The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Eric Ringmar has only been blogging since last year, but has already been sacked from his job as a lecturer at the London School of Economics. What did he do wrong? Nothing, by his account. First I must say parenthetically, for those who take no cognisance of such things, that blogs are no more than
Currently lurking in the Scottish Borders; blogging hiatus likely to continue for a few more days. Trust y’all are flourishing and making the most of the New Year.
Andrew Lambirth urges those who think they don’t like this artist to go and see this show Last chance to see this large and lavish retrospective of the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais (Tate Britain, until 13 January). The Tate confidently asserts that John Everett Millais (1829–96) was the ‘greatest’ of the association
For the answers to the Impossible Quiz, click here. For the answers to the Impossible Quiz, click here.
Filming on The Palace was only a few weeks in when the rumours started flying. ‘A tawdry and offensive affair’ trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph; ‘dreadful and offensive and very near to the bone’, added Lord St John of Fawsley; ‘a real danger [it will] undermine support for the [royal] family’, weighed in a media watchdog.
Absurd Person Singular, Garrick Women of Troy, Lyttelton Cinderella, Old Vic Five years as a critic and I’ve never seen anything by Alan Ayckbourn. With a flicker of apprehension in my heart I took my seat at the Garrick. Absurd Person Singular (nice title, nothing to do with the play) begins at a bourgeois
Sleeping & Dreaming Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1, until 9 March 2008 ‘To sleep, perchance to dream…’. If only. We are supposed to spend one third of our lives asleep, but many find getting their regulation quota a losing battle, and others don’t even want to. Sleep is beleaguered in our busy world,
I am an idiot. Last month, in this space, I proffered the usual random selection of favourite albums of the year, not a single one of which had actually been released in 2007, for, like many people (I’d like to think), I can be a little slow on the musical uptake. A day or two
If you’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. after yet another nightmare about climate change, there’s been a well-timed antidote on Radio Four this week. On The Estuary (made by the wildlife team, Chris Watson as sound recordist, Mike Dilger as naturalist and Stephen Head as the landscape historian), we heard how The Wash on
Extras (BBC 1), Parkison: The Final Conversation (ITV), Sense and Sensibility (BBC 1), David Cameron’s Incredible Journey (BBC 2), The Hidden Story of Jesus (Channel 4) We said goodbye to Michael Parkinson and Andy Millman over Christmas. Andy Millman was the hero of Extras, whose finale went out on BBC1 on 27 December. This was what
Many of us are beginning to weary of the pushier sort of ‘expert’. Gone is the sense of proportion, the admission of scientific doubt, the ability to weigh risks against benefits. Taking seriously a year’s worth of their health warnings would give anyone an eating disorder. It hardly builds confidence when so much of the
Ricardo Somocurcio, the narrator of The Bad Girl, is an unambitious man whose sole wish, ever since his childhood in Peru, has been to live in Paris. He studied hard at school and, on arriving in Paris after university, learns languages and soon makes enough money from working as a freelance interpreter to stay in
Ninety may be the new 70, but it is also seriously old, and no picnic. In her short, sharp, disconcerting new book, Diana Athill, the renowned editor turned writer who has just reached her 90th birthday, does not try to pretend otherwise; pretending is not, and never has been, her style. Here, she contemplates her
by , , , ISBN When you buy this book (and buy you should for reasons that follow), try reading the notes to A New Waste Land before the poem itself. This is not because the poem is ‘difficult’ or in any sense obscure. On the contrary, Horowitz is an oral poet, a performer: veteran
Decolonisation has not been a happy experience for Africa. But nowhere in the continent has it been as disastrous as in Algeria. The country had once been the most successful of France’s colonies. Before the war, it was rich in resources and heavily subsidised by France. The educational system worked moderately well. It had produced
Fidel Castro, hélas, et encore, hélas, hélas. Castro is the most famous Latin American since Bolívar, one of the few to have achieved world fame. He deserves it, as a third-world revolutionary and as a survivor. There are many studies of him, and here is another, the product of some hundred hours of interviews conducted
Poor old Fordie. That was Ford’s eternal cry, and it is repeated often here. His father called him ‘the patient but extremely stupid Ass’, his very name — Huffer — meant ‘Ass’, so was changed first to Hueffer, then to Ford. As a writer he was disliked (‘It is me they dislike, not the time-shift’),
On Boxing Day, The Skimmer noted how the Catherine Tate Christmas Special with its orgy of swearing was hardly suitable for BBC1 on Christmas Day. Now, The Times reports that OFCOM is to investigate the show following a flurry of complaints from viewers about the “most offensive programme ever broadcast by the BBC on a
The Catherine Tate Show’s Christmas Day Special managed over 20 uses of the F-word in the first five minutes, which must be something of a record, even by today’s debased standards of modern entertainment. True, the show was broadcast at 10.30pm, safely after the 9pm watershed when more adult material is shown, but this
Shane McGowan celebrates his 50th birthday today. Who would have thought it? Comfort and joy all round. This must rank as one of the most unlikely anniversaries imaginable. As the great man says himself: “Smoking, drinking, partying – that’s why I’ve stayed alive as long as I have.” That’s the spirit lads. Give it a
Oh dear. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis (who apparently find the idea of being asked to name and write about her favourite movies of the year an intolerable imposition that reminds her of the Judeo-Christian patriarchy that has made her existence so frightfully ghastly) then further indulges herself with this hackneyed spot of hand-wringing:
Watched “Atonement”, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, the film version of Ian McEwan’s novel and the latest British costume drama which American critics affect to love (hence talk of Oscars) but to which American audiences are indifferent (in two weeks in the US it’s taken only a paltry $3.5m at the box office).
This is the best Christmas song I’ve seen in years. It’s obviously even better if, like me, you went through a teenage phase of listening to nothing but The Doors…
Now that Hollywood has decreed that smoking in movies is as bad – and in fact perhaps worse – than gratuitous sex and violence, it’s not a great surprise that folk are reminiscing about the role smoking has played in the movies. This Slate sideshow doesn’t break much new ground – and, lamentably, declares smoking
It seems bizarre to me that book shopping at this time of year should be about negotiating your way through mountainous piles of ‘Things You Never Knew About…’ or ‘The Book of Absolutely Useless…’ -type miscellanies. Surely Christmas, with its long, lazy afternoons and that strange week of limbo between Boxing Day and New Year’s
Some years ago I was walking through the closed galleries of the Uffizi with a group of journalists, when we passed the Portinari Altarpiece. In those spaces, free for once of jostling crowds, it was suddenly obvious what a wonderful work of art this mighty triptych was. With paintings, as with people, you often get
The fight has gone out of Victorian- bashing as a pastime. The high moral aims and low double standards of so much 19th-century culture, characterised by unsmiling portentousness and once regarded by Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford et al. as a ‘shriek’, pale alongside the emptiness of modern celebrity worship. ‘Victorian’, which once meant ugly, silly
The indulgences of Christmas in the forms of food and drink are fairly well represented in the operatic canon but less socially acceptable indulgences, such as smoking and even drug abuse, don’t feature quite so frequently. Hardly surprising, really, as singing doesn’t seem naturally to combine with snorting a line or the long, luxurious inhalation
At the National Gallery the year starts with a show of Pompeo Batoni’s stylish portraits of 18th-century Grand Tourists in Italy (20 February to 18 May). The painter Alison Watt (born Greenock, 1965) has now completed her two-year stint as the NG’s seventh Associate Artist and will be showing the fruits of her labours in