The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Earth: The Climate Wars (BBC 2); Amazon (BBC 2); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (BBC 1) A Church of England official has issued an apology to the descendants of Charles Darwin for the Church’s ‘anti-evolutionary’ fervour towards his Origin of the Species. I wonder if in about 150 years’ time the BBC — presuming it still
Ancient Landscapes — Pastoral Visions: Samuel Palmer to the Ruralists Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until 19 October Don’t be misled by the title: although in its entirety this is a wide-ranging exhibition, it was organised by Southampton Art Gallery (and thus draws heavily on that remarkable permanent collection) and was originally intended for a much
Don Giovanni Royal Opera House La Rondine Peacock Theatre This latest revival, for which the opening night received a great deal of publicity, and which began with Tony Hall, the Royal Opera’s chief executive, welcoming Sun readers and bidding them to come again — but at what price? — sported as distinguished a cast as
Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost all normal rights to speak out, each was forced to question every thought and ask himself: ‘Rather than death…?’ In practice, most of the writers
Chicago, by Alaa al-Aswani Because I spend part of each winter in Egypt, friends from time to time ask me to recommend, not a guide, but a book that will give them the ‘feel’ of that country. Invariably my choice has been The Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won
The Believers, by Zoë Heller Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is
It has been famously written, and often observed, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Never was this truer than in the case of the Wittgensteins, who were also, some of them, crazy. I take notes in books for review and in this one I wrote ‘nuts’ 23 times. Ludwig, the famous
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner. It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, read by Lyndham Gregory Ever been called a ‘dung-brained gubberhead’ or had your face compared to ‘a bandar’s bunghole’? Welcome aboard the Ibis, a rancid former slaving schooner now transporting migrants, coolies, criminals and opium from Calcutta to China. Here amidst the pounding seas we have the perfect backcloth
All gone, now of course. Bryan Appleyard has more: I was once persuaded, against my better judgment, to write to Samuel Beckett in Paris – I knew him slightly – asking him about his hopes and resolutions for the new year. The telegram arrived – ‘Hopes colon zero stop resolutions colon zero stop.’ Christopher Ricks
Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks back to the early 20th century when organs were in their heyday ‘As in England, in America the organ is King,’ wrote the French organ-composer Louis Vierne in 1927, following a phenomenally successful three-month tour of America and Canada. His 50 recitals had drawn in around 70,000 obsessed fans, including some 6,000
Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray Sadler’s Wells I often wonder whether in a society so greedily obsessed with the commercial acquisition of good looks Dorian Gray’s disquieting handsomeness and prolonged youth would still mean anything. Liposuction, steroids, laser hair-removal and impossible fitness programmes have eroded and detracted from what once was the notion of ideal beauty,
Although I spend my time working with counterpoint, and know jazz is as capable as any other sort of music at yielding the greatest delight in it, how jazz musicians organise their ‘compositions’ remains a complete mystery to me. I could more easily write a symphony than join in with a jam session. Are they
Pineapple Express 15, Nationwide Pineapple Express is a ‘stoner’ comedy from the seemingly inexhaustible, super-producer Judd Apatow and, in its defence, probably wasn’t made with a middle-aged housewife such as myself in mind. As it is, I’ve only ever done pot once and did not like it (my knees went). Apatow was, of course, also
Saint François d’Assise Royal Albert Hall As the climax of the Proms centenary of Messiaen, The Netherlands Opera brought his vast opera Saint François d’Assise to a sadly uncrowded Royal Albert Hall. And by Act III there was room for the prommers to lie in the arena as if they were fellow recipients of the
There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total,
Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux When Paul Theroux set off from Victoria Station in 1973 his plan was to cross Europe and Asia, taking as many trains as he needed to get him to Tokyo, returning on the Trans-Siberian Express. From the four-month journey came a travel book that was not
Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent, the dearest friend will turn sly and dogmatic. No surprise then to discover that in North America Scrabble is a cut-throat business, in which computer-generated
On the latest Spectator letters page you’ll find a response by Robert Weide to Toby Young’s Status Anxiety column last week. Weide’s the director of the forthcoming film of Toby’s semi-autobiographical book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and he objects to Toby’s account of the actress Kirsten Dunst’s on-set behaviour. As Weide puts
It was the final of Maestro on BBC TV last night and I have been glued to every episode. Despite being extremely wary to begin with at the thought of a bunch of amateurs plunging in to try their hand at something so complex as conducting, a skill that requires years of study to master,
Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress Leicester Square Theatre Liberty Globe Sons of York Finborough Let’s hear it for those ageing babes and their one-gran shows. Hip, hip, hip-replacement. Britt Ekland and Elaine Stritch are already at it, and here comes Joan Rivers who wastes no time wasting the opposition.
Francis Bacon Tate Britain (sponsored by Bank of America), until 4 January 2009 At Tate Britain is a glorious centenary show of paintings by one of our greatest modern painters, Francis Bacon. It’s more than 20 years since the last Bacon retrospective at the Tate, but the Bacon industry has been chugging steadily away in
If you’re able to read this magazine on Saturday in an unchanged world, it’s probably safe to assume that Wednesday’s gigantic experiment with particle physics has not brought about the catastrophe that some doomsayers have predicted. Big Bang Day was the moment when the scientists at the great Cern laboratory under the Alps finally switched
Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century. With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on
Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, by Kirsten Ellis Unlike her republican-minded father, ‘Citizen Stanhope’, Hester declared ‘I am an aristocrat and I make a boast of it’. After falling out with him (her mother had died when Hester was four) and quarrelling with his heir, her brother, in her
Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John Williams Poor Michael. His life became a complete mess and in 1975, aged 41, he was hanged for murder in the prison in Port of Spain, Trinidad. One of the victims was his young cousin, Skerritt, a local barber; the other, more sensationally, was an
Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person
Pompeii, by Mary Beard In the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew its top. First came a rain of pumice stones; the roofs of Pompeii collapsed under their weight. Worse was to come: a burning lava, flowing at great speed against which no living being could survive. Pompeii was a city