The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
For those who haven’t leafed through a copy, or read the extracts in the Guardian this week, Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s new book is effectively an extended diatribe against the Unjust Rewards of those who, say, work in the City, or who went to Oxbridge universities. It’s a one-note attack – with scant room for subtleties – and Giles
In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of
This short novel was first published in a tiny edition at the end of last year. Since then it has won the McKitterick Prize (for the best first novel by an author over forty), and now it is reissued with a glossy picture on the cover and a quote by Mick Jagger saying that he
Andrew Taylor reviews a selection of recent crime novels The Murder Farm (Quercus, £8.99) is Andrea Schenkel’s first novel and has been hugely successful in her native Germany and elsewhere. Based on a real case, it is set in the 1950s and deals with murder of a farmer, his wife, daughter, grandchildren and maid. It
Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t
We’ve just updated the Spectator summer reading list with some selections from our literary editor, Mark Amory. You can see them – and the rest of the list – here.
We’ve just updated the Spectator summer reading list with recommendations from Liz Anderson and Henrietta Bredin. You can see the full list here.
It’s 80 years since the birth of Andy Warhol – an occasion which I feel shouldn’t go unmarked. To be honest, though, my reaction to his work oscillates wildly. Sometimes it seems warm and inclusive, and I enjoy it. At others, it’s too arch and mechanstic, and I don’t. But I guess that’s Warhol’s allure. His
Vilhelm Hammershoi: the Poetry of Silence Royal Academy, until 7 September The poet Rilke cautioned that ‘Hammershoi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow…’ It is certainly muted, being composed mostly in shades of oatmeal and grey. Interiors and the fall of light were favourite
National Ballet of China: Swan Lake Royal Opera House My first article for The Spectator was a slightly long-winded analysis of the state of Swan Lake on the eve of the ballet’s centenary. It followed a far more pedantic four-part essay in the specialist magazine Dancing Times, of which the late Frank Johnson, my first
Her Naked Skin Olivier Elaine Stritch At Liberty Shaw In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like
Elegy 15, London and Key Cities Elegy is about an ageing professor (Ben Kingsley) and a beautiful young woman (Penelope Cruz), and it is based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, which, in turn, takes its title from Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which the poet describes his soul as ‘sick with desire/and
Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culture-vulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop
You may have seen the summer reading list that Tory MPs have been issued with. But here’s an alternative set of book recommendations for you, this time from Spectator staff. Not all the books will be newly-published. But they’re generally books that we’ve read – and enjoyed – recently. Hopefully, we’ll unearth a few gems for you. If so, please
It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment
Was it Wordsworth who discovered the ‘real’ rural? Later, the Georgian poets celebrated its passing, giving rise to what Edward Thomas called ‘the Norfolk Jacket school of writing’. The poets of the 1930s took up politics instead, and nowadays poets are mostly urban. These scatter-shot generalisations, riddled with exceptions, are only meant as an introduction
Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move
Lloyd Evans talks to Matthew Bourne about his new ballet Dorian Gray and co-directing Oliver! Matthew Bourne is a whirlwind. He’s a dynamo, a powerhouse, a force of nature. He has created the busiest ballet company on earth and turned Britain into the world’s leading exporter of dance theatre. His breakthrough came in 1995 with
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict The British Museum, until 26 October Sponsored by BP After last week’s Hadrian supplement in The Spectator, readers will be well-informed about this prince of emperors, so I will confine my remarks to a personal response to the exhibition. I must say immediately that it looks very impressive and that Sir
Mikhailovsky Ballet London Coliseum It is somewhat refreshing that the 2008 summer ballet season in London is not monopolised by either the Bolshoi or the Kirov/Mariinsky ballet companies as it has been for the past few years. The presence of two rarely seen formations, such as the Mikhailovsky Ballet and the National Ballet of China,
La Gioconda; Pulcinella; Iolanta Opera Holland Park On a hot fine evening in London there can’t be anywhere more delightful for an opera-lover than Opera Holland Park, which is now so comfortable, and has such high standards of performance, that to see a rarely performed work there is in all respects at least as enjoyable
The X-Files: I Want to Believe 15, Nationwide OK, straight to the point, because we are busy people, right? And when we are not busy we are pretending to be busy, right? So, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, worth your time? No. As it is, it’s 104 minutes that I won’t be getting back.
Marcus Berkmann on Travis Elborough’s nostalgia for LP records There’s a rather wonderful new book out by a man named Travis Elborough, which sounds a bit like one of those dead Dorset villages where every second house is a holiday rental. Mr Elborough’s previous book was a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the Routemaster bus,
Early mornings on Four have seen a miraculous appearance in the past fortnight with the emergence of the Evan and Nick Show. Not for years has there been a genuine double act on the Today programme; not since Brian Redhead and John Timpson in the 1980s when the Queen tuned in at ten past seven
A three-part series called Expedition Guyana was hurriedly retitled Lost Land of the Jaguar (BBC1, Wednesday) possibly in the hopes that viewers might think it was a spin-off from Top Gear, more likely because a BBC suit suddenly realised that the name ‘Guyana’ wouldn’t pull in viewers. No doubt someone else wanted to call it
Philip Hensher on Peter Martin’s biography of Samuel Johnson Thanks to Boswell’s inexhaustibly interesting biography, Samuel Johnson is deeply familiar to us, even in his most extreme eccentricities. It’s easy to forget how bizarre and alarming he must have seemed to most of his contemporaries. His involuntary movements were such that modern scholars have often wondered
In Wild Mary, his biography of the irrepressible Mary Wesley, Patrick Marnham describes Cornwall in the 1930s as ‘a lost world, a world that had its own rules and customs and mysteries’. While Wesley was bed-hopping on the Lizard peninsula, around the Atlantic-battered rocks at Newquay, Emma Smith was enjoying a most peculiar childhood in
Jonathan Mirsky on Nancy Kohner’s new book What could be more poignant than this? ‘You know nothing of what is happening here, and I can’t explain it to you. Just be glad that you’re as far away as you are. What is happiness? Happiness is what once was, once upon a time when we lived such a
Blair Worden reviews Ophelia Field’s latest book What a wonderful subject Ophelia Field has found, and how adroitly she has handled it. In the Kit-Cat Club, the coterie of Whig writers and politicians that began in the last years of the 17th century and lasted into George I’s reign, she finds both a mirror and a source