The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There is a delightful moment in this novel when Nathan, the narrator, is standing on one side of the street with his nephew, Tom, and they see Nancy Mazzucchelli on the other side. Tom thinks of her as the BPM, the Beautiful Perfect Mother, and he would never dare approach. Nathan simply walks over and
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. In every life there is the subject for a sermon. Perhaps that is why so many sons of the manse have ascended into Fleet Street’s paper pulpits. Indeed, if there is one area of journalism that has progressively improved over the last 20
Histories of Victorian London now come two a penny. They are the left-wing historian’s answer to biographies of Good Queen Bess. What is there new to say? We start with fog and smells and move on to disease and the working classes. We meet Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew. We chastise the rich and welcome
Readers may sympathise with Tracey Emin. Her big mouth and huge appetite for self- advertisement make her a ready target; she’s so shameless and yet, by her own account, so abused. (‘And then they started: “SLAG, SLAG, SLAG.” A gang of blokes, most of whom I’d had sex with at some time or other…’) Life
Thrillers now come heavily disguised, and but for the blood-stained head-lamp on the jacket of this one and the warning across the corner, ‘Be careful who [sic] you trust. It might just be the death of you’, one would take the book to be a straight- forward, if lurid, portrait of a bright girl with
It is difficult to put a finger on the reason, but there has always seemed something particularly dismal about the Gunpowder Plot. There is obviously a lot to be said for any conspiracy that can erase the Stuart line from English history at a blow, but from Robert Catesby and the rest of the old
Isn’t it peculiar when people change their name? John Wilson becoming Anthony Burgess, Peggy Hookham being borne aloft as Margot Fonteyn, or Richard Jenkins leaving Port Talbot as Richard Burton. When a person insists on being called somebody else we are witnessing an identity crisis. (Frank Skinner was Chris Collins until 1987. It is rumoured
Sitting at Stamford Bridge at the weekend, Chelsea trailing Bolton 0-1, I reflected on the nature of 11 brilliant players and their manager. After Mourinho’s half-time talk, Chelsea scored four goals in 10 minutes. There are inspiring and uninspiring gaffers. If he were a conductor, José Mourinho would be a virtuoso, but what does this
In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe
Lecherous Limericks (1975) by Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov’s ambition was to have a book in every one of the major Dewey Decimal categories. This one fits in the category labelled ‘dirty poems’. It’s a collection of 100 original limericks dealing with what Asimov called ‘actions and words concerning which society pretends nonexistence — reproduction, excretion,
English Touring Opera began its autumn tour, as usual, at the Hackney Empire, a place I haven’t been to before, and shall hesitate about going to again, not so much because of the tropical temperature inside as the rigours of getting there and back into the centre of London. It was good to see it
Mark Morris Dance Group has long been a regular feature of London dance seasons. Still, the power to surprise in Morris’s choreography has not waned. Take, for instance, the first of the two programmes presented last week at Sadler’s Wells, as part of the company’s 25th anniversary tour. Although signature traits informed each work’s choreography,
In 1960, writing a postcard to her friend and mentor Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus (1923–71) worried that she was ghoulish. From an early age her photographs had recorded the marginalised and dispossessed, capturing the imperfections and frailties of humanity. She was a woman with a mission — scrutinising society and chronicling the damaged or eccentric,
I suppose if I had to name my favourite children’s author it would have to be Richmal Crompton and the William stories, followed not far behind by Anthony Buckeridge and Jennings, and Enid Blyton with the adventures of the famous five. There are numerous others, of course, but I enjoyed reading these three the most
The Modern Movement in architecture had scarcely succeeded in abolishing ornament before people began to speculate about how and when it would return. In Britain, the historian Sir John Summerson, as a young journalist, found it hard to believe that architecture would be able to communicate without it beyond the initial period of purification which
‘Time of Change: Journey through the Twentieth Century’ is how one of London’s major orchestras heads its publicity for the new season. But it’s impossible not to stifle a yawn of surprise as one reads the proudly marshalled highlights. ‘Mahler’s impressive Symphony 4’ is the earliest (completed 1900); next in time comes Vaughan Williams’s Tallis
Laura Gascoigne on the Pompidou Centre’s massive survey of Dada Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism: it’s funny how many names of modern art movements originated as insults on the lips of critics. Not Dada, though. The founders of art’s first anartism were ahead of the game, pre-emptively christening their movement with a silly name designed to put
Buried within the pages of this book there lies an extraordinary story worth the telling, the bald facts of which require none of the elaboration to which they are here subjected. In 1896 a certain Anna Maria Druce, of 68 Baker Street in London, petitioned the home secretary to have her late husband’s coffin opened,
He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’ So the Bellman would cry: and the crew
While staying at Chatsworth for Christmas 1994, James Lees-Milne records an exchange with his old friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, on the subject of keeping a diary. Leigh Fermor regrets not having done so: ‘It might have helped him pick up the threads … so difficult for horny old fingers to feel. Yes, I said, a
Among my earliest recollections is that of wandering into my mother’s bathroom and watching her, toenails incarnadine with polish like pillars above the foam, as she addressed herself sternly along the lines of: ‘I should have covered the jack. Then they could never have made the contract.’ Except for my brother Maurice, who played the
Once upon a time, the young Roy Strong spent many hours, with the encouragement of Sir Anthony Wagner, researching the records of the College of Arms in connection with his interest in Elizabethan and Stuart portraits and pageantry. This resulted in what many regard as his best work, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals. Now, 50
The farmer and writer, A. G. Street, who in the 1950s co- edited with Max Hastings’s father a magazine which gives this book its title, wrote before the war: When the countryman turns his cows out to grass in the spring, he also gets out his rod and net ready for the fishing. The turning
Scholars face a formidable task when they set out to write the lives of the playwrights and poets of the Elizabethan age. They do not possess the personal revelations, say, of Byron’s letters. They must piece together scraps of information contained in the lawsuits of an astonishingly litigious population; the comments of friends and enemies
I’d like to defend Joyce Carol Oates —she’s had so many rotten reviews of this, her latest novel. Reviewers, I reason, must get tired of a writer who publishes a novel a year (Mother, Missing is Oates’s 44th) and seek something snide to say like ‘time to slow down’ (the Guardian) or ask, like Patrick
‘People who have recently lost someone have a certain look . . . one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness,’ observes Joan Didion in this painful memoir, which describes the first year of her widowhood after 40-odd years of marriage. She should know: the merest glance at her photograph confirms what the mirror must tell her,
There’s an old definition of a gentleman: that he is someone who is never rude unintentionally. Rudeness, since then, has spread and spread, and 20 times a day we probably ask ourselves the same question which underlies these two books about contemporary manners. Do they mean to do it? Are they just bleeding ignorant, or
Trilogy(1978) by Leonid Brezhnev Leonid Brezhnev produced the standard documents for a Soviet leader: speeches, articles and Leninophiliac tracts. In 1978 he added three books of jaunty memoirs: Little Land, Rebirth and The Virgin Lands, which told of his part in the Great Patriotic War and its immediate aftermath. Sample scenes include him single-handedly repelling
Hollywood’s two biggest animated features of the month both take place in England, or ‘England’ — in the case of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Victorian London; in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a bucolic northern mill town. The latter defers to the reality of contemporary Britain in certain respects (laser security alarms)