The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Where have I been all these years? A listed Francophile managing to miss the utter delight of Bizet’s la jolie fille de Perth! Not averse to Carmen, tickled by the dusky oriental charms of The Pearl Fishers, diverted by the precocious brio of the 18-year-old’s sole symphony, enchanted and moved by the music for l’Arlésienne;
It is some years since I saw, in a Paris bookshop, a translated copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but I still enjoy recalling the French names given for the four members of the rabbit family: Flopson, Mopson, Queue-de-coton et Pierre. Cottontail is the species of rabbit which is found all over
Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We’ve had Edward St Aubyn’s novel Mother’s Milk and few respectable books’ pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragi- comic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives. Yet it is a fact that a really good memoir usually
We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison,
How much more do we need to know about Sir Wilfred Thesiger? Alexander Maitland, his literary executor and friend for the last 40 years of his life, collaborated with Thesiger on six books of his travels, and we have Thesiger’s first two classics, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, not to mention two other mainly
Walk over Lord Foster’s wobbly bridge from St Paul’s and you will see, squashed between Tate Modern and the reconstructed Globe Theatre, a three-storey house that, according to an inscription, is where Sir Christopher Wren stayed while building the cathedral. Alas, the legend, acceptable in the 1940s when the words were put up, no longer
South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate,
Finland, 1902. The Russian empire controls the country — has done for nearly 100 years — but a resistance to Tsarist rule is gaining strength and volume. In Helsinki, revolutionary discussion is turning into action; in the country, Swedish Finns are comfortable as the ruling class. The House of Orphans is the name given to
Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to
Having had no operatic performances at all in January, English National Opera is filling February with two hardy perennials, Jonathan Miller’s productions of The Mikado and Rigoletto. Odd, considering how successful they both are, as are so many of his productions, all of which must be thought of as old, that he is not asked
Right from the start of this retrospective exhibition, the complications set in. In Room 1 are four paintings from the 1981 series ‘Dear painter, paint for me’. One of them strikingly depicts a figure (presumably the artist?) seated on a black sofa placed out in the street and surrounded by black plastic rubbish bags. The
Until I had a daughter I used to think the problem with me and girls was me. But when you’re given the chance to observe the female of the species up close from birth onwards under home laboratory conditions, you soon lose any post-feminist illusions you might have about the blame for the war between
Over a year ago my six-year-old grandson Henry Flynn rushed home from his multi-ethnic south London school playground in Streatham with a solemn but urgent question for his father, an art historian, as it happens. So far as is known, incidentally, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic blood flows in young Henry’s veins. ‘Am I a Muslim,
After a family quarrel in 1717, George I ordered his son and heir’s imprisonment in the Tower. His ministers had to explain that in England not even a king could dispense with habeas corpus. The King considered bundling the future George II on to a man-of-war bound for the West Indian plantations, but reluctantly conceded
Proust is rapidly becoming the Mozart of the novel, one of those artistic figures before whom, from time to time, we delight to abase ourselves in various not always dignified postures of idolatrous adoration. One acquaintance of mine, for example, currently devotes his leisure hours to marking up A la recherche du temps perdu in
There are a lot of travel writers these days setting off ‘in the footsteps of’ someone else, gathering clues and arguing with ghosts. This is partly pragmatism: there are so few untouched trails around that you might as well make a virtue of necessity, lend your narrative some historical backbone and a point of comparison.
Val McDermid is probably best known for her series of sharply contemporary thrillers featuring a criminal profiler. But some of her standalone novels, in particular the superb A Place of Execution and The Distant Echo, have narrative sections that hark back to a generation earlier; and their plots turn upon the long shadows thrown forward
The acrimonious debate over the Elgin Marbles, housed in the British Museum since 1816, provides the catalyst for this new book. Ever since Lord Byron libelled Lord Elgin in verse as, ‘the last, the worst, dull spoiler,’ plundering the temple where ‘Pallas lingered,’ homegrown restitutionists have quoted Childe Harold to support the arguments for their
The etymologists of the Oxford English Dictionary should be alerted that Steven Poole has coined a new word. First used as the title for his book, published in 2006, ‘unspeak’ is a noun for a ‘mode of speech that persuades by stealth’. How, it might be asked, does this differ from ‘spin’? Poole contends that
There are some people who do one distinct thing in their life — only one — but it is enough, just, to confer immortality on them. Such a person was Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), the Victorian poet. This gifted and sensitive man was a product of Dr Arnold’s superb teaching at Rugby and won a
Christopher Lloyd died on 27 January. Not since the deaths of Gertrude Jekyll in 1932, William Robinson in 1935 and Vita Sackville-West in 1962 has so much homage been paid in the broadsheets to the memory of a gardener. In the nation at large, more people mourned the deaths of Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton,
Andrew Lambirth on Maggi Hambling’s forceful seascapes and Rose Wylie’s quirky art Let me at once state an interest: I have just written a book with Maggi Hambling about her life and works, currently available from all good booksellers. But long and intimate knowledge of an artist’s oeuvre should not disqualify the critic from writing
William Thornhill, convict, is spending his first night in a mud hut in the penal colony of New South Wales. He’s in Sydney, but this is 1806, and Sydney is little more than a huddle of such huts. Beside him, his wife Sal and their children sleep. Beyond is darkness, the ‘vast fact of the
One of life’s longed-for little twists comes when the nice guy finally asserts himself and reveals a darker side to his personality. Alan Alda, celebrated for having played Hawkeye for 11 years in the television series M*A*S*H* and an actor who always seemed slightly too eager to ingratiate, had his moment of revelation as the
Following the success of his first memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has written a second one, with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel. The Sailor in the Wardrobe is the story of his rite of passage from restricted late boyhood in Dublin to independent young manhood adrift abroad. The
Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of ‘futuristic’ fiction. Most such fiction — Forster’s The Machine Stops, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice — describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time when it was written. However, in The Eagle’s Throne the fact
It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from
Decayed gentility and a feckless father. These make the springiest springboard for the angry artist. Dickens, Picasso, Joyce, Shaw, Francis Bacon all enjoyed these unsung advantages in life. So did Samuel Langhorne Clemens who called himself Mark Twain, after the cry of the leadsmen sounding the depths in the treacherous waters of the Mississippi (twain=two
It’s been 44 years since Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made its debut on Broadway, but it still seems extraordinarily fresh. Why? The obvious answer is that the subject matter — the battle of the sexes — is timeless. Anyone in a heterosexual relationship will experience a shudder of recognition at certain points