The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Guardian currently seems to be embarking on more crusades to save literature than Salman Rushdie’s Twitter account. Last week’s post by blogger Sam Jordison was no exception. He asked whether book reviews are “bland, boring and formulaic”. Fresh from judging Not the Booker (a Guardian online award designed to champion independent publishers and celebrate the vox
Amanda Craig tells us what she would title her memoirs, which book reduces her to tears and the 19th century literary heart throb her husband most looks like. 1) What are you reading at the moment? I always read several books at once, so it’s Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis biography (review), Julia Jones’s A Ravelled Flag
As part of our book of the month coverage, here is Nicholas Lezard’s review of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, taken from the current issue of the Spectator. You can read other posts on the book here. So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense
The Centre for Policy Studies hosted a party for Robin Harris earlier this evening, in honour of the publication of his one volume history of the Conservatives. Andrew Gimson reviewed the book in a recent issue of the Spectator and described it as ‘a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship’, plenty of eminent Tories agree.
It’s that time of the year again: prepare for bad sex, courtesy of the Literary Review. The Bad Sex Awards will be held, wait for it, at the In and Out Club on 6 December. The list is still open, and readers can still nominate worthy candidate by contacting the Literary Review. At present, though,
Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems moves through a neat thirty-year stretch from his first collection Arcadia (1979) to his acclaimed Costa-winning volume A Scattering (2009). We travel from Reid’s early period of inventiveness to the later years of solemnity. More importantly, however, it fleshes out a career many will only know through Reid’s recent work.
Jeannette Winterson’s timely intervention in the Booker prize debate last month reminded us that ‘novels that last are language-based’. On that basis, Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, might have been a worthy candidate for the Booker 2011, had it been written in English. In this latest offering by French
If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure. Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now
The second part of our critical roundup of the ten most-talked-about literary biographies. Read part 1 here. Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester This admirable attempt to resurrect the queen of regency romance doesn’t really meet its objective. When publishers are looking for quotes for the paperback, Daisy Goodwin’s ‘solid and well-researched’ (Sunday
The Times has invited (£) everyone aged 16 and under to enter its Young Poet of the Year competition. The winning entry will be published in the newspaper. The Times also suggests (£) that competitors record YouTube videos of themselves declaiming their poems; selected entries will then be posted on the Times’ website. Inspiration is
Andrew Lambirth finds paintings at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition of such a singular and pure beauty as to take the breath away The great world is humming with an event of international importance at the National Gallery: the largest number of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving paintings ever gathered together. To see anything by this
High Arctic, the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened Sammy Ofer wing at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (until 13 January), brings a thoroughly 21st-century, technology-driven museum experience to this historic site. It’s an exhibition, Jim, but not as we know it. In 2010 Matt Clark, creative director of the art and design practice UVA,
Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines. Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded
When I was a student of history, the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s What Is History? I never understood Carr’s question. Or the answers that his book gave. If history is not about people and events, but causes and ideas, then I could see no sense in bothering to study
The arrival of the composer Eric Whitacre and his family in London as permanent residents brings a ray of Californian sunshine to our cloud-bedraggled lives. American musicians who have chosen to move to Europe to work have always made an interesting group, headed by jazz players of the calibre of Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet.
The time of year is approaching when Nutcrackers take over from opera, and then a further round of Traviatas gets under way. But that does at least mean that it’s also the time when the schools of music put on their end-of-term operas, and this season is unusually promising. Next week Sir Colin Davis is
The delectable drama student who served dinner beforehand in the Rooftop Restaurant told us she’d much enjoyed Written on the Heart but that it was a bit intellectual. As David Edgar’s new play is about the making of the King James Bible, this wasn’t altogether surprising. How do you make a play about the deliberations
‘I’m off to see a play about a man who kills his dad,’ I told my five-year-old as I left the house. ‘Because he didn’t give him any ice-cream?’ he said. Mmm, I wondered, it’s possible that Hamlet harboured some childhood grudge against Claudius over a Mr Whippy refusal episode. But such meta-textual speculation is
Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This
The 20th century was a century of musical revolutions. One of the last and most audacious ignited 50 years ago on the east and west coasts of America. And in a small but significant way The Spectator played a part in fanning the flames. In 1968 a young critic and early-music specialist by the name
You can always find a thief in financial markets. That is where the money is. Most frauds are quite dull affairs, and some are never uncovered. A few, however, are spectacular. The scale of loss, or the glamour of the perpetrator, or the failure of the ‘system’ to spot and prevent the crookery, may contribute
If you want to see what an ambivalent attitude we have towards rhetoric, you have only to look at the speeches of Barack Obama. Before Obama became President, when he was out on the stump, there was no holding him back rhetorically: he soared, he swooped, he lifted his eyes to the hills and found
So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense of being a fictional character. He’s hardly even that. We have no evidence beyond Sherlock Holmes’s word, and if you look at Holmes’s behaviour in ‘The Final Problem’ you can see an almost classic case of paranoia —
In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of the art nouveau houses designed by Antonio Gaudí, who had died four years earlier. Waugh was captivated by the swooshing ‘whiplash’ lines of the building. He hired a taxi and asked the driver to take
The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man.
Sarah Raven comes of a botanising family. Her father John, a Cambridge classics don, travelled all over the British Isles studying wildflowers. Like his own father, Charles Raven, he was a gifted watercolourist, and between them they drew almost every plant in the British flora. Sarah still possesses 18 volumes of their watercolours. Nevertheless, to
It is noticeable that the kind of young woman that a clever public man most likes talking to is intelligent but totally unchallenging. This is pleasant for both. She gets to pick up useful knowledge, while he can hold forth, happy that she doesn’t have the inclination or firepower to disagree, argue or interrupt.
Mussolini’s brutal sex-addiction makes for dispiriting reading, but provides material for a fine psychological study, says David Gilmour Bunga bunga may be a recent fashion, but adultery for Italian prime ministers has a long history. The first of such statesmen, Count Cavour, had affairs with married women because he was too nervous of being cuckolded
Is the world in need of a yet another Sherlock Holmes story? Well, with the successful publication of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk it seems it is. Riding on the crest of the wave created by BBC’s ingenious series Sherlock, which brings the brilliant detective into the 21st century, and the Robert Downey Jnr