The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Girl with a Pearl Earring Theatre Royal Haymarket Waste Almeida Creditors Donmar I don’t know much about art but I know what I dislike. Art history. It forces one to view paintings and sculpture through the medium of literature. Every word spoken in appreciation of art is a step away from true art appreciation, which
For some reason October this year is yielding the kind of running about the place more normally associated with the summer festivals. From Naples to St Asaph, from Paris to Evora to St Omer and back to Evora in as many days with the added excitement of a broken-down Eurostar and various throat- and ankle-related
There’s something agreeably aimless, even melancholy, about late Saturday afternoons, after you’ve finished whatever you were doing in the day and before it’s time to go out. I found myself in a hotel room in Yorkshire last week at the crepuscular hour of 5.30, too lazy to do any work, too enervated to shower and
In 1956 I joined other new kids on the block at Punch magazine: Quentin Blake, Ed McLachlan, Mike Williams, Honeysett, Ray Lowry, Ken Pyne, Bill Tidy, Pav, Petty, plus Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman who were going to blow the world apart with their blood-and-guts drawings. While Punch’s pages were curling at the edges, up
Joan Eardley The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1, until 20 December The interplay between realism and abstraction that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in British art gave rise to a number of fascinating paintings as artists struggled to resolve the balance to their own satisfaction. The co-existence of these extremes in the
Cavalleria rusticana & I Pagliacci English National Opera Don Giovanni Royal Opera Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci tend to be regarded by opera buffs as a couple of blowsy old tarts, still plying their trade long after they could plausibly expect any decent customers, and only to be contemplated or tolerated if they are wearing
These days, Charles Pooter, the City clerk and narrator of George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1892) — the enduring comedy of hum-drum middle-class, late-19th-century life — could never afford to rent (or buy) his six-bedroom house, The Laurels, in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. The Pooters of this world fled north London a
This is a time for making the most of small mercies. One of the greatest of these, as the financial system collapses around us, is the splendid joke that is Robert Peston of the BBC. His extraordinarily camp, over-emphatic delivery would be perfect for reporting glitzy Broadway first nights but seems hilariously at odds with
‘I couldn’t understand most of it. I mean I could understand each word but not when they were put together,’ says one of the characters in Tulips in Winter on Radio Three on Sunday night. I knew immediately what he meant. There was something wonderful going on in Michelene Wandor’s play word for word, but
Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who
Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw George Pelecanos, The Turnaround Ian Rankin, Doors Open Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in
The Horsey Life, by Simon Barnes Dolly Dolores was a big-bottomed mare with a white star on her forehead who loved to jump. Simon Barnes experienced an instant connection with her on his first ride. He had never owned a horse before, but his wife persuaded him to buy her. He spent a royalty cheque
Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of novels (Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men etc.) as well as the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries and the 44 Scotland Street series. But McCall Smith has a number of other strings to his
Of the four Prime siblings of the Beacon farm, Frank, the second boy, was, throughout their early lives, ‘almost invisible’. He did everything late, spent most of his time alone, and was a dunce at school, where he bemused teachers and children alike. They never knew what to make of Frank, they said; what went
Henrietta Bredin on how book illustrations can bring the narrative to life The illustrations in children’s books play a crucial role in expanding the imaginative horizons of the reader and fixing the story in the memory. The very best book illustration is so inextricably linked to the text that it is hard to think of
Ursula Buchan on the new chief presenter of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World Where do you stand on the most important issue of the day, namely, whether the BBC should have passed over Carol Klein, to be chief presenter of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World after the retirement of Monty Don, in favour of Toby Buckland? The
A musician friend of mine acquired his first iPod recently, and like small boys who don’t realise that everyone else went through this about five years ago, he and I frequently discuss our battles with the things. A musician friend of mine acquired his first iPod recently, and like small boys who don’t realise that
Six Characters in Search of an Author Gielgud Riflemind Trafalgar Studios Pirandello, the master of pretentious bombast, is perhaps the most talent-free of all Nobel laureates. Here he is in the West End with one of his better-known experiments updated by Rupert Goold and his collaborator Ben Power. Playing games with the conventions of theatre
Why do some sounds endure to jolt the memory and take us back to a specific moment in time, like Proust’s taste sensations, while others fade away? The chunter-chunter-chunt of a steam train, for instance, is instantly recognisable even for those too young ever to have been on a ‘real’ steam journey. When they hear
One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a
A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). A review of another biography
‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. For 25 years Simon Annand has been allowed to catch these vulnerable moments and the result is a series of intimate, revealing and beautiful portraits. Many of the subjects are famous, a
In 1972 Tim Robinson — a Yorkshireman by birth, a Cambridge mathematician by training, and an artist by vocation — moved to live on Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands that lie off the Galway coast. His first winter there was hard and ominous: long nights, big storms, and a series of
‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. It seems a bit early to be discussing how to survive the 21st century. After all, there are 92 years left in which to do it, years in which we can expect
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in
Rothko Tate Modern, until 1 February 2009 The first thing that should be noted is that this exhibition is not the retrospective that its title implies. In fact, it’s a severely limited show, concentrating on the late work only. There are therefore none of the joyful, brightly coloured paintings that sell so well around the
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People 15, Nationwide How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is based on Toby Young’s best-selling memoir of the same name and, already, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: what, a film based on Toby’s book? Well, he kept that very quiet, the sly old devil.
Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday); Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday) ‘People have a problem with me,’ claims Jamie Oliver, but I’m not one of them. I’ve had my doubts in the past — overuse of phrases like ‘luvly jubbly’, the Sainsbury’s ads, the general extreme jealousy of his stupendous wealth,
An old friend in journalism, well aware that he was prone to conspiracy theories, especially where his own career was concerned, used to say to me, ‘Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get me.’ So were the authorities out to get Aidan O’Brien when they convicted him and jockey Colm