The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
At last an issue to unite all of us — right, left, Muslim, Christian and Hindu, liberal and conservative. The decision to knight the author Salman Rushdie has brought together, in angry concordat, almost the entire world. There are those who, even now, may be strapping on the semtex to deliver to Rushdie the righteous
The departure of Nick Ross from “Crimewatch” is a sad victory for the worst kind of criteria now being applied in television. Nobody disputes the importance of appearance on screen – it would be odd if it were otherwise – but Ross is scarcely senescent and looks a pretty sprightly 59 year old. Having dined
Back from Interesting 2007, a daylong festival of creativity in the Web 2.0 world at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, and organised by the peerless Russell Davies (check out his always stimulating blog). Amongst the many ideas and concepts given an airing: the links between the Muppets and Ibsen; ‘foot candy’ for those
David Belasco was a pioneer in the field of stage lighting, passionate about creating realistic effects, the most famous of which occurred in his one-act play Madame Butterfly, during which the action slowed to an almost total halt for a 14-minute, lovingly rendered dawn sequence. Puccini saw the play in London in 1900 and rushed
The Royal Academy Summer Show boasts that it is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition, but this year it focuses on invited artists and distinguished foreign visitors. Thus it neglects both the Academicians, its real strength and raison d’être, and the until now faithful corps of British artists who submit year in, year
A small but beautifully staged exhibition is now on show in the garret of Dr Johnson’s House in London. It was in this room that Johnson worked on his mammoth Dictionary of the English Language. A large roof-space with eaves and heavily charred roof timbers (the roof was set on fire by the Germans a
Nabucco; Pelléas et Mélisande Arriving for the first production in Opera Holland Park’s new season, we were greeted with a reassuringly retro set. Since there is no curtain, what we see is what we’re going to get, and it is a stage full of battered suitcases and nothing else. For the operagoer, this sets bells
The other day I had to address a group of media students from Michigan State University on the purposes of TV criticism. I came up with about five, the last of which was: always impress on your audience what a massive waste of life almost all TV-watching is because it’s mostly rubbish, it sucks out
Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is bound to be criticised in some quarters, but, in its way, it is a historic moment, a collective rite of recognition for an author who paid a terrible personal price for his readiness to write candidly about the problems, confusions and vibrant possibilities of our post-colonial, mixed-up, multi-faith world. Midnight’s Children
The more you reflect on the Clintons’ story, the more remarkable it becomes. A boy and a girl meet at a prestigious Ivy League law school, fall in love not so much with each other as with the concept of themselves as a couple, leave their sophisticated world to go back to his Southern backwater
Europe had a party during the Congress of Vienna in the last months of 1814. Monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and their wives and mistresses had learnt what Lord Castlereagh called ‘habits of confidential intercourse’ while engaged in defeating Napoleon. Between balls and banquets in the city’s many palaces, they seduced, betrayed and negotiated with each other.
Many of us Europeans have visited the Smithsonian Insti- tution in Washington DC, and most of us have not the foggiest idea how it got its name. If quizzed, we should probably hazard a guess that Smithson was some rich old American codger, earlier in vintage than Frick or Pierpont Morgan, who had endowed one
This richly detailed and engrossing biography, a fine companion volume to William Hague’s life of Pitt, will still many arguments and feed others. Two hundred years ago the Act abolishing the slave trade was, as it remains, a beacon of humanitarian legislation, a defining moment when morality met commerce in open battle and won a
Reading this languid, chapterless novel is like spending the summer in Tuscany. The plot drifts along, punctuated by a few sharp shocks, just as a day at the villa might combine exquisite lethargy with a brisk dip in the pool or sumptuous meals. Sometimes there’s an obvious sting in the tail for such indolence: the
It is good to be reminded of the left-wing writers of the 1930s who took arms against the injustices of a society in which they were themselves privileged members. Sometimes they were over-hectic preachers — Take off your coat: grow lean:Suffer humiliation: Patrol the passes aloneAnd eat your iron ration. — but there was nobility
Tonight I heard again the rat in the roof, Fidgeting stuff about with a dry scuff, Pausing in silence, then scratching away Above my head, above the ceiling’s thin Skin that separates his life from mine. So shall I let him be, roaming so narrowly In a few finger-widths of carpentry? The evening passes by.
The author is nothing if not versatile. Apart from being the Observer’s music critic he has written books on a very wide variety of subjects. This book is about his experiences in the world of poker, specifically the form of poker that has taken the world by storm, No Limit Texas Hold’em. There is much
‘Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,’ a bartender says in Haruki Murakami’s eerie new novel. And it’s not just time that can seem out of joint during the witching hours, Murakami suggests. After Dark explores the ways in which the night can heighten our sense of isolation, and
It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded —
Garsington Opera on a warm, damp Thursday evening. I’ve been chairing a pre-performance talk on La donna del lago between the conductor David Parry and Rossini scholar Philip Gossett, and now I’ve been given a seat in the orchestra pit to watch the show, as the auditorium is completely sold out. Somewhere behind me, out
Slate has a fun, little piece up on a possible ending to the final Harry Potter story. I expect we’ll see a lot more of these before the book comes out on the 21st of July. Indeed, William Hill are even running a book on who might kill Harry Potter with Voldemort the favourite at
One of the many things which makes me love Edward Elgar is that both the man and his music are so tremendously unfashionable. No wonder tax-funded quangos set up to ‘promote culture’, and run by New Labour bureaucrats, are refusing to mark his 150th birthday. He does not correspond with their criteria of approval at
Gillian Ayres and David Bomberg: two painters with markedly different visions of the world, but united in excellence. Interestingly, there is a period of Bomberg’s work — the Spanish paintings of 1929 — when his paint surfaces seem to resemble Ayres’s of the late 1970s and early 1980s in their impacted intensity. But apart from
This season’s they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-any-more offering at the Old Vic is Gaslight. The chief reason for going to see it is that it stars the talented young actress Rosamund Pike. Time spent gazing at the astoundingly beautiful Miss Pike is never wasted. But Gaslight has other attractions as an entertainment. It’s a 1938 three-act thriller set in
Until recently I was one of those insufferable prigs who proudly announces, ‘Oh, I never watch television, it’s all rubbish these days.’ But there was little virtue in my self-restraint, and I had no idea whether there was anything worth watching or not. The fact is that when you are out at the theatre four,
Fidelio is so full of wonderful music, and its subject matter is so stirring and so perennially relevant, that it should be a frequent feature of any opera house’s repertoire. In fact it is rather rare, and this new production is the first time it has been seen at the Royal Opera for 14 years.
Stylistic accuracy is one of the most problematic aspects of restaging dance works. ‘Style’ is a fluidly ambiguous notion encompassing a multitude of factors: the training of the choreographer and dancers, particular aesthetic trends, interpretative choices, and so on. Hence the difficulty of getting it right. Stylistic appropriateness goes far beyond any detailed reproduction of
The best way to get serious press coverage for your big show is to provoke the hacks by shutting them out from the first night. It’s a high-risk strategy but in the case of the now famous King Lear with Ian McKellen it’s worked a dream. The director Trevor Nunn and the RSC chief Michael