Culture

Culture

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

Dark doings in the suburbs

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No doubt one reason why British people like Kath & Kim (often on BBC2, now on Living, Thursday) is that it takes the mick out of Australian suburban life. That makes those of us who lead British suburban lives feel superior. But it’s more than that. It’s very funny. It’s worth watching just for the

Alex Massie

O tempora, o mores! | 8 December 2007

More Paddington Bear blogging: Paddington, the bear from Peru, will be arrested and interrogated over his immigration status in a book marking his 50th birthday.Paddington Here and Now, due to be published in June 2008, is set around the bear’s home at 32 Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, west London. It will mark the 50th anniversary

All passion spent

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Sargent’s portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked

Recent books of photographs

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In England by Don McCullin (Cape, £35) is, as might be expected, more gritty than pretty. Yet it is approachably humane compared with his famous war photography, where from Vietnam to Beirut the horrors are as terrible as Goya’s. McCullin escaped the London gangland of Finsbury Park by means of the photograph that forms the

Too funny for words

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In 1989, when David Gill and I celebrated the Chaplin centenary with a week-long run of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre, several critics declared than no one under 40 found Chaplin funny. That ruined our advance box office and not even the presence of Princess Diana on the opening night revived it. Yet those

Fear and loathing in old Europe

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What marks out the Napoleonic wars from what had gone before, the great dynastic clashes of the two earlier centuries? It is by no means the only, or even the predominant, question that Charles Esdaile poses in this sweeping study, but in many ways it is the most challenging. Professor Esdaile’s The Peninsular War demonstrated

Don’t judge a book by its cover

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With its quartos, rectos and folio, the language of book-binding lends itself to the novelist’s palette. It’s a terminology rich in tactile pleasures and potential metaphor for a writer. So it’s a joy to find Belinda Starling doing it justice in The Journal of Dora Damage, not least by situating this idiosyncratic profession in the

A love story

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The pilots called it ‘the Spit’, ‘my personal swallow’, ‘a real lady’, or, simply, ‘the fabulous Spitfire’. It was not a perfect machine. Due to its long nose, forward visibility during take-off was poor; it was freezing cold in the cockpit, and so small that the pilot did not have room to wear a bulky

The enduring mystery of Mrs Bathurst

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A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension  ‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!” A week ago I re-read it. Result:

The Suffolk Way

I spent last weekend at the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival and it’s an event I can thoroughly recommend. It’s been going for 13 years now, with a programme devised by Craig Brown, and the roll-call of speakers it attracts is hugely impressive. On a blowy wet Suffolk day it’s extraordinary to be able to take refuge

Lloyd Evans

Conquests and coffins

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On Tuesday Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor take on Othello at the Donmar. If the show hasn’t sold out already, it soon will. Doubtless the starry cast will help shift a lot of tickets but so will the play’s peculiar ‘self-rationing’ effect. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, Othello is the least often revived. The play

Sex with no appeal

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What has come to be known as the Sex Show at the Barbican has received mixed reports. Some people dismiss it out of hand (and unseen) while others profess to enjoy it immensely. One painter I know loved it, but then he is a voyeur both by profession and inclination. I approached it with an

Blast from the past

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Percy Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957, Design Centre, Rugby School, until 8 December In the 1915 Vorticist Manifesto, published in the movement’s magazine Blast, Wyndham Lewis (he dropped Percy) wrote: Lewis is one of them, as this first-rate exhibition at his alma mater — he was a pupil for two years from 1897 — amply demonstrates. It

Last farewells

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Just outside Florence’s city walls, marooned in the middle of a huge great ring road, lies a foreign field that is for ever England. Well, it’s really for ever Switzerland. The English Cemetery of Florence is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and is officially called the Protestant Cemetery of Florence. But, because the

Traditional fare

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As the holiday season is all but upon us, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on Christmas movies of the past and the standards that have been set. There was one called Jingle All the Way that I liked very much indeed. It was about a man of foreign heritage who spoke

Good humour, bad taste

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L’Elisir d’amore; Das Wunder del Heliane After not seeing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore for years, I went to two new productions of it in five days. The Glyndebourne one, which I reported on last week, is admirable, but the Royal Opera production is in some ways better still. That surprised me, because the director is Laurent

Lloyd Evans

Lunatics at large

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The Dysfunckshonalz!; Some Kind of Bliss; William Blake’s Divine Humanity The spirit of punk and its exhilarating lunacies are brilliantly captured in a new show at the Bush. Mike Packer’s affectionate satire tells the story of The Dysfunckshonalz, a major punk band of 1977, who 30 years on are approached by an American bank eager

Radical prophet

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It’s not what you think, we were warned by Jenny Uglow, the far-seeing biographer of Hogarth and Elizabeth Gaskell. Those ‘dark Satanic mills’ and ‘mountains green’ of William Blake’s epic poem were never intended as an anthem in praise of England’s democratic virtues. Blake was neither a conservative, nor nostalgic for an imaginary golden past.

James Delingpole

Royal treatment | 1 December 2007

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On the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert. Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production company RDF who personally edited

Mill! thou shouldst be living at this hour

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Britain has had few public intellectuals. The one undeniable example was John Stuart Mill who lived from 1806 to 1873 and whose utterances dominated the more intelligent public debates of the mid-19th century — predictably he was keenly studied by Gladstone and mocked by Disraeli. In the last year of his life he was persuaded

Christmas funny books

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Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but

A criminal waste

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With an estimated one surveillance camera in Britain for every 14 Britons, reality television has never been more invasive. The reason Big Brother has been allowed to watch its citizens so comprehensively in this way rests with the claim that CCTV is a protection rather than an intrusion. Only the guilty should fear the all-seeing

His own short story

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This is an academic monograph on Saki’s literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes lavishly from the evidence available about his short and rather secret life. It begins with the miserable childhood and the odious aunts and ends with his death aged 44

A false dawn

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Gordon Brown has a number of key political challenges to satisfy simultaneously if he is to lead his party to a fourth consecutive election victory. As Lee’s outstanding book makes plain, the Prime Minister’s immediate political task is to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of the Blair legacy without falling into the hole Al

The parent trap

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Nick Hornby has often written perceptively about male adolescence, but Slam is the first of his books to be aimed at an adolescent male readership. Teenage boys will read music magazines, sports reports, pornography and cereal packets, but they are notoriously averse to reading — or rather, finishing — books. Can Hornby break the habit,