The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take
An old biographer friend of mine, having churned out several lives of the great over the years, eventually told me over a boozy and depressing lunch that he had had enough, and that he wouldn’t be writing another one ‘for as long as I live’. As it happens he didn’t live that long, but you
The preceding volume in the New Oxford History of England, covering the years 1727-1783, described the people as ‘polite and commercial’. Boyd Hilton does not imbue their sons and daughters with Byronic qualities, as his title might suggest; rather, it expresses the extreme volatility of the period. In the 1820s 60 per cent of the
Lecterns have been installed in some bookshops enabling customers to flip through the 625 tabloid-format pages of what must be the largest volume ever devoted to a single modern artist. Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ Size is Warhol the Lot, a bulk buy, a gross amplitude of Warhol the Simple, Warhol the Smart and Warhol the Resourceful
Saint George has spent years in denial.His image has had a bad press.There’s been, as shrinks say, for some whileA problem he needs to address. I suppose it’s not really surprisingHe’s pining for something to clout,For even with wide advertisingThere aren’t many dragons about. And where is the Maiden Worth Saving?(To find any maiden is
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an argument in favour of ordinary life, as opposed to a life ruled by passion and intensity. It’s a kind of anti-Tristan, in which Isolde decides, in the terminology of Act II of Wagner’s drama, to call it a day as far as uniting with Tristan in undying (or unliving) love
According to theatrical lore, no play can be considered an out-and-out masterpiece unless it’s initially rejected. The most famous example is Look Back in Anger, which received a critical mauling in the dailies and was only saved from closure by Kenneth Tynan’s rave in the Observer. The second most famous is The Birthday Party, which
Really, it isn’t me who decides what TV programmes to review. It’s my wife. Like, the other night I’d started watching Ricky J. Dyer’s fascinating documentary I Love Being…HIV+ (BBC3, Monday) about pozzing up, the disgusting gay underworld perversion of deliberately getting yourself infected with the HIV virus by seeking unprotected sex with known carriers,
I work at the V&A and walk every day through galleries packed with marvellous things, but the other day I was stopped in my tracks by something unique: eight contemporary illuminated manuscript pages, flecked with gold and shimmering with light and colour in their display cases. They are, I discovered, from the Saint John’s Bible,
This wonderful small book brings to an end much journalistic nonsense that followed 11 September 2001 in its definitive treatment of its causes and repercussions. To the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, what happened on that day was a natural conclusion to decades of Arab frustration and Western neglect. Honourably, but not totally successfully, he
When Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrived at the Russian court in 1744, one of the many daughters of minor German royal houses who came to St Petersburg in the hope of an advantageous marriage, she was just 15 and ‘as ugly as a scarecrow’ after a severe illness. Her future husband, the heir to the
This is a ghastly story, powerfully well told. Lives of criminals form an accepted part of biography; within it, lives of con men are more difficult, because conmen cover and confuse their tracks so carefully. Carmen Callil triumphs over innumerable difficulties to make clear the career of Louis Darquier, one of the villains of the
Were I swimming for my life with these four books between my teeth and were I to be tried more sorely, the first to go would be Parrot. It has three gems: that Warren Hastings, who died (from starvation) in 1818, owned a parrot that was still alive in Swindon in the 1920s; that Charlotte,
At the centre of Rachel Billington’s new novel is love, but this is not in any conventional sense a romantic novel. Claudia, a schoolgirl, falls in love with a man 24 years her senior. He is not a romantic man, though given on occasion to the poetic flights of fancy associated with his chosen occupation,
It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and
For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one
This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per-
In a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History in New York there is a diorama of a giant squid caught between the jaws of a whale. It is huge, vivid and quite alarming — two mighty beasts tussling, and never a victor. This is the spectacle which gives this film its curious title:
This year’s Tate Triennial has been so universally panned it seems cruel to add to the chorus of criticism. Still, it’s fair to ask why it’s so dreadfully dreary — and the answer, I think, is a lack of fantasy. Fantasy, as an ingredient of visual art, has fared badly under modernism and postmodernism. Somewhere
The Serpentine Gallery is a pleasure to visit, which makes it all the more frustrating that its exhibition programme in recent years has been so dominated by the modish and ephemeral. Thankfully, from time to time, an exhibition of real worth manages to squeeze past the art censors. American painters seem to have fared better
Like everyone else I loved Planet Earth (BBC1, Sunday), which came to only a temporary end this week. The images are fabulous. If the global-warming doomsayers are right, and if in 50 years’ time what’s left of us are living on mountain tops, chewing grey squirrels and watching DVDs powered by lichen, it will be
‘Quelle catastrophe.’ Thus Samuel Beckett on hearing that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1969. He would doubtless have been similarly disdainful of the events arranged to mark his centenary, which falls on 13 April. A disregard for fame and success, and even for his followers, was one of Beckett’s artistic hallmarks and it
In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide
Wavell was a great soldier and a great man: wise, courageous, clear-headed, an inspired and inspiring leader, a pattern of integrity. It is peculiarly unfair that the three greatest tasks he undertook all ended in near total failure. He made his name between the wars as a thoughtful, forward-looking soldier who did as much to
In 1975, a few months after the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus that had stormed across the northern tier of the island in the preceding summer, I stood in the square of Lawrence Durrell’s old village of Bellapaix and watched the Greek villagers being rounded up for deportation to the south. Within a short space
Professor Fukuyama is famous for having told us at the end of the Cold War that history was at an end. By this he meant that the slow advance of liberal democracy was inevitable. As he explains in his latest book he did not mean that we should try to accelerate the process by killing
At school there was a group of us who thought that Samuel Beckett was the coolest person on the planet. What could be more thrilling than the apocalyptic minimalism of a play featuring two people who lived in dustbins? We found validation for our passion when a teacher drew our attention to the Polish critic
The Bickersteth family has performed its Levi-like role in the Church of England for several generations, providing it with some of its best traditional pastors. Rectories, vicarages, deaneries, palaces have homed them and parish churches and cathedrals have long witnessed their work. And work it still is, as this autobiography of a 20th-century bishop proves,
The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on