The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This book takes up the story, told so memorably in his Clouds of Glory, of Bryan Magee’s early years in working-class Hoxton. In the first chapter, the now nine-year-old Magee, always precocious in his search for knowledge, is learning about the facts of life from one of his chums. Soon after, separated from his family
Weevils, sodomy and flogging or Baker rifles, jangling bits and ragged squares? For most authors dealing with the Napoleonic era, it’s an either/or. C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian do the Royal Navy, Bernard Cornwell does the land battles. But there’s one greedy-guts out there who wants to have his cake and eat it. Step
Saartjie Baartman, who performed under the name of ‘the Hottentot Venus’, became one of the most famous theatrical attractions of Georgian London. Exhibited like an animal for the entertainment of a paying crowd (‘two bob a head’), she was routinely obliged to suffer sharp prods in the buttocks from her curious audience who ‘wished to
I opened this book expecting to find the sort of volume a considerate host would place in your country- house bedroom. It is a bit more than that. Taking the decline of the Earls of Fitzwilliam and their enormous house Wentworth Woodhouse, outside Rother- ham, as her theme, Caroline Bailey evokes the social revolution that
To be called ‘the squinter’, which is what ‘il Guercino’ means, might not seem an auspicious nickname for an artist, but it doesn’t appear to have stood in the way of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), who became one of the most famous Italian artists of the 17th century. Not only was he a distinguished Baroque
‘His clothes are drenched in brine, his beard drips with seawater, and his brow is covered in perspiration due to his continual efforts to reach sinking ships to save them from the angry waves.’ Such is the lively picture of St Nicholas recorded by an anthologist of popular Greek calendar customs, contrasting somewhat with the
The Illusionist is one of those films that gains points for trying to be clever and different and ingenious but then promptly loses them all for being not clever or different or ingenious enough. It’s frustrating, really, because you can feel the good film trying to get out — ‘let me out, let me out!’
Sunday evening at the Barbican was a revelation, no less gushy word will do. Janacek’s comic opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek is the Cinderella in his operatic output, if you don’t count the very early works, whole or fragmentary; even the weird but kind of wonderful Osud is more likely to turn up these
Michael Keegan-Dolan is to dance–theatre what radical and elusive Banksy is to the visual arts. Indeed, these two acclaimed bad boys of modern-day culture have a great deal in common; both derive their art from cruel satire of the everyday, which they portray with similar irreverent and shock-provoking strokes, in spite of their different means
I used to write a few political profiles in my time, and the one thing I always hoped was that the subject would refuse to co-operate. You had to offer to interview them, naturally, otherwise there might be legal difficulties. But you prayed they would say no. That rarely happened. When I did see them,
Hugh Thomas is widely known as the author of scholarly blockbusters 1,000 pages long. He now excels in what he calls an intermezzo, a learned and lively book of 192 pages, full of good things including splendid pen portraits of worthies: of Choiseul, the easygoing foreign minister of France; of King Charles III of Spain,
It is a curious phenomenon of the modern novel that so many writers entrust their narrative voice to a character that in real life they would go a long way to avoid. In the right sort of hands, of course, it can be brilliantly effective, but imagine a Jane Austen novel narrated by Miss Bates
Clinton Heylin is a celebrated Bob Dylan expert, which makes his subsequent concentration on punk rock something of a surprise. But there’s a connection — Dylan shares with the best punk bands a devastating originality and a refusal to toe the established line. It is this free-spirited mentality that clearly attracts Heylin to his subjects,
Jane Smiley suffered a period of writer’s block after 9/11. In the middle of writing a novel, Good Faith, she found herself unable to continue. It all suddenly seemed pointless. So, to inspire herself to complete her own, she read a hundred novels — one of which was Boccaccio’s The Decameron. After finishing Good Faith
At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in
The young Evelyn Waugh, it’s said, once declared in a newspaper article that the writing of novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. One would like to think he gave his reasons, but, according to Somerset Maugham, ‘he threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he
Browsing through a Christie’s catalogue, I came across the description of a pen-and-wash drawing by Rowlandson, c. 1800, ‘Elegant company in a park’. It set me thinking. One knows very well what was meant by ‘elegant company’ at the beginning of the 19th century. It applied perfectly to the party Mr Bingley brings to the
Got the right place? Yup, this looks like it. I’m about to meet TV’s grumpiest man, and his fixers have booked us a room in a fashionable media institute in Covent Garden. I peer through the frosted glass at what appears to be a hotel, a bistro, a therapy centre and a health farm all
If ever there was an exhibition which warranted a speedy and assessing first look, and then a longer, more lingering concentration on certain pictures, then Citizens and Kings is it. Subtitled ‘Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830’, it doesn’t have an exactly prepossessing moniker. Citizens and Kings sounds like something out of one of
The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century
Sheridan Morley died suddenly last weekend. He was The Spectator’s theatre critic from 1990 to 2001. His knowledge of both the stage and its leading practitioners was encyclopedic, while his many theatrical anecdotes were hugely entertaining. He and his wife, the producer and critic Ruth Leon, were planning to spend more time shuttling between London
The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the
‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed. First, the contrasts: Tchaikovsky the emotional, passionate, subjective, confessional, pouring his heart
Exactly 400 years ago, 24 February 1607, the first great opera received its première in Mantua. It’s a crucial date in the history of the arts in Western Europe, and it would have been agreeable to be able to report that Opera North, in its new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, did it justice. And musically
Sometimes when listening to Radio Four you can have the odd experience of spiralling downwards into your very own time warp. Lying in the bath on Sunday morning, for instance, with the radio warbling in the background, you could almost pretend you were back in the 1970s (except that the cork tiles and avocado finish
Insomnia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When, for example, I made up my mind that I was going to review the BBC’s new series Sleep Clinic (BBC1, Monday), I knew that later that night I would have enormous difficulties getting to sleep. This is one of the horrible tricks we insomniacs play on ourselves. We’ll have
When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among
The Order of Merit is the only honour which almost everyone would like to possess. The Garter is picturesque but would be felt by some to be anachronistic and somewhat pompous. Gs, Ks, Cs, Os and Ms are handed out with the rations and can anyway probably be bought. Companions of Hon- our are respectable