The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Boris Godunov English National Opera La rencontre imprévue Guildhall School of Music and Drama The new production of Musorgsky’s most important work Boris Godunov, at English National Opera, raises more questions than it answers. It is an impressive achievement, showing a seriousness of commitment to the work on the part of everyone involved, and yet
Body of Lies 15, Nationwide Body of Lies is the latest film from producer/director Ridley Scott and it is an espionage thriller set mostly in the Middle East — Iraq, Jordan and Syria — featuring espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and, if you can keep up, which I didn’t, there is probably a considerable amount of counter-counter-counter-espionage
Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. But I genuinely found his sitcom, Outnumbered (BBC 1, Saturday), co-written with his long-time collaborator Guy Jenkin,
Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind. When, finally, you can no longer ignore what is happening all around you, at least you can be comforted by the
Now that I am in my 81st year I have been wondering what to do about my art library, which has more or less taken over my country house in Over Stowey and occupies all the available space there. I originally began collecting it seriously 30 years ago, to help me write a general history
A further selection of the best and worst books of 2008 , chosen by some of our regular reviewers Ferdinand Mount I’m not sure quite what it is that captivated me about Tim Winton’s novel, Breath (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). It’s a sort of Huck Finn goes surfing in Australia. A scrawny kid bums along the
Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, by Tom Holland Millennia, like centuries, are artificial quantities, mathematical nothings. Medieval men may not have shared our obsession with marking the years in round numbers. But they had much the same desire to bring form and structure to a history that might otherwise
On her sole experience of sharing a stage with Sybil Thorndike the redoubtable old dragon, Marie Tempest, found all her scene-stealing tricks foiled by her co-star. Hear- ing of Thorndike’s later damehood she muttered: ‘That’s what comes of playing saints’. Thorndike was, of course, always associated with Saint Joan from her first portrayal of Shaw’s
Ian Buruma’s latest book, The China Lover, is a fictionalised take on themes previously examined in his impressive body of non-fictional work. His views on Japan, its history, films and underworld as well as the role of the outsider, the relationship between East and West and much more are all unpacked here as we follow
I see from the cover of this book that at least three reviewers had kind words to say about Gordon Brown’s previous effort. ‘Very moving,’ the Guardian wrote. ‘Readable and intelligent,’ alleged the Sunday Times. ‘Trust me: this is a fine book,’ claimed The Spectator. Perhaps they were being polite because the author is not
The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant It is a curious fact, not enough appreciated, that the qualities which make men successful entrepeneurs — imagination, courage, energy, ambition and so on — can be nearly useless in politics, diplomacy and war. Thus, William Stephenson, a rich Canadian
The Island that Dared, by Dervla Murphy Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, where the deuce can we go without Dervla Murphy getting there before us? This miracle of ubiquity has rattled from end to end of the Andes, tracked the Indus to its source, ridden a mule through Ethiopia and a bicycle
Late Nights on Air comes daubed with the usual eulogies, yet this is one book that truly merits the ecstatic blurb and more besides. It is Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, after A Student of Weather (2000) and Garbo Laughs (2003), both of which have been lauded in her native Canada and, to a lesser degree,
Lord Berners, by Peter Dickinson Lord Berners spent his life with his reputation preceding him. Lovingly fictionalised as ‘Lord Merlin’, he of the multicolour dyed pigeons in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, less sympathetically rendered as ‘Titty’ in Harold Nicolson’s Some People, Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwitt-Wilson, 14th Baron
Lady Worsley’s Whim, by Hallie Rubenhold There is a magnificent portrait by Reynolds at Harewood House in Yorkshire of Lady Worsley. She wears a sweeping red riding habit, she looks self-assured and alert, and she holds a riding crop as an allusion to her skill as a horsewoman. In reality, as Hallie Rubenhold’s book vividly
Chekhov originally wrote the dramatic monologue, On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, in 1886, and substantially revised it for a second version of 1902 shortly before his death. It deals with Ivan Ivanovitch Nyukhin, a hen-pecked husband who delivers a lecture (at the request of his wife) on the evils of smoking. The play has
Until the BBC’s Culture Show reminded me of it this evening, I had no idea that it is now 25 years since Local Hero was released. Christ, that makes one feel old. If Bill Forsyth’s classic is not the best British movie of the past quarter century, it is certainly the loveliest. And, oddly, timely
Danny Kruger explains how his theatre company helps offenders to go straight Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson was a drug dealer, with a five-year stretch for murder behind her and no nice future ahead. But then a random meeting in a Baltimore nightclub, with an actor in the hit TV show The Wire, led to a starring
The Baader Meinhof Complex 18, Key Cities The Baader Meinhof Complex is, well, just horrible really. Horrible, horrible, horrible and for those of you who are slow out there — and I know who you are; don’t think I don’t — it is horrible; just horrible. It is brutal, relentless, nihilistic, violent, terrifying, relentless, psychopathic,
I had what reformed alkies call a moment of clarity last week. On one of my regular trawls through the Amazon website, I clicked the One-day 1-Click button and ordered the first CD in what I felt in my guts was going to be an expensive and enjoyable binge. But instead of the usual response
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare Mark Morris Dance Group Barbican Like child prodigies, enfants terribles do not last forever. As both epithets imply, there is always a fairly traumatic moment in which they stop being children. True, enfants terribles normally outlive child prodigies, at least because the label is never so strictly related
My old friend ‘Posh Ed’ Stourton begins his new book about political correctness (It’s a PC World, Hodder and Stoughton) with an anecdote about the Queen Mother. She told him, in private, that the EEC would never work, because of all those ‘Huns, Wops and Dagoes’. Ed was displeased: ‘I thought that what she had
The only man from Dulwich College I have ever known, or met, was a master at my school, M. H. Bushby. A distinguished cricketer at Dulwich, he went on to captain Cambridge. Here he is described, in later life, as a ‘much respected and much loved housemaster’, so my attitude to Dulwich has always been
Malcolm Lowry liked to quote the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who saw Man’s life as a sort of novel, made up as you go along. Certainly there are times when life aspires to the condition of fiction. The story of Peter Mandelson, George Osborne, Nat Rothschild and the Russian oligarch might have been written
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker The writer, Robert Macfarlane, said of his friend, Roger Deakin, that everything Deakin had ever said tended ‘towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self’. It was a fierce verdict. Not a denial of the self or even a suppression of
All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not
My Three Fathers, by Bill Patten The mother to match Bill Patten’s three fathers was Susan Mary Jay. The Jays were cosmopolitan and very grand: they sent their sons to Eton and hobnobbed with the likes of the Mouchys and Boni de Castellane. They would have considered their fellow-Americans of The Ambassadors or Portrait of
A Prickly Affair, by Hugh Warwick At a time when most of his fellow-mystics deplored this sinful world and longed to leave it, 17th-century Thomas Traherne ecstatically celebrated the world and confirmed his religious faith by observing its wonders. ‘The Ant is a great Miracle in a little room . . . its Limbs and
The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, edited by Neil Harris Think quiz. ‘A crescent-shaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake. An unchallenged murder record — a splendid university — hobo capital to the country — and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this earth.’