The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Phew! We’ve just had a narrow escape, if reports are true that the Today programme has been ‘in talks with’ Katie Price, aka Jordan. Phew! We’ve just had a narrow escape, if reports are true that the Today programme has been ‘in talks with’ Katie Price, aka Jordan. In talks with? Is international-style diplomacy really
It is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street and there seems to be as much celebration and feasting as there was for the Queen’s own golden jubilee, in 2002. It is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street and there seems to be as much celebration and feasting as there was for the Queen’s own golden
I doubt that Philip Larkin has ever been out of fashion, but after the 25th anniversary of his death and the publication of his letters to Monica Jones – beautifully reviewed for the Spectator by Philip Hensher – his star is well and truly back in the ascendant. T.S. Eliot, who was hardly renowned for
The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.’ Does she mean
I don’t remember who it was who said ‘memory is genius’, but they were on to something. I’m not sure, either, whether they meant genius in the original sense of ‘animating spirit’ — i.e. memory as constitutive of personality — or in the modern one of ‘brilliance’. But both seem to apply equally well to
It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned for an audio book, but as Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Sounds of Crime tells us in a pre-thrill talk, he ‘begged’ the five writers he considered to be the best in their field to produce a new story for this collection; and ‘happily for
For Jasper Conran the country is about ‘the scent of ripe apples or freshly-baked bread’, about grand houses that ‘sleep among ancient trees’, Morris dancers, Morris Travellers, tasteful cottages and ‘daffodils dancing in the breeze’. In his book Country (Conran Octopus, £50) there are some lovely interiors, though the most striking are those of his
Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Tom Rosenthal has been a life-long admirer of Lowry’s work, spending
David Cameron was despondent on the evening of 10 May. Although the election result was pretty much as he had predicted privately, he feared that his ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ of coalition with the Liberal Democrats was about to be rejected in favour of a deal with Labour. When we talked that night he
Juliet Townsend selects the best of this year’s reading for toddlers through to teenagers In these straitened times one can only be grateful for the excellent value offered by picture books for young children, which have remained at the same price for several years. Since the migration of their production to the Far East, some
Here is the latest Bookends column from this week’s issue of the Spectator: The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury,
Last week was Shelley, here’s this week’s Discovering Poetry excerpt: Now I’d be willing to wage at least a fiver that in the last twenty-four hours you passed on the street a nice young couple walking happily hand-in-hand. Nauseating, isn’t it? But also the most natural thing in the world. There seems to me something
Alas, Gordon Brown’s Beyond the Crash was just too late to qualify for this month’s Spectator Book Club book of the month. What a sadness. Instead, I’ve picked a book to inspire goodwill in all men: Lucky Jim. The Spectator originally described Kingsley Amis’ campus classic as ‘that rarest of rare good things, a very
Here is a brief selection of the best offerings from the world’s literary pages: Writing in the City Journal, Christopher Hitchens asks why Capitol Hill has been stolen by the pot-boilers: ‘The days of the Georgetown hostess are gone; the hostesses themselves are gone, too. Their reign began to close years ago, when senators started
A couple of years back, John Carey reviewed a new biography of Kingsley Amis and began with the question that people had been asking for years: why was he so horrible? Amis is regarded as one of a generation of fat philistines, drink-sodden and misanthropic, who made careers of bating Britain’s ‘Trots and leftist shags’.
‘The coalition’s proposal to slash funding for the arts…and humanities risk not just losing a generation of artists, but also a generation of critical and creative thinkers’. So says an indignant Guardian letter buttressed by a shopping list of academics. A familiar clarion call. But surprise, surprise what unites the subjects threatened with impoverishment? Books.
This article was originally published on the Spectator’s Cappuccino Culture blog. It is republished here because it relates to last week’s episode of the gripping if smaltzy adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the story of one writer’s journey through the twentieth century. The second episode begins with the outbreak of the Second World
If you went on holiday to Italy this year, you may have come back with a plate, a mug or a jug — an item or two of the painted pottery still handmade (at least sometimes) by craftsmen and women, mostly in Umbria, but also in the Marche, and which you can see in the
A kind of madness has taken grip of the art market. It seems that the world’s super-rich have decided that money has no value — or at least that it has a value different from that understood by the rest of us. Just this month, one of Alma Tadema’s fanciful biblical epics was sold for
The historic centre of Bruges has 16 museums, enough to cater for every touristic taste. There’s a Diamond Museum, a Lace Centre, a Choco-Story (the narrative element distinguishes it from the 50 chocolate shops) and a Friet Museum — or ‘Belgian Fries Museum’, for English-speakers under the misapprehension that fries are French. But the main
The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine Father of Spin emphasised, it was a great deal more important
Andrew Lambirth talks to the artist Keith Coventry about drawing inspiration from Sickert, Churchill and Ladybird Books Keith Coventry has no time to visit the two lap-dancing clubs that lurk a few doors down from his studio, a small room with barred windows in a light-industrial block in the East End. Here, he puts in
Back after a rugby-related hiatus. Here’s Caitlin Rose with her Sinful Wishing Well…
John Ruskin is the greatest writer whom, today, an educated person can admit not having read without embarrassment. One professes ignorance of Shakespeare or Dickens with apology or defiance, but most of us still seem unaware that Ruskin is as essential as Chaucer or Milton to understanding ourselves within a world (for all its ills),
One afternoon in the winter of 1992 I was on a bus traversing London’s Millbank when an extraordinary sight caught my eye. A bright red Triumph Spitfire had been driven up the imposing front steps of the Tate Gallery and abandoned there. Not for the first time in my life I wished I had a
St Paul’s Cathedral is quite rightly something of a national obsession. No other building has protected ‘view corridors’ as a result of legislation in 1935, when new building regulations allowed the surrounding buildings — notoriously a telephone exchange to the south — to overtop the cathedral’s cornice line. These corridors, extending like an unseen net
According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. Well, his work
Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, his biggest success, dating from 1902, leads a fringe existence, but it persists thanks primarily to the name role, dramatically meaty and not imposing too great a strain on the performer. Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, his biggest success, dating from 1902, leads a fringe existence, but it persists thanks primarily to
There are quite a few reasons to like The American. It is an action film with almost no action, making it a non-action action film which, I now know, is my favourite kind of action film. It stars George Clooney, and while I have tried to imagine Mr Clooney doing something uncharismatically — rinsing out