The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
He was accused of listening too much to the ‘wrong people’, of being ‘too deferential’, not judgmental enough. Sometimes those he interviewed afterwards said that he was like ‘a ferret’, who pried too deeply into their lives, ‘looking for the facts that he wanted’. But Tony Parker, who died in 1996, gave a voice to
Now and again a sitcom gag lodges in the public mind. In 1974, Ronnie Barker, in Porridge, was reminiscing about Top of the Pops and its all-girl dance troupe, Pan’s People. ‘There’s one special one — Beautiful Babs,’ he says. Beat. ‘Dunno what her name is.’ Her name was Babs Lord. She attracted the attention
It is easy, especially if one is not American, to feel ambivalent about the fictions of John Updike. The immaculate clarity of his prose style, the precision of his vocabulary, the tenderness underlying his Wasp comedies of manners, the puckish wit rising above a sorrowful temperament — none of these can be gainsaid. But the
The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of bedragglement (including Olga, the family dog). ‘How can you bear to watch that stuff? Steptoe’s got a face like a squeezed lemon. He’s perfectly horrible.
In 2009 a magazine survey found that many women in their twenties wanted to stay at home baking while their husbands went out to work: ‘I’d love to be a captive wife.’ Jessica Mann’s thoughtful and emphatic book is a riposte to this, an overview of the Fifties, which she calls a polemic and a
Sartre tried to prove that hell is other people by locking three strangers in a room for eternity and watching them torture each other. Similarly Will Cohu seems determined to show that hell is our own families. What is remarkable is that Cohu’s family members were not a collection of horrific monsters. On the contrary,
Christopher Isherwood kept diaries almost all his life. The first extant one dates from 1917, when he was 12, and like most schoolboys he used it more to measure than record his days: ‘Work in morning, walk in afternoon. In choir. More work. Nothing special.’ At Cambridge, however, inspired by the W.N.P. Barbellion’s The Journal
I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who is the risk manager of a large Wall Street hedgefund. The other is by David Graeber, the anarchist who has been called the leader —
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s masterpiece, which, though not popular, attracted the admiration of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, J.R. Ackerley, John Betjeman, Philip Toynbee, C.P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Frank Tuohy and Alan Sillitoe. According to Elizabeth Bowen,
‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness. They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I feel like I am becoming human.’ You may have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk, the man who feels he is becoming
The late Carlos Fuentes was a fluent English speaker — the product of being the son of a diplomat and his own careers in international academia and diplomacy. Here he is talking with Charlie Rose in February 2011. The interview captures the sense of how important politics was to Fuentes and the other writers of ‘El
I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding
What’s happened? Carlos Fuentes died on Tuesday night. Who was he? He was a revered Mexican novelist, a crucial part of the literary movement in Latin America that came to be known as ‘El Boom’. What was ‘El Boom’? It was an artistic movement that emerged in the ‘60s. The writers were mavericks who defied
The latest intellectual maverick to win the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, Laurent Binet certainly isn’t shy, especially when it comes to his literary tastes. A single paragraph in his debut — a postmodern take on Heinrich Himmler’s righthand man Reinhard Heydrich — reveals his position on Camus, Desnos, Flaubert, Hasek, Kafka, Marquez, Rimbaud and
Everyone enjoys making and perusing lists of ‘greatest’ — nineteenth-century novels, Beatles LPs, generals, opening batsmen, and so on. The choices inevitably reflect the compiler’s tastes and prejudices, and are always fun to dispute. I have spent the last few months considering the claims of Britain’s Prime Ministers, a process from which four semi-finalists ultimately
The Observer’s William Skidelsky has taken it upon himself to list ‘The 10 best historical novels’. The usual suspects are present: War and Peace, The Leopard, I Claudius and The Blue Flower. There are a couple of surprising inclusions, too: Eliot’s Romola, for instance. And, of course, there are some glaring omissions — of which,
I met a very interesting chap while doing my weekly video film for the Sunday Times. This was Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael, Cornhill. He hove into view like a disreputable clergyman from a lateish Graham Greene story, dog collar, strange hat, impish grin. He has just written a book — The Politically
William S. Burroughs is, alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the third part of the Beat generation’s holy trinity. Yet while those two were long ago ushered into the canon, Burroughs’ writing has stubbornly resisted a comparable assimilation into the mainstream. A less conventionally romantic figure than the unruly Kerouac or the hippie seer Ginsberg,
Astrophil and Stella 1 Loving in truth, and fain my love in verse to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
It is upon us: the dreaded London Olympics. I’m not against the sport, not really. But the wall to wall advertising, the endorsements and the cultural tie-ins leave me totally cold. London is soon to be awash with Olympics-inspired arts exhibitions designed to snare the thousands of IOC plutocrats who will be attending the Games
There are so many axes being ground in Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s fascinating and explosive new book, Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, that it should be handled with asbestos gloves and read behind protective goggles. The health warning that should be given before reading is that two of
People go to exhibitions for different reasons, and although I was highly critical of David Hockney’s recent show at the Royal Academy, I accept that a great many people visited it and came out smiling and uplifted. They tended to be individuals who don’t usually go to exhibitions or look at real painting, and it
Alasdair Palmer questions the ill-conceived makeover of Chartres cathedral which robs us of the sense of passing time that is part of its fascination and mystery Should old buildings look old? Or should they be restored to a condition where they look as if they could have been put up yesterday? Those questions are raised
Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a film about Jeff, who lives at home, and that’s enough subordinate clauses for one day. (Don’t be greedy; you know how fattening they are.) It’s a comedy from the Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, who have previously made small films that have been well received (The Puffy Chair,
We all know the ‘excellence theory’ of migration. Barriers to entry guarantee that imported cargoes have outstanding qualities. Manfred Karge’s parable of urban despair in the Ruhr comes to the UK with high expectations. It’s been here before. Director Stephen Unwin premièred the play at Edinburgh, 1987. His new revival at the Arcola demonstrates that
Pharmaceutical considerations were uppermost in my mind as I made my way to the Barbican Hall for Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, a production which began touring in Michigan in January and ends in Hong Kong next March. I imagine that marijuana is probably the best preparation and accompaniment for seeing it, but that
I should have thought about this more carefully — the timing of it, I mean. This is Crucible time, and in the normal scheme of things I would be watching almost nothing but snooker. Yes, dear readers, I am that sad and pathetic thing known as a snooker addict, and a red-button one at that.
‘There’s no point in being a liberal if you’re just a furry little herbivore on the edges of British politics,’ declared Paddy Ashdown on Sunday on Private Passions (Radio 3). It was a revealing comment. The programme went out last weekend after the LibDem’s disastrous results in the local elections, but it would have been
Folk legend Sandy Denny’s eminently coverable songs, direct of melody and opaque of lyric, have scarcely declined in popularity since the singer’s death in 1978 at the age of 31. A tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2008 was such a hit that a similar event is being staged at the Barbican this