The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s famous opening is used by Gilda O’Neill as an epigraph to her delightful foray through 19th-century murder and mayhem, but in truth, as she shows in The Good Old Days, the past is our native country. Things were not different then:
According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes
The second volume of this superb biography opens in 1939, as William Empson returns to London after two years of high adventure and real privation in a China up against Japanese invasion. Resolved to do his bit against Hitler, he drops poetry and literary criticism to join the BBC’s propaganda operation, where he put his
It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good
‘Suspicion is a shifting shade,’ Mark tells the police lieutenant who’s questioning him, and no one appreciates the tensions of suspicion better than Thomas H. Cook. Cook remains relatively unknown, though he’s garnered numerous crime-writing awards, including an Edgar for The Chatham School Affair. Places in the Dark and last year’s Red Leaves rank among
If you had a friend who was an actress, and she was on the brink of a nervous collapse, what would you do to cheer her up? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? I bet you wouldn’t take her to New York to visit a mutual friend, another actress, who was starring on Broadway —
Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the
Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989) by Jimmy Stewart The most intriguing thing about this book is its title. Ernest Hemingway and His Novel by Ernest Hemingway would not work. Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield wouldn’t either. Poems by Jimmy Stewart would be ridiculous, as if he were pretending to be
For the scales at which we live — the buildings we inhabit, the vehicles we drive, the sports we play — classical physics is a useful, highly accurate and reassuringly comprehensible system. But at scales we never personally encounter, at immense velocities, infinitesimal sizes or cosmic distances, things are not so simple. In these worlds,
In a taped diary entry for April 2003, David Blunkett describes a terrible dream: ‘a dream that had all the undertones of being on the outside, of being alienated, of being given the cold shoulder, of being friendless and leaning on a stick, having fallen out with Tony Blair and then having challenged him in
It’s difficult to believe that the golden boy of British art — as David Hockney remained for so many years — now has more than half a century of work behind him, or that he will celebrate his 70th birthday next summer. His technical versatility and immense skilfulness have seen him through many different guises
Earlier this year, a book appeared celebrating the first ten years of the Stirling Prize for architecture. Back in 1996, recession was only just ending and the National Lottery just beginning. It was the end of a bleak time for architects, doubly afflicted by the criticisms of the Prince of Wales. One unexpected benefit of
‘Museums are the new United Nations.’ So says Jack Loman, the director of the Museum of London. He is one of many professionals, and increasingly policymakers, calling on cultural institutions to act as instruments of foreign policy. Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is enthusiastic about this mission and is currently
Opera North’s home at the Grand Theatre Leeds now boasts a resplendent auditorium, with lacquered walls and raked stalls, so that I have now finally seen the stage; and above all greatly improved acoustics. More remains to be done, as the news release grimly informs us, stressing that Phase II of the plan ‘will have
From its very opening scene this film is exquisitely, lavishly gorgeous and on and on it goes, being exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous — oh, the frocks, the shoes, the petit fours, the piled-high candies! — until you start thinking, enough with the exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous already. How much exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous can a
At the Cheltenham Festival last week, Professor John Sutherland was on a panel discussing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea — which on this occasion won the mock-Booker prize for 1966, defeating The Jewel in the Crown, The Comedians and The Magus. Prof. Sutherland made the point that a prequel like WSS can exist because the
Twilight, the witching hour — that tantalising moment on the cusp of day and night when everything seems strange, poignant and full of possibilities. It is a gift to the photographer, whose raw material is light: its shifting subtleties, its evanescence, its poetic potential. The V&A has collected in this exhibition the work of eight
There are many who might consider it an absolute crime that someone who would look so entirely delectable in a dirndl is instead about to hit the stage of the London Palladium draped from head to toe in a habit and wimple. Lesley Garrett, however, is so thrilled that she can barely contain herself. Other
It is a tribute to Pervez Musharraf’s powers of persuasion that after reading this book you’re not entirely sure which country he rules. Is it Pakistan or Fantasististan? The rational choice is Pakistan, but the country he describes belongs to another world altogether. Women are empowered, the madrassahs are being curbed, democracy is waxing, terrorism
When the second world war began, Nicholas Mosley, the distinguished novelist son of the fascist leader Sir Oswald, who thought that Britain should not fight Germany and whose second wife, Diana Mitford, counted Goebbels and Hitler as friends, was a 16-year-old schoolboy at Eton. ‘At this time,’ he writes in his new book, in which
For 16 years, from 1878, Blanche Wittman was a patient in the infamous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, diagnosed by the famous Dr Charcot as a hysteric. Putting Blanche on display in a cataleptic state, Charcot explained to audiences that he hoped to reveal, through her ‘a certain system, a secret code, which … could point
T. S. Eliot was happily married to Valerie Fletcher for years, but it is only his relationship with Vivien Haigh-Wood that people want to hear about. (‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.’) Lauren Bacall’s second husband was Jason Robards — but
Who did Evelyn Waugh call ‘the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit’? Answer: Somerset Maugham. Surprising answer? Perhaps. Others judged him more harshly; Edmund Wilson dismissed him as ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious writers who do not care much about writing.’ Actually Maugham took a
Seize the Hour is an admirable example of the storyteller’s power. From Homer to the great playwrights and novelists whose works we can hear or read repeatedly, the telling is all. Achilles pursues Hector around the walls of Troy; we know how it will finish, but like Homer’s audiences we want to hear it again.
It’s difficult not to warm to Mad Tracey from Margate (‘I like Tracey … I landed on my feet with that name’), the inventor of the Rothko Comfort Blanket for Private Views, however reluctant one may be to have one’s nose rubbed in other people’s bodily fluids and spiritual excretions. She famously staggered out of
At the end of his excellent introduction to Auschwitz Report, Robert Gordon invokes W.G. Sebald’s argument in his last book, On the Natural History of Destruction: compared to ‘natural histories’, e.g. contemporary medical reports such as this one, more literary texts ‘[know] nothing’. W.G. Sebald was one of the greatest thinker-writers of the 20th century,
Claire Tomalin is an accomplished biographer. While she recognises Hardy’s genius, this book is not an essay in literary criticism. With great skill and sensitivity she uses his poetry, novels and his extensive correspondence to illuminate the life of a man for whom she writes ‘the wounds inflicted by life never quite healed’. He never
Having It So Good follows hard on the heels of Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good, which appeared last year. Both are doorstoppers — over 600 pages long — and the reader groans as he picks them up. Soon, no doubt, literary editors will be asking reviewers to weigh books rather than write about