The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Is this map of birds’ migratory routes informative or deceptive? Does it create the impression that nature is flourishing when it is really in decay? In today’s golden age of cartography, when technology has lifted mapmaking to an unprecedented level of sophistication, The Natures of Maps wants to be a party-pooper. Maps, it declares, pretend
The Companion to British History (Third Edition), by Charles Arnold Baker Readers familiar with the first edition of The Companion to British History (Loncross, 1997) will already know that its value as a reference work proceeds from an inclusive attitude towards its subject. Besides providing the rudiments — monarchs, battles etc — the CBH was
Memoirs? No one writes them any more. If you wish to distinguish yourself from the sweaty masses, you are far better off publishing a diary, or notebook, call it what you will (Frederic Raphael naturally calls it a cahier). To publish one, of course, you need to have written one, ideally some years ago, full
Senior civil servants are generally expected to be shadowy figures, influential rather than powerful, discreet rather than flamboyant, probably — in Gladwyn’s generation at any rate — educated at Winchester. To describe such a being as a Titan might seem an oxymoron. The Titans, it will be remembered, were a family of giants who had
Director Lindsay Posner finds something primal and truly disturbing in Arthur Miller’s play The day’s rehearsal is about to commence. The actors sit or stand around chatting, telling anecdotes, prevaricating, pouring one last cup of coffee — anything to avoid the moment when they have to begin committing emotionally and psychologically to Arthur Miller’s text.
Frost/Nixon 15, Nationwide Frost/Nixon is a properly terrific, dramatised account of the television interview between David Frost and disgraced former American President Richard Nixon which, broadcast in the summer of 1977, achieved the largest audience ever for a news programme in the history of American TV with 45 million viewers. As I don’t remember much
La Bayadère Royal Opera House I have often wondered what it is that makes the 1877 La Bayadère such a popular ballet. Certainly not the flimsy, derivative and highly unbelievable plot, as full of sensationalist twists as any mass-oriented 19th-century feuilleton; nor the music, a concoction of fairly uninspiring catchy tunes by the well-known 19th-century
It’s funny how much television depends on repetition. Daytime, especially. The same house is always being auctioned, the same chinoiserie discovered in the attic, the same boxes being opened on Deal Or No Deal. Even the new Countdown has eschewed new letters. It might have been fun if they added a few Greek ones. This
Unique Forms: The Drawing and Sculpture of Umberto Boccioni Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, N1, until 19 April The year 2009 sees the 100th anniversary of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, celebrated by a major reassessment of Futurism at the Tate in June. Meanwhile, the Estorick Collection has got in first with a small but select
Oliver! Drury Lane Roaring Trade Soho A show with an exclamation mark in the title has a lot of promises to fulfill. Oliver! opens on a magnificent note. The dark, silkily lit workhouse teems with the figures of stooped orphans who crawl up through the floorboards and march around the shadows like sad doomed little
Skin Deep Opera North Verdi’s Requiem Barbican It takes a brave person, or more likely couple, to attempt an operetta which effectively satirises contemporary fads, and the more obvious the target the more difficult to pull off the satire with the requisite degree of scathingness. David Sawer and Armando Iannucci have taken cosmetic surgery, and
I had a letter from my friend Leo the other day, one of the most interesting men I have ever met. The son of a navvy and a cleaner, he won an exhibition to Balliol to read English and when he arrived in Oxford his Geordie accent was so strong that he was often incomprehensible
In these dank days of January, the mind struggles to escape the claustrophobia of an English winter, weighed down by heavy grey skies or hemmed in by suffocating mists (pungent with the smell of jet fuel). A couple of atmospheric programmes on Radio Four this week came to the rescue, creating soundscapes so rich in
We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage fall in shopping activity in December, the names of the high street retail businesses that have gone bust or been taken over, the numbers of shopworkers who have lost their jobs. We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage
The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, by Robert Crawford Robert Burns: A Biography, by Patrick Scott Hogg How to account for the phenomenon of Robert Burns? Not the man or his poetry, but the national icon, a Caledonian amalgam of Alexander Pushkin and Bob Marley? The process of idolisation began with the instant acclaim that
Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle Only recently a portrait minature by Lavina Teerlinc was identified as being of Lady Jane Grey. Her diminutive size, coiffed red hair and crimson lips had suggested that it might be her — except that the eyes are blue, while Jane’s were known to be
Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and
Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from the Love Affair of a Lifetime edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Roberts It is probable that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a virgin ten years after her marriage to Alan Cameron, the retired Secretary to the Central Council of School
The Writer as Migrant, by Ha Jin Three quest-ions, labelled as ‘Aristot- elian’ by the author, begin the Rice University Campbell Lectures delivered by Ha Jin in 2007: to whom, as whom, and in whose interest does a writer write? To which the reader might respond: can any writer truthfully answer any of these questions?
Henrietta Bredin talks to Ian McDiarmid about turning a novel set in Scotland into a play Ian McDiarmid possesses a voice that, if he chose to let it, could curdle milk. Half-strangled and poisonously clotted it emerges in an evil flow in his portrayal of the Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars films. As Satan
Manon Coliseum Ballet goers don’t seem to mind the endless flow of new productions of 19th-century classic works. Every year works such as Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle and the ubiquitous Nutcracker are presented to audiences worldwide with new designs, new sets, new dramaturgic readings and, in some instances, with new choreography. Yet such a
If your concert-going habits mean that you always attend the same kinds of venue in the same kinds of town in the same country, the equation I am about to put to you may strike you as being rather odd. But the fact is that on the world stage there are socialist concerts and capitalist
Maybe it was too soon for Saturday night’s Archive on 4 to reflect on George W.’s reign as President of the US of A. After all, there are still three days left of his administration. But Bremner on Bush: A Final Farewell was a missed opportunity. Rory Bremner was presumably hauled in as presenter because
A Pantocrat who should be on everyone’s curriculum The decision by the authorities to drop Coleridge from the syllabus of state schools is intended as another nail in the coffin of English literature. He is to be replaced by a person unknown to me but apparently popular on TV quiz shows. No reason is provided
It’s bloody depressing being a columnist right now. The meltdown is easily the most important topic, but how many variants of this can you produce before readers give up? Or think they have read it all before? I was going to give you the latest economic horror story of our L-shaped downturn but instead I’ll
Ron Howard’s movie Frost/Nixon is that rarest of things: a film that not only replicates the brilliance of the stage play that inspired it, but transcends the original. Peter Morgan’s drama about the unforgettable interviews between David Frost and former President Nixon in 1977 gives Howard magnificent source material, to which he adds all the
Ach, Sir John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and leading champagne socialist, has died. Sad. From a piece I wrote about him way back in 2002: Mortimer belongs, I think, in the vanguard of the supporting cast, a second lieutenant rather than a leader himself. He’s too reticent to play the
Well Apollo Hit Me! The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury Leicester Square In Blood: The Bacchae Arcola So what does the theatre critic make of the recession? No one’s asked me, actually, so here goes. Leaving aside the obsessive 24-hour media coverage, there’s little trace of it in the real world. Immunise your bonce