Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed

More from Books

Cock’s bones! This is a most wonderly historical novel, the very reverse of a wind-egg. It tells the story of Lambert Simnel, the youthful figurehead of a Plantagenet uprising against Henry VII in 1487. The historical Simnel is an elusive figure, and most of what little we know comes through Tudor propagandists. Jo Harkin fills

Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali

More from Books

Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in 1894 in Kazan, on the banks of the Volga. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who vanished when she was ten. Her mother, a midwife, moved the family to Moscow where Elena attended an exclusive school. But in 1913 she started coughing, so was sent

Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction

More from Books

Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable

The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A

More from Books

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music

Good lawyers make for bad TV

Television

Given that TV cameras aren’t allowed to film British criminal trials, Channel 4’s new documentary series Barristers: Fighting for Justice is a courtroom drama without the courtroom. As for the drama bit, the programme does its excitable and occasionally successful best – but isn’t always backed up by its own participants, who on the whole

Was Sir John Soane one of the first modernists?

Exhibitions

Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to George Dance the Younger and at 18 had moved on to Henry Holland. Later came major commissions, a professorship, a knighthood and gold medals. Fame followed. Along the way he added an ‘e’ to his

Cartier used to be a Timpson’s for the rich

Exhibitions

In the fall of, I suppose, 1962, my friend Jimmy Davison and I, window shopping on Fifth Avenue, bumped into the glamorous Venezuelan playboy-grandee Reinaldo Herrera. Jimmy asked where he was going. ‘I’m just nipping into Cartier. They’re fixing my skis,’ Reinaldo replied. Autres temps, autre moeurs. I doubt anyone today uses the world’s most

Lloyd Evans

Those behind this fabulous new comedy are destined for big things

Theatre

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco is a period piece from 1959. It opens with the invasion of a French village by a herd of rhinoceroses. This paranormal event is never explained. In Act Two, the villagers start to imagine that they’ve become rhinoceroses and changed species. But one plucky sceptic, who defies conformity, refuses to swap

Why is the British Museum hiding its great Orthodox icons?

Arts feature

The long neglected art of Byzantium and early Christianity is returning to the world’s museums. Last November, the Louvre confirmed plans for a 3,000 square metre department dedicated to the Byzantine legacy and more than 20,000 works from Ethiopia to Russia that are currently scattered across the museum’s cabinets. Having been initially shelved a decade

Kate Andrews

Impeccable history of the free market – and from the BBC too

Radio

The launch of Radio 4’s Invisible Hands series has been both blessed and cursed by timing. It tells the story of Britain’s ‘free market revolution’, just as President Donald Trump overhauls the free trade consensus of the past 40 years and world leaders grapple with how to respond. The problem is the hypotheticals posed at

Van Morrison is sounding better than ever

Pop

There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name of an artist and a comprehensive history of their live performances will appear, spanning decades long gone to the hour just past. Setlist.fm is both a useful resource and a massive spoiler-fest; the music equivalent

Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week

The Listener

Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about a dancing teapot. But when he was rejected for military service in the first world war (he was 39 and 5ft) he practically forced his way to the front line as a lorry driver –

A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed

More from Books

Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down

The liberating, invigorating music of Pierre Boulez

Classical

‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too

Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany

More from Books

Late one evening in 1994, an Italian magistrate walked into a storage room at the military prosecutor’s offices in Rome. There his eye was caught by a 6ft-high wooden cupboard, curiously positioned so that it faced the wall. His interest piqued, he pulled the cupboard around and opened its doors. Inside were stacks of documents

Absorbingly repellent: Ed Atkins, at Tate Britain, reviewed

Exhibitions

In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you can simply buy a customisable 3D avatar from Turbosquid.com, animate it with your own movements by wearing a sensor-filled motion-capture bodysuit, and presto! Lifelike but eerily soulless, Ed Atkins’s video portraits occupy a strange visual