The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Welcome to the inaugural post of Bookbenchers where we ask backbench MPs what they read when they’re not white paper-pushing. Kicking things off is Steve Baker, former engineer officer in the RAF and currently MP for Wycombe – when he isn’t helping run the educational charity The Cobden Centre, or skydiving. What book’s on your bedside table
The Eurozone crisis leads today’s news agenda (read William Hague’s take), with evermore dire predictions being made about the future of the single currency and the European Union itself. Many readers may be left uncomprehending as billions turn into trillions, and apparently we can’t count on the BBC for impartiality, so here is your Eurozone crisis
What do John Boyne, Tracy Chevalier, Joe Dunthorne, Anne Enright, Jane Harris and Kazuo Ishiguro have in common? Apart from the obvious? And apart from only coming in the first third of the alphabet? Graduates of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing course seem to be the only people writing novels at the moment.
As our television screens luxuriate again with images of Downton Abbey, one of its cast members is starring in an altogether grittier production in the heart of West London. Last time we saw Kevin Doyle, he was pleading a lung condition to escape being sent to the Battle of the Somme. Here he starts off
The most influential authors, retailers, critics, agents, publishers, broadcasters and poets were all listed in The Guardian Book 100 this weekend. First prize went to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos who – in addition to diversifying from books to groceries – is currently setting up Blue Origin, a company which offers space travel to the general
Teenage obsessions are a strange and terrible thing. How, exactly, does an album – which is, after all, nothing more than a recording of some music – seem to embed itself so completely into our identity? How does it become something so crucially important that we can’t imagine our world without it? With hindsight I
Rome contains many hidden treasures, but the most remarkable of the lot is concealed on the Caelian Hill, above the Colosseum, in the medieval monastery of Santi Quattro Coronati. It’s a cycle of frescoes dating from around 1250. It is extremely rare for painting from this period to survive anywhere, but it’s even rarer in
One of the greatest Renaissance paintings remaining in private hands, Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Darmstadt Madonna’, was sold discreetly this summer. It was not offered at auction but sold by private treaty sale — auction-speak for a negotiated private sale rather than a public auction — in a deal brokered by the art consultant
In 1982 Sven Berlin placed a sealed wallet labelled ‘Testament’ on top of a rafter in his studio with instructions for it not to be opened before his 100th birthday on 14 September 2011. Inside was a key to the identities of the characters in his notorious roman à clef about post-war St Ives, The
I recently watched another one of those delightfully obscure BBC4 archive documentaries. This one was called Bristol on Film. I like archival film footage for what it reveals unintentionally: the incidental details which have nothing to do with the film-maker’s original intent, but which 60 years later reveal how profoundly the world has changed. Like
A new programme to revive Latin and Greek in our schools Some 15 years ago, at the behest of the then editor Charles Moore, I wrote a jovial 20-week QED: Learn Latin column for the Daily Telegraph. It attracted a huge following, and I still have four large box-files full of letters from users. The
The basic problem with I Don’t Know How She Does It is that we are meant to sympathise with a rich woman who has an absolutely amazing life and great hair and is nannied to the hilt and I Don’t Know How To Do That. How do you do that? Can you take classes? If
The Royal Opera’s season isn’t awash with new productions, in fact until Christmas only has two thirds of one, but that was what it got under way with: all three short operas of Puccini’s Il Trittico, with Gianni Schicchi revived, and Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica fresh; they are all produced, and mainly very well,
A world première at the Almeida. My City written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Is it any good? Well, let’s see. Plot, first. It’s not that Poliakoff can’t write a plot; he can’t even think one up. Instead he sets himself a high-minded riddle and examines its possibilities. Take an archetype, ‘the kid-fearful-of-the-dark’, turn it
Next month it will be five years since the death of my former boss, Peter Hepple, and I still miss the man who saved my career and very possibly my sanity. Peter was for 20 years, from 1972–92, the editor of the Stage newspaper, often affectionately known as the actors’ Bible. But he contributed to
What was it Sir Thomas Beecham said about Stockhausen? ‘I’ve never conducted any of his music, but I once trod in some.’ So far as I know, Beecham never commented on the work of Pierre Boulez, but I’m sure his verdict would have been the same. Both composers adopted a modernist language that is politely
It’s such a relief to come back from a trip to America, to switch on the first available radio and fall into Francine Stock talking about Nicholas Ray on The Film Programme. Americans have lost the radio habit. You won’t find sets in any, let alone every, room in the house. No one I know
‘I don’t suppose the war will leave any of us alone by the time it’s done,’ prophesied one of the characters in the new series of Downton Abbey. Oh, dear, I’m sure she’s right. So I wonder which will be the character who comes back with shellshock, which one with no legs, and which one
CNN recently referred to Birmingham as ‘the unlikely birthplace of heavy metal’. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition entitled Home of Metal (until 25 September). All the gnarly-mouthed, guitar-thrashing kings of metal hail from the Black Country: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Napalm Death. Walsall boy Noddy Holder, lead singer of semi-metal
‘John Smith is dead.’ These four blunt syllables, as elemental and atmospheric as the first line of a classic novel, form the opening of Chris Mullin’s new collection of diaries. This is a fascinating read, crammed with gossip, jokes, insights and anecdotes, not all of them political. Mullin’s first disclosure is that the ‘decent interval’
In this compelling book, Matthew Hollis analyses how Edward Thomas, for years a frustrated literary critic and prose writer on rural themes, became all at once, at the age of 36, a poet of genius. It was his close friendship with the American poet Robert Frost which, in 1914, precipitated this long-delayed fulfilment. Married while
Carola Hicks was an acclaimed art historian, and, as she phrased it, a biographer of objects, exploring the ‘lives’ of art-historical subjects from the Bayeux tapestry to the stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel, and now Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’, deftly weaving together the history of the times in which the objects were
Almost two decades ago, as a junior political reporter on the Evening Standard, I heard the cabinet office minister William Waldegrave tell a parliamentary committee that in certain circumstances it was right for a prime minister to lie. The words made no impression on the committee itself, but I nevertheless dashed up to my office
To be the daughter of an enormously powerful man must always be an enthralling if sometimes daunting experience. To be close to that father when, almost single-handed, he is shaping the destinies of the nation, if not the world, is to be uniquely privileged. Mary Soames took no part in the decision-making that was happening
In numerical terms, British police procedurals about maverick inspectors in big cities are probably at an all-time high. Few of their authors, however, have Mark Billingham’s talent for reinvigorating a flagging formula. Good As Dead (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the tenth of his London-based Tom Thorne thrillers. On her way to work, Detective Sergeant Helen
Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s she starred in film adaptations of her younger sister Jackie’s novels The Stud and The Bitch, and in the 1980s as Alexis Carrington in the American soap opera Dynasty. More recently she has reinvented herself,
David Jones has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s she starred in film adaptations of her younger sister Jackie’s novels The Stud
That Used to Be Us: What Went Wrong with America? And How it Can Come Back Who’s it by? Thomas L Friedman (Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat) and Michael Mandelbaum (Professor of American Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University). What’s it about? How America lost its superpower status
Nothing in Stephen Kelman’s Booker-shortlisted novel suggests to me that he is a cynical man (quite the opposite in fact), so it seems churlish to marvel at the perfect timing of this summer’s riots for him and his book. For while Sky News has barely finished rolling the breaking story that we are an island