Culture

Culture

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

Barenboim becalmed

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Fidelio; Samson The Proms The visits to the Proms of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under their co-founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim have become, already, something more than an artistic event — or, this year, four artistic events in two days. It is immensely moving to see young people from endlessly embattled states making music together,

Touch of darkness

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J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite Royal Academy, until 13 September Supported by Champagne Perrier-Jouet Just what is it that makes John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) so different, so appealing? (As Richard Hamilton might put it.) And in what way is he so modern? It certainly isn’t an off-putting or radical modernity, for the exhibition in the

Lloyd Evans

Charisma unbounded

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The Mountaintop Trafalgar Studios Hello Dolly! Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park Meet the black Elvis. A man who got up on stage, a man who ‘sang’, a man who was adored by millions, a man who was King. Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, is set in a Memphis hotel on the eve of Martin Luther

Sam Leith

Let me not be Mad

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I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ Few epigraphs to fiction have been so widely disregarded as the disclaimer with which Evelyn Waugh presaged Brideshead Revisited. Immediately it was published, as Waugh’s great friend Nancy Mitford wrote to him, the general view was simply: ‘It is the Lygon

Mixing memory with desire

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Rick Gekoski is an expatriate American, long established as one of the leading antiquarian book-dealers in Britain. As one might expect, books have been his passion for as long as he can remember, his reading as integral a part of his development as anything experienced in the world outside. ‘Every reading experience vibrates subtly across

From Russia with love

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In the last couple of decades or so, a plenitude of biographers have provided us with studies of 20th-century literary celebrities, from Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw to Evelyn Waugh and T. S. Eliot. Roland Chambers now treats the life and works of Arthur Ransome, a lesser mortal than these grandees. Ransome was born

Daily grind

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This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has set in our time. It is a state of the nation book, and what a state we seem to be in: if Faulks is less kind to the contemporary than he has been to the past, we cannot blame him, for

Prelude to Waterloo

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Napoleon has humbugged me, by God. He has gained 24 hours’ march on me!’ The Duke of Wellington’s exclamation was at least honest; he made only a show of calmness when told at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on 15 June 1815 that the French were across the border. His reputation stood in the balance,

Susan Hill

An indisputable masterpiece

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Of how many novelists can it be said that they have never written a bad sentence? Well, it can be said of William Trevor, as it could of his fellow countryman John McGahern, and of many another Irish novelist. What was it that so formed them, to write such elegant, flexible, lucid, beautiful but serviceable

Ticking the boxes

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How do you describe novels written by a Fellow of All Souls, laced with extreme post-modern self-consciousness and lavish with cultural references, but revolving almost entirely around graphic permutations of the sexual act? As a genre, it can surely only be called clever-dick-lit. This is Adam Thirlwell’s second foray into this exclusive terrain. His first

Rhyme and reason

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On the face of it, Nicholson Baker’s books are a varied bunch. His fiction ranges from the ultra close-up observations of daily life in the early novels to the hard-core sex of Fermata and Vox (a copy of which Monica Lewinsky famously gave to Bill Clinton). His non-fiction includes a tribute to John Updike, a

Alex Massie

Obama’s Summer Reading List

Since we’re speaking of lists and, you know, it’s still August, Barack Obama’s summer reading list  is a mixture of the good (George Pelecanos) the middlebrow (David McCullough) and the too-contrived-and-appallingly-written (Tom Friedman). Joe Carter critiques the list and asks: In all seriousness, though, what books would you recommend the President read during his vacation?

Amis at 60

Martin Amis says that when a man turns 40 he stops saying “hi” and starts saying “bye”. So, as a 41-year-old, I now stand unequivocally on the farewell side of the tracks, putting my affairs gradually in order before the eventual arrival of the Grim Reaper – who in an Amis novel would probably be

Alex Massie

Amazon & Wodehouse

The thinking is, I suppose, that this book is about a valet and Wodehouse’s writing featured a gentleman’s gentleman too. Plus, he did make those unfortunate recordings while held prisoner by the Nazis. Nonetheless, I was a trifle surprised to receive an email from Amazon.com suggesting that… As someone who has purchased or rated The

An ‘intelligent spectacle’

Arts feature

Henrietta Bredin talks to David Pountney about running the Bregenz Festival Back in the days when David Pountney was director of productions at English National Opera, his so-called office was a tiny broom cupboard of a space carved out of a backstage cranny of the London Coliseum, with a single grubby window overlooking a narrow

Lloyd Evans

Northern exposure

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Edinburgh is a flashers’ convention. Edinburgh is a flashers’ convention. Everyone wants exposure. They come to build their brand, to raise recognition levels among the oblivious, to smuggle themselves into your brain while you’re not looking. So don’t feel obliged to buy a ticket. Your attendance is sufficient reward. Performers know the fringe is a

Proms profusion

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Grasping the content of the Proms these days has become a bewildering business. The best image I can give is of a contrapuntal web, teeming with themes, in which the principal subjects stand out against the detail, but where the detail nonetheless clamours for attention and the sheer profusion of it can seem overwhelming. When

Street life | 22 August 2009

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I expected to dislike Walk on the Wild Side (BBC1, Saturday), fearing sub-Johnny Morris, anthropomorphic, animals-say-the-darndest-things whimsy. Instead it turned out to be funny, inventive and even acerbic. The notion is that comedians take genuine footage of animals from natural-history programmes, and voice-over short routines matched to the creatures’ movements, often with surreal effect. It’s

Brewing up

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One minute we were in Brent Town Hall witnessing a Citizenship Ceremony, as a group of Somalis, Sri Lankans and Iraqis were welcomed as fully paid-up (to the tune of £2,500-plus) British citizens, the next in a beekeeper’s garden in Acton, west London. One minute we were in Brent Town Hall witnessing a Citizenship Ceremony,

Alex Massie

Ukraine’s Got Talent

Perhaps you’ve already seen Kseniya Simonova’s performance on Ukraine’s Got Talent. But if you haven’t, watch how she recounts the horrors of Ukraine’s experiences during the Second World War. With sand. It’s one of the most remarkable, moving, beautiful pieces I’ve seen in ages. Since the video has already been seen 900,000 times  I suppose

Close to the Bone

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Sir Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 September The Fleming Collection mounts loan exhibitions of artists represented in its permanent collection, its focus on Scottish artists a strength rather than a limitation. (Would there were an institution in London which just showed American artists. Perhaps then we’d

Lessons from the past

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Oh the relief of quantitative easing! Who could fail to welcome a fiscal laxative guaranteed to loosen the bankers’ constipated hold on credit? But before much more of the mixture is gulped down, it may be salutary to glance at the effect of the purgatives administered to ease economic bowels in the late 17th century.

Missed opportunity

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A World According to Women: An End to Thinking, by Jane McLoughlin The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, by Ellie Levenson Jane McLoughlin is furious with women. We have let the feminists down and turned off the rational sides of our brains in favour of the thrilling emotional life that popular culture provides. The feminists

The great Russian takeaway

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That the rise of a powerful coterie of Russian billionaires overlapped with Britain’s transformation into an offshore tax-haven is unlikely to escape the notice of both countries’ future historians. Indeed it is entirely plausible that had successive British governments in the 1990s been less amenable to foreign wealth, this book would have been entitled Genevagrad

Populist preaching

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Patrick Marnham visits Brazil’s annual festival of literature Many years ago a wild-eyed Englishman hacked his way into the Amazon rain forest and disappeared, never to be seen again. Since then the fate of Percy Fawcett, known as ‘the Colonel’, has remained a mystery. Fawcett, a heavily bearded pipe-smoker in a deerstalker hat, was a

Lloyd Evans

Credit-crunch festival

Arts feature

Lloyd Evans goes in search of culture on the rain-soaked streets of Edinburgh The crunch. That damn credit crunch. It hurt Scotland hardest of all. A worldwide reputation as a financial powerhouse? Gone. Dreams of independence? Severely truncated. Last year the Edinburgh Festival bore prophetic signs of imminent poverty, of homelessness, of doom. Free shows