The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Teatime has come and gone here at Tree-Stock, and we have yawned our way through tepid sets by Corinne Bailey Rae and the insufferably wimpy Keane. Don’t send a bunch of boys to play a man’s stadium. Thank God for Metallica who are presently restoring some sinew and cojones to proceedings. Front man James Hetfield
Call it ‘nan-archy’: the anarchy of rock’n’roll grafted onto the spirit of the nanny state. The Red Hot Chili Peppers bounce and rave pleasingly in front of a huge rolling message board which instructs us to recycle our old mobiles, not to wash our towels too often, and to ‘rethink’ how we bring our shopping
Almost exactly 24 years ago, in July 1983, the IRA planned to kill Charles and Diana by bombing a Duran Duran concert at the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road. I was at that gig, aged 15, and here I am again, aged 39, watching the same band and trying to work out whether Simon Le Bon
After a jurassic start, the joint is jumping now: Razorlight were as sharp as their name, and Dundee’s finest, Snow Patrol, turned in a stunning set, the highlight of which was Open Your Eyes. Although lead singer Gary Lightbody should think twice about the golf jumper. Kasabian up soon. I feel I am doing my
At Wembley Stadium for Live Earth: host Chris Moyles has just tried to sell a used 4×4 to two billion people watching the great eco-event. The atmosphere is indeed amazing. Uh-oh. Genesis -combined age 380 – have tottered on stage and struck up Turn It On Again. Is this a terrible warning from Al Gore?
It’s a commonplace these days for satirists and their fans to claim that they have an unnerving ability to know how politicians work behind the scenes. ‘Someone from No. 10 said, “How on earth do you get it spot-on, every time? It’s uncanny.”’ For instance, some years ago Rory Bremner was playing Tony Blair. There
Strange to think of Tom Stoppard attaining three score years and ten. It seems a mere nanosecond since we were first dazzled by his disturbing take on Shakespeare, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and his plays are still characterised by the tumbling ideas and linguistic foreplay of youthful ingenuity. To celebrate his birthday, BBC Radio
My computer gave up the ghost last week. I bought it in 1999 and in recent months it has felt a bit like one of those clapped-out spaceships in Dr Who, held together only with wire and willpower as you force it through the space-time continuum. Normally such technical failure would reduce me to fury
I thought I was unembarrassable, at any rate with the lights out. ENO’s production of Kismet has proved me wrong. I sat blushing furiously and sweating, when I wasn’t struggling to keep my eyes open and head up. Anyone who thinks — and some people do — that artistic badness is merely a lack of
The Pain and the Itch – Royal Court / Small Miracle -Tricycle / The Last Confession -Haymarket The Pain and the Itch Royal Court Small Miracle Tricycle The Last Confession Haymarket Class warfare is at its most vicious and exhilarating when it occurs within classes rather than between them. Just as feminism is a conspiracy by
Edmond 18, Key Cities Edmond Burke (William H. Macy) is middle-aged, middle-American, dully employed, dully married. One evening, on his way home from work, a quasi-mystical whim leads him to consult a fortune-teller who tells him, ‘You are not where you belong.’ The consequences of this are felt later that evening when he says to
As we are constantly reminded, every exhibition in these novelty-obsessed times has to be the first to do something, and the Tate’s rather dreary photo show is no exception. ‘The first major exhibition ever to present a photographic portrait of Britain from the invention of the medium to the present day,’ trumpets the press release.
I was intrigued to meet Grayson Perry — who wouldn’t be? I hadn’t known his work before he hit the national headlines in 2003 as one of the artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize, which he subsequently carried off in triumph as his alter ego ‘Claire’, dressed to kill in mauve satin frock with ankle
Galsworthy is one of those writers who obstinately survives. Critical opinion wrote him off long ago. His plays are rarely staged. Most of his novels have sunk below the horizon. Yet the three which make up The Forsyte Saga have rarely, if ever, been out of print, and continue to be read — not only
Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or
This substantial and fascinating book looks at the aftermath of the Third Reich in the German-speaking regions of Europe. The Allies ‘came in hate’, their memories of Nazi atrocities refreshed by the liberation of concentration camps like Auschwitz, where the Soviets found more than a million items of clothing, and Buchenwald, where the piles of
Minotaur in Love is Fraser Harrison’s second novel. His first, High on the Hog, published in 1991, set around a family Christmas in the country, was funny and moving. Minotaur in Love is altogether odder. Written in epistolary form, the Minotaur of the title is Bruno, a publisher, who tries to explain his strangeness to
Of all the sciences and pseudo-sciences that clamour for our attention, none is a tougher sell than pure mathematics. The British have never been noticeably keen on abstraction, but there’s something about algebra, analysis and, indeed, topological vector spaces that sends even the calmest and cleverest of us reaching for the gin. I think this
Christopher Hitchins writes with exuberance and a sense of the great emancipation which he supposes modern knowledge offers humanity. ‘Scepticism and discovery have freed them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair mad scientist,’ he says of religious believers, whom he invites to abandon their faith and to
The most difficult task for a novelist is to engage the reader in an account of happiness. In Consequences, Penelope Lively manages to pull this off. She examines happiness as ‘a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity’. This ‘sublime content’ is achieved by Lorna, the
This is a book that really ought not to work. Being Shelley is not quite a biography and not quite a critical reader and not quite anything most people will have seen before. If you want to know, in order, what happened in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley — where he went, who he
So farewell, George Melly. There isn’t much fun left in jazz any more; it takes itself so seriously. George didn’t — always having fun, listening to his favourite Bessie Smith records. He was one of the last generation of jazz musicians to enjoy his work and to convey that feeling to his audience; he
The late David Halberstam—author of The Best and the Brightest—has a posthumously published essay in Vanity Fair on Bush’s misuse of history. He charges that the Bush administration lives in “a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a
Last night’s Diana concert was ostensibly a tribute to the late princess on what would have been her 46th birthday. But its deeper function was – yet again – to demonstrate the awesome resilience and adaptability of the monarchy. Those who have doubts about Prince Charles need only look at the next generation, the sons
I have been trying to work out why the idea of John Simm as the Master in Doctor Who is so compelling. By my calculation, Simm is the eighth actor to play the Doctor’s nemesis, who originally returned to the revived series in the form of Derek Jacobi. Of course, there is innate (not to
There are things which fashion can teach us. Real things. Not just things about puce after a heavy lunch, or the invariable inadvisability of headwear. Things about choice, and belief, and about how we approach the world. Consider this. Last weekend, slaloming through the Glastonbury fudge, I kept seeing people who were dressed as pirates.
Kristin Scott Thomas has a bee in her bonnet. Actually, she has several bees in her bonnet. It’s more like a beehive than a bonnet. ‘British cinema is at death’s door,’ she rages. ‘Funding is a real issue. But people just aren’t making the right decisions about what gets made.’ I’m speaking to her at
Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi The Uffizi is to Florence what the National Gallery is to London, and part of its astonishing collection is devoted to a unique array of self-portraits, housed now in the Corridoio Vasariano. This long corridor, which links the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, was designed by Giorgio Vasari, artist,
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was Britain’s leading authority on art in the 19th century, and his voluminous writings had a profound influence on both artists and public appreciation. The process of art, according to Ruskin, was one that should be founded upon the truthful perception of nature, and landscape art and its practitioners, notably Turner, were