The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you
My first visit to the made-over Royal Festival Hall was to see a semi-staged production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It wasn’t an artistic success, as could be judged from the extravagantly genial response of the audience, roaring with laughter that had no trace of nervousness, and applauding one number after another. Sweeney is a failure
Masquerade: the work of James Ensor (1860–1949) It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for a James Ensor exhibition than the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, the squeaky-clean temple to Edwardian taste in art founded by Viscount Leverhulme on the profits of soap. Among the fragrant creations of Millais, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones,
‘Heath Robinson’s Helpful Solutions’ and ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract’ I went with high hopes to the Cartoon Museum. Actually, I think the appellation ‘museum’ rather grand for a couple of rooms off a back street in Bloomsbury, particularly when the real thing — the British Museum — is just round the corner. Still, I can applaud
Peter Phillips on Nicholas Kenyon’s Proms swansong and a lost masterpiece Nicholas Kenyon’s swansong at the Proms this summer is surely the most elaborately complicated, one might say contrapuntally conceived, series of concerts ever staged. Just reading the blurb makes one’s head spin — so many themes, so many anniversaries, so many reasons for paying
In 1931, a Belgian pulp-fiction writer living in Paris and churning out four titles a month using various noms de plume decided to publish a series of detective stories under his own name. His publisher had to ask him what his real name was;everyone in Paris knew him as ‘Sim’. Georges Simenon, as he identified
There has not been an abler or more decent prime minister than Sir Robert Peel, and peacetime has not produced a more courageous one. Perhaps none has assembled a more gifted ministry or commanded Cabinet more effectively. Before and during his premiership he made huge choices and implemented them with skill and resolve. Like Attlee
Visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, high on a hill overlooking Simi Valley, California and you are greeted at the door by a bronze statue of the former president dressed as a cowboy. For many on the Left in Britain that is exactly how they saw the 40th president of the United States. They should
Don’t imagine this book by a 42-year-old Englishwoman who has been in her time an English undergraduate at Oxford, a digging-in anti-roads campaigner and a lonely depressive in her London flat, is anything resembling your average expedition into the wild. The usual elegant reflections on wilderness and its transcendent emptiness are absent here. Instead, there
Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January this year, was a literary-minded reporter. As the Polish Press Agency’s only foreign correspondent for most of the 1960s and 1970s, he would prepare for his journeys to Africa, Asia and the Americas by reading extensively. Later, he used his exotic experiences as material for what might best be
Is there anyone, hearing a story about bigamy, who does not feel a tiny jolt of admiration, even envy, for the wrongdoer? How many of us can say that, if we could suffer no ill consequences, we wouldn’t rather like to have a second household, with different plants in the garden, different curtains, a different
One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they
The news that Sebastian Faulks has written a Bond novel says a lot about the status 007 has achieved in the culture. On the big screen and through a ruthless process of reinvention, Bond remains a player at the multiplex. Poor Pierce Brosnan thought he was doing just fine, being tortured in Korea to the
If you can’t be bothered ploughing through the Campbell memoirs, BBC2 has done a superb job filleting it. I’ve just had a preview of the three-part documentary starting on Wednesday – complete with his bleeped-out expletives and thoughts on everything from homicide to suicide. Fittingly, it’s from the same production company that did Grumpy Old
January 24th, 2001 on Peter Mandelson’s second resignation, over the Hinduja passports-for-favours affair: “I went back up and TB looked absolutely wretched. Peter looked becalmed. TB said he had made clear to PM he had to go and that though he wasn’t sure, over time he would see why it had been necessary. TB seemed
Anthony Browne, director of the think-tank Policy Exchange and prior to that the chief political correspondent of The Times, is plucking out the most interesting passages from the just published Alastair Campbell diaries for Coffee House. June 30th 2003 on going for BBC over Andrew Gilligan’s report that he sexed up the “dodgy dossier”: “I
Well, Alan Clark he aint. The publication today of Alastair Campbell’s diaries looks set to be a colossal damp squib. I haven’t read the 794-page book, but judging from the extracts he’s posted on his website Campbell’s observations are almost comically uninteresting. Here he is, for example, on meeting the Princess of Wales in 1995:
Read Matthew d’Ancona’s Live Earth reports: Live from Live Earth, Rocking for the Planet, Gore’s message is confusing, can Geri be clearer?, Let’s save this funny old world, Nan-archy in the UK, The Excellence of Tree Stock, Turning it up to 11 and Nobody does it better.
During Terence Stamp’s summing up speech at Live Earth, I very nearly lost the will to live – a self-defeating performance by the actor, given that the whole point of the concert was to rev up our collective instinct for survival. Five minutes in to Terry’s oration, we were longing for a nearby glacier to
There are few sights in Western civilisation to compare with Spinal Tap performing ‘Stonehenge’ and it is at least arguable that the risk of impending apocalypse caused by climate change was worth it to get Nigel, the boys and the dancing dwarves back on stage. Two billion people watching around the world are surely happier
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