The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This review of Gordon Brown’s book on Courage from Blair’s pollster Philip Gould is absolutely fascinating. This is his take on Brown’s chapter on Bobby Kennedy’s career: “its fascination for Brown, is Kennedy’s metamorphosis from “hard” to “soft” courage in the course of his later life, moving from tough-guy enforcer to open, empowering and empathetic
The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made
Abu Suleiman looks back on his time in al-Qaeda as a reformed drug addict in Britain might consider his past life as a junkie. Speaking English, learnt from his American jailers at Guantanamo Bay, the young Saudi is now a respectable member of society and has a wife and a job as a stock market
Sara Paretsky is one of the most respected and influential crime novelists of today, and this poignant and compelling personal testimony explains both the influences which made her a writer and the kind of writer she became. She was born in 1947 in Ames, Iowa, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the only daughter in
A few nights ago I was at a dinner party at which all those present knew each other far better than I knew them. For what seemed an interminable time their sole topic of conversation was the tempestuous relationship of a couple of whom I had never even heard. The story, in as far as
Of six million Russian soldiers captured by the Germans, only one million are still alive in 1945, two million German women raped by Russian soldiers in the last months of the war, countless millions of Jews and others done to death in German concentration camps, 12 million displaced persons wandering about in Germany at the
In a large house in north London, thick with the fug of kosher cooking and unspoken secrets, lives a lopsided family. The Rubins are envied — and enviable, surely? Claudia Rubin is a rabbi. She is also a writer, media personality and, par excellence, mother. She dominates her gentle, disappointed biographer husband Nor- man and
The unending journey of this book takes Mark Tully from slums to skyscrapers as he explores the past, present and future not only of the subcontinent but of society, both eastern and western; how democracy is facing up to fundamentalism — Hindu, Muslim and an atheism he scathingly labels ‘aggressive secularism’. The Dawkins camp would
Imagine coming across a book that has lain untouched for 100 years, and making an unexpected historical discovery. Ed Maggs, an antiquarian bookseller, had just such a thrill recently. ‘I was reading the epistolary diaries of a rather eccentric Victorian called Cuthbert Bede. I became strangely fixated by the story of this man who was
Writing a novel is a voyage into unknown territory. (Reading one is also, of course.) The author explores possibilities. To some extent even those novels which seem far removed from autobiography represent the author’s imaginary, or alternative, life, characters owing more in the last resort to him than to any identifiable models. He is a
One of the guests at our third Elgar concert at The Spectator’s offices in Old Queen Street last night shrewdly pointed out the oddity that the great composer does not seem to travel as well as, say, Vaughan Williams. Listening to Madeleine Mitchell (violin) and Nigel Clayton (piano) perform the sublime Violin Sonata (Op. 82)
I’ve been having a Wagnerian time of it lately, organizing a festival of events to coincide with the Royal Opera’s performances of the Ring cycle in October. On Wednesday I was deep in the Nibelheim-like bowels of the Royal Opera House, recording extracts from Wagner’s letters with Simon Callow. He read with the most spine-tingling
DVD release of the week is Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final instalment of the boxing saga. Yes, I know the idea of the 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone climbing into the ring again is innately absurd, but all of the Rocky movies, including the first which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, have been
Tomorrow, I am taking part in the launch of Pass on a Poem, a terrific campaign to encourage the reading and enjoyment of poetry at the Oxfam Bookshop, 170 Portobello Road, London W11. Lots of other readings are set to take place around the country, but this one will feature such luminaries as P.D.James, Jon
An estimated one in three of the world’s six billion people will watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. How will Britain fare in that global spotlight? Having committed more than £600 million to prepare our athletes and competitors, there’s not much more that the government can do on the haul-of-medals front. The
Sir Peter Blake is much in demand. A popular figure since he rose to fame with his unforgettable design for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album (1967), he has long been a spokesman for his generation and for the arts. His knighthood in 2002 brought a whole host of new requests and obligations, much of it
Having spent a chunk of my life living, mentally, in 1888 with Vincent van Gogh in Arles I find that I still have not completely left that place. The book is published, the paperback is out, my surrogate literary life is in another country and a different time — with John Constable and his wife-to-be
Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the
‘It is a compelling moment in the art world,’ says Robin Woodhead, Sotheby’s executive vice president and chief executive, Europe and Asia. ‘There has been a fundamental change in the market worldwide. Growing numbers of people have begun to take an interest in art, and we see continuing effective economies and new emerging markets —
Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a
Second Movement: Triple Bill; Angela Gheorghiu; Pelléas et Mélisande Second Movement is a young opera company which gives singers who have graduated from their college but are not yet on the opera house circuit a chance to demonstrate their gifts, and in unusual repertoire. Since standards at Second Movement are evidently very high, it also
There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people,
You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the
New movie festivals spring up every year and pictures can achieve fame and reach large, if not especially lucrative, audiences by playing on the worldwide festival circuit without ever getting into normal commercial cinemas. But pace John Huston, who over half a century ago described Edinburgh as ‘the only film festival worth a damn’ (a
Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it’s familiar stuff and has all been written about before. The detail is too much, and the potted narrative of forgotten political manoeuvring tends to overwhelm the life. One way out of this dilemma
This curious and wearisomely long novel, the third of a trilogy, and set in Ashford, Kent, is partly an exercise in the fantastical impregnated by the historically serendipitous, and partly a crudely shaped slab of kitchen-sink realism, complete with passages of high comedy. These two elements strain to come together, to knit into some seamless whole, but,
I seem to have missed the name David Crystal. He is clearly a phonetician, expert in linguistics, but the blurb tells us little about him except that he appears on television. He comes across as a genial cove. In one of his many digressions on the subject of words — this book is composed of
I’ve heard the Iraq war blamed for many things but this one takes the biscuit. According to an analyst on the Today Programme, our abject failure in the Eurovision Song Contest is a consequence of the ill-feeling created by the invasion of Iraq. Have a listen here, the clip starts at 7.48am.
Sometimes you absolutely know, beyond the gentlest breath of a doubt, that you’re not going to like a person; something you’ve heard, or read about them, has tipped you over into a flinty conviction that they’re not your type. I took a preconception of this sort with me to meet the cult film-maker Julien Temple.