The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
At The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder I had to suspend my disbelief so hard that my brain chafed. Mr Pinder is an ordinary south London labourer who likes marrying, getting divorced and keeping the divorcees at home. Curtain up and he’s living with three former wives — and a new young filly has just
Oh, for heaven’s sake, now they’ve gone and ruined Shrek, and I hate them for it. Indeed, may those responsible be damned to the eternal fires of hell. Failing that, may they at least wake up one day with their feet on the wrong way round and an elbow for an ear. How dare they?
Amid the acres of coverage devoted to the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most celebrated record in pop history, one irony has been overlooked. The album was considered as ephemeral as any other when it came out, but has grown mightier and mightier; the company that made it, on the
Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday) has been particularly brilliant of late and I think Spectator readers should know. There were moments in the first two new series where one might reasonably have gone, ‘Yeah, but it’s still not a patch on the original.’ But as series three draws to an end, I don’t think there can
The last thing Winston Churchill (or Ramsay MacDonald, for that matter) would have thought of discussing before taking power as prime minister was the kind of books they read to their children, or took to bed with them after a hard night’s slog wading through government papers. But such are the times we now live
Princess Diana was two years my junior and eight years younger than her most recent biographer Tina Brown. Our collective generation was one in search of someone or something to provide the soundtrack to our lives. We hadn’t lived through the second world war, we were too young to have connected with Vietnam or fallen for
‘Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,’ wrote a puzzled German consul to his superiors in Berlin during Einstein’s visit to America in 1930. Wherever Einstein appeared, the consul observed ruefully, he attracted huge audiences who were not just enthusiastic but positively worshipful. Overwrought admirers crowded round him,
Of all the world’s under- developed and misruled countries few can compete with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The former Belgian Congo, more recently known as Zaire, has lived for so long with lawlessness, brute violence and neglect, with Belgian colonial and Mobutu’s post-colonial exploitation, that it seems to have justified Joseph Conrad’s selection
What is the What cuts through the strata of criticism, and gets straight to a fundamental question, one which echoes the title: What is a novel? The plot is the journey to Ethiopia, Kenya and finally America of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, but what makes this ‘novel’ unusual is that Valentino is a
The problem about contemporary history is that we know both too little about it and too much. The archives of the state are closed to the public for 30 years, leaving us dependent on those famous sources of myth and misinformation, political diarists, memoir writers and journalists. At the bottom end, a history of our
We are promised a true American love story, but the lovers of this romance do not so much make love as f***, even in their tenderest moments. The couple in question are Rosalie, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld and William Short, Thomas Jefferson’s adoptive son and secretary at the Paris embassy in the 1780s and ’90s.
I have a hazy memory of a 1950s television series on stately homes in which Richard Dimbleby (dubbed ‘Gold-Microphone-in-Waiting’ by Malcolm Muggeridge) would respectfully prompt their Wode- housian owners into trotting out seasoned anecdotes. ‘And this of course is the celebrated Red Drawing-room. Your Grace, I think, ahem, you have a story about that curious
Why do we have to pay between £3.50 and £5.40 to book tickets for the theatre on the internet? Most people are unable to turn up in person to book seats — the only way to avoid the extra cost. If a theatre has, say, 600 seats, and over half are filled by people booking
Iain Dale reports that Ed Balls was understandably gloating about the defection of Quentin Davies last night at a Fabian Society reception last night and promised his audience that, “There’s more to come – as I know.”
Where better to spend the last night of the Blair era than in the company of ageing rockers? These days, The Who smash their tambourines rather than their guitars. But, other than that, they are still as sharp as the sharpest Carnaby Street winkle pickers and as taut as the tires on a brand new
This Fraser Nelson piece from September reveals which eight people will really matter when Gordon Brown finally gets his hands on the crown. Do give it a read.
If you think Glastonbury is silly, click on the BBC News website and watch the clip of 2,000 heavy metal fans playing Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” in Stuttgart. This, as any fule kno, is one of the most over-rated songs in the history of pop music, plodding and portentous, opening with a mindless
There is a corner of Northumberland, in the valley of the River Coquet, where the climate has been changed for ever by the actions of one man. In the mid-1860s, William Armstrong set out to transform vast tracts of raw, bleak moorland into what he described as ‘an earthly paradise’ and by the time of
There is a remarkable project of great enterprise and diligence in progress throughout the land — a plan to catalogue all the oil paintings (as well as those in acrylic or tempera) in national collections. This gigantic task is being undertaken by a charity called The Public Catalogue Foundation, which is publishing its findings in
‘They order, said I, this matter better in France.’ It is the norm at the national pavilions (a record 76 nations are present this year) for a new commissioner to be appointed for each edition, who selects the artist, or artists, to represent their country, or heads a committee that does so. A dozen years
Midsummer. Holidays loom. Migrations are being pondered and planned. Right now the English theatre-going middle classes are yearning for August, for Tuscany, for the pine-scented South, and for the sunbeds where they’ll sprawl and doze all summer smeared in perfumed lard and turning the colour of teak. Lovely. The West End is ready for these
Sex, the City and Me (BBC2, Sunday) might just as well have been called ‘All Men Are Bastards — based on a true story’. Sarah Parish played Jess, a horrible person, a fund manager who is better at her job than all the men around her. She was offensive to them, offhand to her husband
We know the pressures the steady flow of immigrants has caused in our society though we hear less about the benefits of having them here; nor do we have much idea what they think about us. Lev, the Polish migrant in Rose Tremain’s new book, expected to find men who looked like Alec Guinness in The
During the post-war years, the author of this book was a much-talked about variety artiste, famous for breaking ten-inch nails, bending steel bars in her teeth and throwing Bob Hope over her shoulder. Billed as the Mighty Mannequin, Joan Rhodes enhanced her appeal by looking and dressing as if she had stepped out of the
Is he a monster, saint, genius or lunatic? In this massive book Naim Attallah attempts to lay to rest the gossip, slander and misconceptions that have dogged him for much of his life, while also coming clean about his own mistakes and failures. I have to declare an interest. I was, in the 1980s, one
Italian intellectuals, Cambodian peasants, Hungarian workers, Russian colonels, Angolan insurgents, French philosophes, American actors, British miners, Chinese craftsmen, Nicaraguan labourers: over the years, the adherents of the international communist movement have been so geographically and socially diverse as to defy classification. During the 100-odd years of the movement’s existence, nations as different as Czarist Russia,
Two books just out from small publishers throw interesting light on the more secret corners of the British handling of the world war against Hitler’s Germany. Each covers a subject that was deadly secret at the time, but of critical importance for winning the war. Joan Bright Astley’s war autobiography, published to much less acclaim
‘Painting with money’ is how Michael Winner described making films. And if the money runs out you can always turn your script into a novel. Ken Russell’s Beethoven Confidential was to have starred Anthony Hopkins in the title role with Glenda Jackson and Jodie Foster as a couple of swooning aristos eager to sponsor the
No doubt Mr Blair will soon be at work on his memoirs; or perhaps his ghost will. Ghosts play a necessary role in the publishing business. Indeed all those firms who rely for their profits on the autobiographies — and even occasionally the novels — of celebrities might collapse without the work of these industrious