The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Whatever happened to the good, honest practice of sticking numerals after a sequel’s title to indicate what number it was in the series? I grew up in the days of Jaws 2, Superman III and Police Academy 7 and, whatever the shortcomings of those pictures, at least you knew where you stood. Generally speaking, the
Venice and Islam: 828–1797 Gazing up at the walls of the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Doge’s Palace, at the enormous canvases depicting tumultuous scenes of colliding fleets, flashing armour and swords, flying arrows, broken spars, burning and sinking ships, and waters congested with enemy dead and dying, you could be forgiven for thinking that
Taking the train from Paddington to Bristol can be hazardous if you coincide with an exodus of holidaymakers on summer excursions. I travelled down on a Thursday morning and the Paignton express was not only packed to the gunnels (if trains can rightly be said to have gunnels), but even picked up more passengers en
Whatever happened to poor old Blackpool? The last time I went it was alive, busy and reasonably full of life. The place today is a windswept vision of destitution and bleakness, home to roaming bands of stag and hen weekenders, fat people with limps and aimless geriatrics waiting to be mugged. A town once synonymous
A novelist is rarely well-advised to write his masterpiece in his fifties, unless his position at the top of the tree is secure. His themes and style are no longer likely to be in fashion. A younger generation of writers is occupying the attention of reviewers and speaking with greater immediacy to the public. This
Coward on the Beach by James Delingpole If you are not the right age to have enjoyed the thrills of serving in uniform in a really dangerous military campaign, the next best thing is to imagine one and write about it. That is what James Delingpole has done, very well indeed. His assiduous research, in
Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About The Game edited by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura Every American schoolboy and schoolgirl knows the mock epic, ‘Casey at the Bat’ (which William Schuman made into an opera), and Franklin Adams’s ‘saddest of possible words,/Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance’ (of the Chicago Cubs’ double-play past masters). The historian,
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July Short-story compilations are a tricky beast. For writers, publishers and readers alike they all too frequently prove unsatisfying. Those who’ve mastered the form draw their stories together in a tapestry of narrative voice, social milieu and location to create a cohesive whole from stand-alone parts.
Since the 1990s, a tartan tide has flooded the coasts of crime fiction, and it still shows no sign of ebbing in terms of either quality or quantity. Broken Skin (HarperCollins, £12.99) is Stuart MacBride’s third investigation set on the wilder shores of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. The novel opens as Logan’s
George Kennan: A Study in Character by John Lukacs George Kennan died on 17 March 2005, aged 100 plus one year, one month and one day. The last half of his life he had spent in semi-retirement at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, but for a few years, between 1946 and 1952, he had
Winnie and Wolf: A Novel by A.N. Wilson In her infamous five-hour ‘confession’ filmed by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg in 1975, Wagner’s English-born daughter-in-law Winifred talked openly and unashamedly about her close friendship with Hitler and his support for the Bayreuth Festival, which she personally managed throughout the Third Reich. When Syberberg confronts her with the rumours
The English House by Hermann Muthesius In 1896 Hermann Muthesius, a Prussian architect and civil servant in his mid-thirties, arrived in London to work as a cultural and technical attaché at the German embassy. His mission, apparently instigated by the Kaiser, was to study the domestic architecture of the United Kingdom, a subject that was
Tony Blair has engaged the same lawyer – Robert Barnett – that negotiated Bill and Hillary Clinton’s respective books deals. Blair is reported to be wanting as much as £8m for them (please lord, let his book be better than either Bill or Hillary’s). My mate James Forsyth asks readers to submit working titles for
This Tim Luckhurst piece for (who else?) The Guardian may be the dumbest thing even this professional contrarian has ever written. Apparently Elvis made “dull music for duller people” and “affection for Elvis is a workable predictor of anti-intellectual attitude”. Mr Luckhurst concludes that: The only credible claim that can be made on Elvis Presley’s
Stuart Reid suggests that if we really want to pay a fitting tribute to Elvis thirty years on from his untimely demise we should put up Lawdy Miss Clawdy. So here it is:
Any Coffehousers still hunting for a holiday read should pick up a copy of Alex James’s Bit of a Blur, which is keeping me company in Andalucía. For those who care, this is the second indispensable account of Nineties culture to appear (the first being John Harris’s The Last Party). For everyone else, this is
Readers with elephantine memories may recall a discussion on the merits of not-reading and on Oneupmanship. With regard to that latter cause, I present The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, reviewing the Library of America’s new and handsome edition of four Philip K Dick novels: While he served a fairly long apprenticeship—a series of almost unreadable
I do not know whether, as was so often claimed, Tony Wilson, who has died aged 57, was a genius. But, as music mogul, club entrepreneur, loudmouth and zealous Mancunian, he was certainly one of the most important and remorseless figures in British popular culture of the past 30 years. Immortalised by Steve Coogan’s performance
‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘You can’t have done, we were away when it came out,’ I said. ‘Well, it seems very
It was a bit surprising to find a programme marking the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Radio Two (Tuesday), not Radio Four. The stations are changing, morphing into each other as they seek ever more urgently to catch that elusive thing, a dedicated listener. Next we’ll find Terry Wogan putting
When the public ignores a playwright, it’s not because the public is wrong but because the playwright deserves to be ignored. Director Paul Miller and translator Clare Bayley have ‘rediscovered’ an obscure Swedish novelist, Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote one play (and it shows) and then stabbed herself in the throat. Set in Paris, The Enchantment
Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Early Adopters buy only the latest thing, they are up to the minute, maybe even up to the second, these crazed opinion-formers whose reckless compulsion to spend all their money on
‘I fear the opera will be banned — unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance — : only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, — I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ So Wagner famously wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, his muse while he was composing
Why do people spend their lives doing something which makes them nervous, even to the point of making them sick? I have watched musicians go on stage so frightened that it has been obvious to everyone present that they could not possibly be about to perform as well as they could. They look pale, they
If you are planning a holiday visit to Shakespeare country and fancy a change of mood and visual pace from the usual round of sightseeing and theatre-going, Compton Verney is a splendid alternative destination. Besides the remarkable permanent collections of paintings, Chinese bronzes and English folk art, there is a programme of changing exhibitions which
On 30 January 1999, not long after the Royal Academy had mounted its second Monet exhibition, The Spectator published my first exhibition review. It was about a renewal of Cubism in the sculpture of Ivor Abrahams and began as follows: ‘The end of a century, like a wedding, notoriously calls for something new. A millennium
God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britainby Rosemary Hill Pugin is not unknown in the way he was 50 years ago. Two major exhibitions in the 1990s, in New York and London, the formation of a flourishing Pugin Society and 3,000 people who one weekend last summer crowded in to see his highly
Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk man, champion of local individuality, anti-globaliser and explorer of the links between nature and culture. (Guess how many of these attributes he shared with this reviewer.) He founded Common Ground, the organisation that gave the
Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts