The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If you want to know what’s coming up in the arts this autumn a good place to look is today’s G2, where critics have chosen the ‘50 hottest acts’. The film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, opens on 7 September (I’ve seen a preview and loved it). Other
V.S. Naipaul’s essay on Derek Walcott, the great St. Lucian poet, in today’s Guardian review is as eloquent and insightful as one would expect. What caught my eye is a point that Naipaul makes about the whole idea of the Caribbean as an island paradise. As he writes, that idea of the beauty of the islands
Forty years after his first drug bust in 1967, Keith Richards is still testing the limits of the law. But, as one would expect of a 63-year-old, the substances in question have changed over the years. So it was that, before an enraptured audience at the O2 Centre on Tuesday night, the pirate-captain of the
Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day
A few years ago, the director of a London-based ballet company publicly challenged the way ballet is taught in Britain. More recently, additional havoc was caused by an article by an equally prominent journalist who lamented our schools’ apparent inability to produce first-rate stars. In each instance, British ballet teachers and directors of prestigious ballet
Shakespeare, as we all know, served up English history as entertainment and instruction for the Elizabethans. Factual accuracy was subservient to a view of the jungle truths of sovereignty and political ambition that was as uncomfortable and relevant then as it remains today. The eight major Histories from Richard II to Richard III have been
TV or not TV, that is the question pondered by Edinburgh every year. An unseen faultline divides the audiences from the performers. Audiences want to get away from TV while performers — especially comedians — want to embrace it. Les Dennis, who has done telly already, transcends the rift in his new hybrid show which
If you feel strong enough to postpone for a while the pleasures of the bookshop and the restaurant (without which it seems no self-respecting art gallery can exist these days), proceed upstairs at Camden Arts Centre into the light and welcoming hall, where the visitor is offered an introduction to the work of Kenneth and
At Edinburgh this year I caught a show I usually miss. The festival attracts a shifting underclass of cadgers, dodgers, chancers and scroungers, and each has a tale to tell that’s as fascinating as any of the ‘real’ entertainment. The show is free. All it takes is a little inquisitiveness. There’s a cobbled lane just
The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine One of the publishing triumphs of last year, The Dangerous Book for Boys, with immaculate timing tapped into a rich vein that combined nostalgia with exasperation at the seemingly unstoppable advance of Nanny State, with her stifling regime of risk assessment and
Hotel de Dream by Edmund White Seven years before his untimely death from consumption at the age of 28, Stephen Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was 1893 and the time was out of joint for a grimly realistic fictionalisation of the life of a prostitute. Nineteenth-century sensibilities recoiled. Crane enjoyed a
Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare Nicholas Shakespeare’s new novel is set in Wellington Point, an inauspicious fictional Tasmanian town. It is a place offering few prospects: the only jobs are menial, and the only person with any vim is the odious Ray Grogan, an estate agent who seduces local women by comparing them
On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein Brick Lane, a long and ancient street in London’s East End, casts a spell of fascination on all who go there. To walk down Brick Lane is to take a voyage through the past, where Huguenot weavers of the 18th century meet fellow ghosts of Jewish anarchists, and their
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape Why did he do it? In his late thirties, Joseph Conrad abandoned the modestly successful career as a seaman which he had steadily built up. Though the job involved tiresome exams and increasing responsibilities, it had been his ‘great passion’, he wrote a dozen years later.
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek For a man who once promised the press, way back in 1962, that ‘you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more’, Richard Nixon has turned out to have a remarkably long political afterlife. After a five-and-a- half year presidency, he spent the two decades after
In the spirit of Not Reading Books, it’s time to move on to Not Watching Movies. Megan kicks matters off by confessing that, despite loving Marlon Brando, she’s never actually seen On the Waterfront. Not a bad contender. For my part, I’ve never actually seen Gone With the Wind. Or, even more oddly, Taxi Driver.
For any politician to allow someone full access to them so that they can write an ‘on the campaign trail with’ book is always a risk. It says something about Nicolas Sarkozy’s confidence then, that when the French playwright Yasmina Reza suggested doing this Sarkozy accepted without hesitation. Reza’s account is sympathetic to Sarkozy but
I spent part of this morning on a delightful walk down Brick Lane in east London with the artist and historian Rachel Lichtenstein, recording a piece for the Today programme next week. Rachel, who is a match for anyone in the field of psycho-geography, has a new book out entitled On Brick Lane, which is
Michael White has a fun post up on which political memoirs really were worth the advances that their publishers paid for them. Which raises the question of which politician’s autobiography would you pay to read? Top of my list would be Peter Mandelson. He is the most psychologically interesting of the New Labour founding fathers.
The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. Radio Four has been broadcasting invitations to the on-air party for months already
As part of its reopening season the Royal Festival Hall is staging a month-long run of Carmen Jones, the 1943 musical by Oscar Hammerstein II adapted from Bizet’s Carmen. The show is far more successful than the production of Sweeney Todd which preceded it, partly because a fair amount of progress has been made with
Tony Blair — the Musical / Gilded Balloon; Tony! The Blair Musical / Chambers St; Yellow Hands / St George’s West; Jihad: the Musical / Chambers St; The Bacchae / King’s Theatre Here’s the formula for satire at the Fringe. Take a scary concept, stick ‘the musical’ after it and you’ve got a catchy title
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,