The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Are books dead? No, just different. Or, rather, story-telling adapts to new technology. To wit, Japan. As the New York Times reports: TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a
…here’s one for all you art-lovers out there: A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre. After careful planning, he got past security, stole the paintings and made it safely to his van. However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas. When asked how
Purgatorio Arcola Happy Now? Cottesloe The Lover/The Collection Comedy Purgatorio. Hardly a seductive title and I confess it was curiosity rather than enthusiasm that dragged me to the Arcola in Hackney to see how Ariel Dorfman (best known for his 1992 play Death and the Maiden) had handled the Medea myth. His update transplants the
There Will Be Blood 15, nationwide Juno 12A, nationwide There Will Be Blood (oh, yes) stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a late-19th-century American oilman whose own view could not be plainer: find oil, beat off the competition, buy the land, drill it, get rich. And that’s about it, not that it matters. It’s the
Norm’s poll of your favourite English-language novelists has reported its findings. Not a great surprise that Austen and Dickens come first and second. But really, how can Norm’s erudite readers have placed Philip Roth third (albeit a very distant third) and Ian McEwan sixth? This suggests a serious lack of, well, judgement. Wodehouse, for the
Richard Shannon has been writing about Gladstone on and off for almost 50 years. His first book, a study of Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, was published in 1963. He is the author of a major biography of Gladstone in two exceptionally hefty volumes, which appeared to critical acclaim in 1982 and 1999. So why
Forget John McCain – on the evidence of this morning’s Press Conference it is Hillary Clinton who is getting inside David Cameron’s head. Talking about Britain’s UNICEF rankings, Cameron concluded, “We must live by the words of the famous African saying: It takes a village to raise a child.” As any American will tell you,
James MacMillan explains why he hates the assumption that he is a liberal left-winger In my travels I see myself frequently described in foreign media as a ‘left-wing and Scottish nationalist’ composer. The latter label is ludicrous, and I just put it down to a foreigner’s ignorance and justifiable disinterest in the parish-pump tedium of
Where do you find your music? Yes, I know, you go to the CD rack and there it is. Or, if you are as obsessed as some of us, you go into almost any room in the house and there is a pile of the stuff, because you can’t get rid of any of it,
Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures. Actually, as Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way
However loaded or coded, ‘Greek love’ is one of our more misleading cultural terms of convenience. It refers to an aspect of classical civilisation whose existence many people continue to find either embarrassing or reprehensible. Even now Hollywood chooses to present Achilles and Patroclus as best buddies US-Army style rather than as lovers unabashedly showing
The late Alan Coren once called a collection of articles Golfing for Cats, in order, he claimed, to maximise his sales by tapping in to two profitable markets at once. Michael Moorcock has lavishly adopted this stratagem. The cataloguing data for this book defines it as: ‘1. Detective and mystery stories. 2. Fantasy fiction.’ The
“Too soon!” went the outcry when the films United 93 and World Trade Center were released, some 5 years after the events they depicted. Now – as Peter Bradshaw points out in today’s Guardian – filmmakers aren’t even waiting for the “dust to settle” on a news-story before moving-in with their cameras. A production deal
A Decade of Discovery Esoterick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London, N1, until 6 April This year, as the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art celebrates its tenth anniversary, garlanded with plaudits for the loan exhibitions it has mounted, it is time to focus once again on its greatest asset: its permanent collection. This new display,
Cloverfield 15, Nationwide Cloverfield is tiresome, dumb and horrid, and just in case you didn’t get that I’ll say it again: this film is tiresome, dumb and horrid. Don’t go. Do anything but go. Don’t be swayed, as I was, by the fact that on its opening day in America it grossed $16 million, grossed
The President’s Holiday Hampstead The Sea Haymarket The Vertical Hour Royal Court There’s no such thing as a great script idea. Ideas are equally good or bad, what counts is how they’re treated. Take the 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Pretty dramatic, momentous and gripping, I’d say. And here’s Penny Gold to dramatise it. She may
Peter Grimes Opera North Of all Britten’s operas Peter Grimes is the one I have seen most often, and it remains not only the one that I find it hardest to make up my mind about, but also the one which I still don’t feel I know especially well. There are the famous passages, not
‘Pakistan is a dysfunctional state,’ said the writer Martin Amis in a debate about ideologies and ideologues in our post-9/11 world on Start the Week (Monday, Radio Four). He seemed curiously unaware that he was in conversation with a woman lawyer from Pakistan, Asma Jahangir, who has just been released from house arrest after defying
Jonestown (BBC 2); Moving Wallpaper & Echo Beach (ITV); Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV) ‘Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid’ is an American slang phrase — tart, cynical and funny — used for telling people to get on with something they must do but would prefer to avoid. It refers back to the mass suicide of 909 members
This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. It
Jane Rye on William Feaver’s biography of Lucien Freud Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to the public gaze; but he does so on his own terms and is notoriously reluctant to let anyone else poke about in it. At the
Between 1975 and today, under the direction of Professor Wm. Roger Louis, the British Studies Seminars of the University of Texas has organized 60 seminars on the modern history of Britain and has published a selection of the lectures in five volumes of which this is the most recent. It includes personal reminiscence. Graham Greene,
Switch off your radios: I shall be on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme at around 5.45pm talking about, of all things, state-sponsored Gaelic TV. It may not surprise readers that I consider this a perfectly senseless boondoggle. by the standards of government waste it is, for sure, trivial and harmless stuff. To the extent that
‘Mr Hallé’s Band’ began giving concerts 150 years ago. Michael Kennedy on the great orchestra On the wet evening of 30 January 1858 in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, which had been opened only two years previously, the 38-year-old Charles Hallé launched his privately funded series of orchestral concerts. On the same date next week,
THEATRE I can strongly recommend God of Carnage, the new play by Yasmina Reza, which tracks the descent into madness of a meeting between two couples to discuss an altercation between their respective sons. All starts with impeccable manners, stilted conversation and discussion of recipes. And then, in a sort of Moulinex blend of Abigail’s
FILM One of the most remarkable things about Africa is how rare it is to see Africans cry. You meet so many human beings there who are forced to endure the most unthinkable, unconscionable poverty, disease and neglect; and yet invariably they do so with a smile so big and true it breaks your heart.
BOOK I’m just coming to the end of The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser – Jerome Loving’s critical biography of my favourite writer. Loving weaves together three narratives – Dreiser’s personal life; his literary development; and the history of early-Twentieth Century America – to create the definitive account of the genius behind Sister
I have three books on the go at the moment: Charles Leadbeater’s brilliant analysis of web-world, We-Think, The Craftsman, by the Spectator’s own in-house magus, Richard Sennett (another masterpiece), and Marcus Du Sautoy’s intriguing exploration of symmetry, Finding Moonshine. I have known Marcus since we are at All Souls together and as well as being
You were probably expecting me to review Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Sky One, Monday) this week but I’m a bit off Afghanistan programmes at the moment. Not to the point where I won’t watch them all the time to the exclusion of almost all else. Just to the point where, at the end, I feel