Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth

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In my childhood we used to make what were called ‘scrap screens’. We pasted magazine photographs, coloured and black-and-white postcards, reproductions, advertisements and flower friezes on to a folding screen, overlapping sometimes unevenly, to create a colourful collage; it was a pleasant, inexpensive pastime. Helen Mirren’s In the Frame is a scrap- screen autobiography. Her

The view from the nursery

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It was a perpetual source of regret to me at the age of ten that my parents were so boringly agreeable. My attempts to persuade my friends that my father, in reality the mildest of men, was a violent sadist, who regularly whipped me with his cane while uttering the sinister words, ‘I’ve got Tickler

Stein and Toklas Limited

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As in her brilliant study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm’s focus in Two Lives is on the writing of biography, especially the biography of a couple — here, the ebullient Gertrude Stein and her ugly, much exploited lover, Alice B. Toklas — and, behind that, the construction of identity itself. Like Stein’s

Sympathy for the Old Devil

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In his criticism of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust observes that it ‘ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is a product of a very different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.’ I would not enter the argument stirred up

James Forsyth

Listen up

Tomorrow morning you’ll want to tune into The Week at Westminster on Radio 4, Matt will be presenting and he’s got some great guest lined up including Dennis Skinner, Gisela Stuart—whose comments on the European constitution have so discomforted Gordon Brown—and Malcolm Rikfkind who set the cat amongst the pigeons with his attack on Tory

No question about it, it was a great performance

Around Westminster today plenty of normally hard-bitten folk have been saying to me how good Fraser was on Question Time. He’s far too modest to say it, so let me add my own congratulations, and here’s Tim at Conservative Home (who is a very nice guy but doesn’t dole out praise indiscriminately) doing the same.

Fraser Nelson

Hollywood goes to war

Just out of the Lions for Lambs premiere in Leicester Square. It is the latest of Hollywood’s celluloid attacks on the White House, and a call to arms. The plot: Tom Cruise is a senator with presidential ambitions giving a reporter (Meryl Streep) an exclusive on his latest strategy in Afghanistan – ongoing as they

Who would have thought it?

There is a long tradition of the pop intelligentsia getting involved with academe or publishing — Pete Townshend’s work as an editor for Faber being the obvious example, Jah Wobble’s labours over Blake’s poetry rather less so. Sir Paul McCartney was the driving force behind the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. The Spectator’s own Alex James

Opera lives

Anyone tempted to think that opera might be a dying art only had to be at the Grand Theatre in Leeds on Tuesday night or the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden last night to discover that it is triumphantly and thrillingly alive.  On Tuesday, for a performance of Madam Butterfly, I sat surrounded by a

Packing a punch

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It’s a good month for the Great War. At the National Theatre this week a new play by Michael Morpurgo tells the story of the war seen through the eyes of a horse. Staged with huge puppet nags, War Horse sounds on paper like the theatrical lovechild of Equus and Birdsong. Up in Bolton, with

Restless mind

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For once a major blockbuster exhibition at the Tate justifies its size: the imaginative world of Louise Bourgeois is so potent and all-encompassing that a show of more than 200 works, from small experimental objects to large installations, seems not a fraction too extensive. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, is famous — in this

Subversive narrative

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Paula Rego had a retrospective at Tate Liverpool a decade ago and a big show in her native Portugal, where she is properly regarded as the country’s greatest living artist, but both exhibitions seem niggardly in comparison with the more than 200 works shown in some 14 rooms at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Even

Indigestible fare

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It isn’t often that we get the chance to see a semi-opera, of which Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur is a paradigm. And after seeing a competent production in Bury St Edmunds last week, I can’t say that I regret the infrequency of performances. This one was in the enchanting setting of the Theatre Royal,

Blurred boundaries

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Dance: Giselle — on love and other difficulties; Shaker As the blurb at the back of the programme says, it is well known that ‘Dance Umbrella celebrates and champions contemporary dance’. Yet the notion of ‘contemporary’ dance, once an artistically neat classification, has long lost its transparency. The vibrant and provocative combination of diverse performing

Competitive edge

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Amid all the fuss about cuts at the BBC and how this will affect programme output, I can’t help thinking, why the outrage? For years, there have been dark rumblings among writers that there’s no longer a drama department to nurture young talent and commission new work — the Birtian revolution of the 1990s saw

James Delingpole

Pointless bickering

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The thing I want to talk about this week is random and unnecessary tension-generation because it ruins almost every TV programme I watch and, once I’ve explained it, I like to think it will ruin all your TV viewing too. I’ll give you a classic example from Heroes (BBC2, Wednesday), a series to which I’m

You can admire a roguish old pagan without approving of him

Any other business

Recently I managed to get hold of a copy of Alone by Norman Douglas. This series of essays about Italian towns at the time of the first world war was the author’s favourite book. But it is not easily found. Indeed several of Douglas’s works are rarities. Most people know his novel South Wind, about

A late and furious flowering

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Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in

King of the lurid spectacle

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What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his

The great misleader

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In my intermittent career as an expert witness, I have observed that the most eminent men make the worst witnesses. Speaking from the lonely heights of their professional pre-eminence, they sometimes claim that what undoubtedly happened could not have happened, and what could not have happened undoubtedly did happen. Their intellectual distinction and busy schedules

Going through the motions

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If book reviews in The Spectator were, God forbid, ‘starred’, this self-styled biography of James Bond would merit just two stars out of five. The rationale behind so mediocre a score, however, would not be, as you might expect, that Pearson’s book is a curate’s egg, good in parts. Rather, it would reflect the fact

Not the place it used to be

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Roy Foster’s new book has its origins in the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2004. This is a distinguished lecture series initiated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past with such high points as Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and

All together now

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In my English school our hymns were mostly in Latin which, despite years of instruction, rendered them sufficiently opaque to be appropriate. What few hymns we sang in English seemed rather weepy, which didn’t appeal. Therefore, emerging from that place into a wider England, it was a surprise to discover there was a culture of

Prodigious from the word go

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There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little

Falling foul of fashion

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J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the