The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Christmas book market is about to be flooded, if that’s the word for these somewhat juiceless jottings, by not one but two biographies of the actress Coral Browne. This dual assessment is perhaps just as well, as quite clearly there were two Coral Brownes, one a witheringly witty, ravishing (in the early 1960s she
In this his latest book Max Hastings aims not so much to write another history of the war in the Pacific but to describe ‘a massive and terrible experience, set in a chronological framework’. It is a companion volume to his Armageddon which did much the same for the last phase of the war in
I share with Richard Mabey a love of trees. Beechcombings begins with the great storm of 1987, although Mabey’s love of trees has its origins in his childhood in the Chilterns. The childhood romance shines through. Trees were family. When I had the privilege of being Member of Parliament for Henley, and so the Stonor
Some writers have the ability to poison one’s daily existence. James Salter, I have discovered, is one of them. To read him is to be painfully reminded of how mundane, how blurry, how fatally lacking in glamour one’s own life is. Still, if you can hold such feelings at bay, reading him is also an
The following extracts are from The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice: Please don’t be misled by the apparent self-certainty of these utterances; be assured that after each one I nervously delete the words but that’s probably just me, right . . . I can see exactly what not to do at the moment.
A Journey into God is one of four books by Delia Smith on the subject of Christian spirituality, the others being A Journey into Prayer, A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent. Delia journeys into God painfully aware of her own lack of recipes. She takes the apophatic approach, describing God as what
Christopher Hitchens’ piece in this month’s Vanity Fair is quite something. Mark Daily, a young officer in the Seventh Cavalry, volunteered for the army despite his reservations about the wisdom of the war in part because some of Christopher’s articles inspired him to do so. Hitch’s latest piece reflects on that heavy burden (shared to
I’m certainly not suggesting that any of the political parties follow this particular source of inspiration but if you want to see, terrifyingly clearly, exactly where Hitler got a great many of his ideas about military parades, civic display and how to combine an appealing brand of paganism with symbolic Christianity, look no further than
A huge screen behind the stage at the Dorchester Hotel yesterday showed Montserrat Caballé singing for a hot-dog in a café. Sadly, she wasn’t there in person to collect the Lifetime Achievement award at the Classic FM Gramophone Awards. Neither was Steven Isserlis present, but his friend Barry Humphries — in the wittiest speech of
An exhibition of self-portraits by members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters has opened at the Bulldog Trust, 2 Temple Place, London WC2, and runs until 10 October. The Trust, which was started in 1983, supports selected charities, such as Hampshire Hospices and the Prince’s Trust, and gives advice as well as money. Rolf
This post reminded me of a terrific piece Sarah Lyall (one of the NYT’s under-appreciated stars) wrote for Slate a couple of years ago. She made the mistake of attending the British Press Awards dinner. The Pulitzers these are not. Most papers crow about their own successes while failing to even report the existence of
Just received an email from Washington National Opera touting their new production of Don Giovanni in which they claim that it’s “widely regarded as the greatest opera ever composed”. Is this true? I suppose it could be, but as with novels it had never occurred to me that there was a clear or obvious “Number
Amidst the coruscating party conference commentary might I just slip in a small musical note akin to that so enjoyed by Matthew Parris in his terrific article in this week’s Spec? He was entranced by a single phrase played on the violin, cutting through the artificial flurry and tension before the transmission of a live
Have you Herd? If you haven’t already done so, buy a copy of Mark Earl’s Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour By Harnessing Our True Nature It sounds sinister, but there’s not much harnessing in it and lots of exciting ideas about what it is to be human. Mark’s thesis is that we’re basically group
Mary Wakefield talks to Jonathan Kent about his plans to jump-start the West End Something is rotten in the West End. It’s not just the sour smell of lager, or the Saturday night binge drinkers. It’s more that as I walk up St Martin’s Lane, through what should be the beating heart of theatreland, there’s
Born Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz adopted the name of his birthplace in Saxony, East Germany just after his definitive move to the West in 1958. Brought up in an atmosphere of gloom and social realism, he had been expelled from art school in East Berlin for ‘social-political immaturity’. He fared better in West Berlin
Positively oceanic was the season’s principal novelty. It was not a new commission; rather, the rediscovery 440 years after its composition of the Mass in 40 parts by Alessandro Striggio, whose final Agnus Dei rises to a staggering 60, which ought to leave Tallis’s celebrated Motet (whose inspiration is reckoned to originate here) pale and
Anyone who goes into the Annely Juda Gallery in Dering Street expecting something like those light, airy, weight-denying abstract steel sculptures, painted bright red all over perhaps, like the Tate’s song-evoking ‘Early One Morning’, 1962, is in for a big surprise. All works shown here stand with absolute, resolute, broad-based firmness as if to proclaim
Too many musicals in London? It depends whether you think the West End should be a temple or a funfair. Room for both, I’d say. But the fact that many musicals are thriving doesn’t mean any musical will. Hit shows succeed because they get virtually everything right. Bad Girls gets three out of five things
Michael Clayton is one of those American films about American lawyers doing American lawyer stuff which isn’t usually my kind of thing. And, anyway, didn’t money-hungry men in neat suits stop being cool or interesting in about 1982? But you know what? This is a pretty decent corporate thriller: tense, exciting, involving, and best of
Guilty pleasure (Radio 4) Unmasking the English (Radio 4) In 1908 Gerald Mills borrowed £1,000 (worth about £52,000 in today’s money) to set up a publishing company with his friend Charles Boon. Among their first authors were P.G. Wodehouse and Jack London, who would probably be horrified to realise that their books are now associated
I once knew a young woman who worked for a large public-interest organisation. She was clever and well educated, but funds were tight, and she feared she was about to lose her job. In which case, she planned to follow a university friend and become a high-class prostitute. It sounded marvellous, she said. The agency
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau While my mother chokes on a fishbone, I am shuffled into another room to watch The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Bubbles rush upwards from a diver’s mouthpiece as my mother coughs up blood. Beyond the window, snowflakes rim the leafless trees. The deep teems with presences. My mother’s
There’s a wonderful story in this book, told by the biologist Lewis Wolpert, about a vistor to the office of the physicist Niels Bohr. The visitor, a fellow scientist, was astonished to see a horseshoe nailed above the Nobel laureate’s desk. ‘Surely you don’t believe that horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he said. ‘I believe
The first thing to be said about this combination of history, autobiography and polemic is how heavy it is — not in the literary sense, though it is by no means light reading, but in the literal sense that it is a surprising weight in the hand. Befitting its title, it is printed on unusually
‘Here is a hot potato,’ The Spectator’s book review editor wrote in a note accompanying this book. Radioactive, actually. In 2006 Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt posted a version of an article they had written on the Israel lobby for the London Review of Books on a Harvard faculty website. It was
In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest, not least on the issue of global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. The author — once what he
Worcestershire is England’s most undervalued county. Sauce, Elgar and cricket, not necessarily in that order, are what most people associate with the name. Otherwise it is that place we cross on our way to Herefordshire, its far smarter western neighbour, or the territory glimpsed on either side of the M5 as we whiz northwards to
The war in Iraq cast a long shadow over Minette Walters’ previous novel, The Devil’s Feather, and it also plays a part in her new one. Lieutenant Charles Acland suffers horrific head injuries, including the loss of an eye, when he runs into an ambush while leading a convoy on the Basra-Baghdad highway. The two