Why should any artist be
Some years ago, I was included in a round- robin from a group of African writers trying to whip up support for an anti-Ryszard Kapuscinski campaign. The plan, as I recall it, was that members of the African intelligentsia should loudly denounce the legendary Polish reporter’s depiction of their continent at the readings he was
When I was in the sixth form, I thought Anthony Burgess the greatest writer imaginable. The outlandish vocabulary, the fireworks, the bravura, the glorious showmanship — surely this was what literature was all about? Then I grew up and realised he was absolutely terrible — a cackling and grim caricaturist, pseudo-forceful and very dead. Whilst
Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of
This is a slight book containing short stories about minor characters. And it is about to receive some fairly faint praise. A Possible Life, Sebastian Faulks’ 12th novel, does little to confirm exactly where he sits in the modern British canon. It probably does not matter greatly; on this showing, he is a competent creator
Krystal had never shot up before … but she knew how to heat the spoon, and about the tiny little ball of cotton wool you used to soak up the dissolved smack, and act as a filter when you were filling the syringe. She knew that the crook of the arm was the best place
Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary? Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in
Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or feed back into this network. His first book in twelve years, John Saturnall’s Feast, explores how the Civil War affected the career of a 17th
Everyone knows something of what happened the night American Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. Frenzied reports followed the news of his death as information, much of it erroneous, flooded the public domain. Bin Laden was armed and engaged the Seals in a fire fight; he was cowering
Downton Abbey has come crashing down. No, it’s not Lord Grantham’s ruinous investments but rather the uncomfortable fact that the world has finally realised that the show is overhyped tripe. Julian Fellows and, it seemed, anyone who’d ever walked on set donned their tuxedos at last night’s Emmys. Expectations were high with sixteen nominations for ITV Drama’s
The muggles of Tutshill, Gloucestershire, have a bone to pick with J.K. Rowling. Tutshill is where Rowling spent her unhappy teens and apparently it is the model for Pagford, the snob-ridden village in Rowling’s anticipated foray into “grown-up fiction”, The Casual Vacancy. The villagers (who I assume cannot have seen an advance copy of the
A fascinating case was recently brought before the Italian courts. After six years of conjugal submission to her padrone (far better than master, give it that) a woman has filed for divorce with accusations of abuse. The slight snag is that prior to marriage she signed a contract with her lover agreeing to offer herself
In 1990 Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female president. As a progressive liberal, Robinson seemed a very unlikely candidate for the job, in what was then, a deeply conservative country. Throughout the 70s and 80s, she worked as a human rights lawyer, as well as a Senator, arguing a number of landmark cases that challenged
Funny the ways you can learn about a book. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones alerted me to one recently, 43 years after his death. I was at Somerset House for the exhibition of photos marking the band’s half-century, and one shot saw them leaving Heathrow Airport in 1966, bound for America. Brian, in a
I’m halfway through Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s memoir of what it was like to be given a death sentence by medieval religious savages. I’m reviewing the book for next week’s magazine. We were, as a country, rather less than unequivocal in our determination to protect Rushdie for his right to exercising free speech; plenty of
Here comes Jane Asher. She swings through the doors of a small Chelsea hotel, chucks her bag on the floor, and sits down with an expectant look. Her voluminous red hair has attractive hints of something blonder on top. Her eyes are pale blue, and extraordinarily intense, and she has a fulsome rack of plump
John Berger (born 1926) is one of the most intriguing and richly controversial figures in British arts and letters. Actually, since he lives full-time in France, he can scarcely be considered English in any meaningful way, and is indeed an international figure, widely regarded outside this country as one of Europe’s greatest intellectuals and quite