The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Vermeer’s Hat turns on its head the conventional relationship between a history book and its illustrations. The seven paintings and one plate reproduced here are not intended to give us clues as to what the period and people in the narrative looked like, but are themselves the starting points for the web of narratives that
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany Nazis in the theatre liven things up no end. They provide the hilarity in The Producers, the creepiness in Cabaret. And when you can’t take any more bright copper kettles or warm woollen mittens in The Sound of Music on comes the SS,
One had confidently anticipated (‘The sex is better than ever!’ he burbled in excited undertone when I last met him a few years ago at a York University concert) that Wilfrid Mellers would make his centenary. His death this May at only 94 doesn’t sadden, however, so much as joyfully recall the wacky life force
Zorro Garrick The Tailor and Ansty Old Red Lion Is Zorro any good? Forget the show for a second, look at the marketing. The stars are English, the story is American and the music, by the Gypsy Kings, is French with a strong Spanish flavour. That’s half the Western hemisphere covered. Nice work, everyone. Things
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging 12A, Nationwide Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is a teen movie as may be rather obvious from the title — come on, it was hardly going to explore the terrible reality of Bosnia’s post-war traumas; get a grip — and we are all for teen movies, aren’t we? A teen
Hansel und Gretel Glyndebourne La bohème Royal Opera House The two operas I saw last week were premièred just over two years apart, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel at Christmas 1893, Puccini’s La Bohème in February 1896. Both of them deal with deprivation and poverty and very different life-destroying forces, and ways of coping with them.
Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a
This book opens with a bang; things are suggested rather than described, in short paragraphs, mostly dialogue; the impression is of a (very English) Hemingway. A party of six inmates, two orderlies and a newly arrived doctor, Irvine, are being taken on a bus from Dartford Asylum to view a whale beached on the Thames
Charles II apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’, and, if it could speak, the novel might do the same. Its death has been so often decreed. More than sixty years ago J B Priestley called it ‘a decaying literary form’ which ‘no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time’. Does this
Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 12 October David Tress: Chasing Sublime Light Petworth House, West Sussex, until 29 July Colin Self (born 1941) is one of the unsung talents of the English art world, a maverick who made intensely original Pop art in the 1960s and then rusticated
The Proms (BBC Radio 3); Latitude Festival (BBC Radio 4); A tribute to Charles Wheeler (BBC Radio 4) It was totally over-the-top, the first-night concert of this year’s Proms season, the 114th since Henry Wood set out in 1895 to educate the musical palate of the nation. It was almost as if the programme was designed by
Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small
In four years London will host its third Olympic Games. It is the first time it will have done so as the winner of a competition between bidding cities as fierce – and some say as suspect – as any that take place in the stadium. Before that London was volunteered as a stage only
This is how you do not interview Hollywood actresses. Newsweek meets Gillian Anderson: I’ve got to confess. I don’t know anything about “The X-Files.” OK. Why is it such a big deal? Ohmygod. You’re not going to do this to me, are you? Tell me you’re not going to do this. Oh come on! It’s
Matthew Yglesias, libertarian? Well, sort of. (He’s right of course.)
Tiffany Jenkins talks to James Cuno about looting, exporting and owning antiquities James Cuno is a busy man. I pin him down between two projects: promoting the new Modern Art Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, opening next year, where he is president and director, and the launch of his new book Who Owns
It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare,
WALL.E, the latest CGI animation from Pixar in collaboration with Disney, has already been hailed as a ‘modern masterpiece’ — in America, at least — but I’m not so sure. It has a cracking, enthralling, wonderfully dystopian first half, but after that it appears mostly concerned with hurtling towards one of those predictable endings that
The Royal Court’s search for new scripts has gone global. Its tireless talent scouts, assisted by the British Council, fan out across France, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Syria and Mexico laying on seminars, workshops and ‘residencies’. They go to India, too, although quite why the Court spends energy nurturing dramatists in a country with the world’s
Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil as it was called in Germany, came rather late to Austria, where it was sometimes called Sezessionstil. Gustav Klimt was a leading light in the breakaway Austrian Secession movement founded in 1897. Only a fool would deny that he was an exceptionally gifted artist. He absorbed in turn 19th-century Realism, Symbolism
Before getting down to a discussion of Wyndham Lewis and an exhibition I’ve been looking forward to for months, I want to register a protest about this year’s recipient of the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This prestigious prize is worth £25,000 and thus ranks with the Turner Prize as a top
IT would have been fun to be at the planning meeting for Harley Street (ITV, Thursday), the new medical drama series about a group of stunningly good-looking doctors in private practice. ‘Look, we get all the bloody bits, the emotional traumas, and the scenes where someone’s pushed down a hospital corridor on a trolley at
How far will the proposed road tax changes influence what we actually buy in the new car market? Not as much, perhaps, as the government likes to think. After all, if you want something like the admirable Fiat Panda you are never going to look at the (differently admirable) Audi A8 anyway. It’s those in
If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern
What do you make of this texting business? It took me on a surprisingly complex journey. First I felt revulsion, then doubt set in, then I sensed a developing acceptance and finally I embraced it with utilitarian enthusiasm. At one point I was even touched by a Shavian zeal that texting might usher in a
This is a curious book: not exactly likeable, but certainly intriguing, and definitely accomplished. It is a debut novel, but doesn’t feel like one at all. It is smart, bold and surprising, with nothing of the crowd-pleaser about it; in fact it might irritate, or disgust, just as easily as it amuses. A disgraced professor
Montaigne wished for a library of deathbed chronicles. ‘If I were a maker of books,’ he wrote, ‘I would assemble an annotated registry of various kinds of dying.’ Such a collection exists. Its ancestors are the ars moriendi of the Middle Ages and its modern manifestations bear uplifting titles such as The Year of Magical
Mugging, according to a popular theory, is a consensual act. Split seconds before the assault takes place victims supposedly establish some sort of complicity with their attackers, thus turning the robbery into a contractual arrangement. The same principle is just as easily applied to political assassination. Along the lines traced by Hardy’s famous poem ‘The
Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less,