The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A couple of years ago I was invited to tour Compass Point Studios just outside Nassau in the Bahamas. Apart from its historical significance — this was once the home of Island Records, where Bob Marley recorded all his great hits — the experience was very illuminating. Compass Point is a state-of-the-art studio and I
The musical profession has never recognised borders. Composers, performers and ensembles have moved from city to city and country to country, learning and teaching, experimenting with local styles, adding to the repertoire and delighting patrons and the public. This cosmopolitanism belongs to the spirit of Western music, which is an art without frontiers, flowing unhindered
Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion
The French rarely read books by foreigners about their history. This is a pity, for their own historians have not always done the job well. The ideological fault-lines of French intellectual life have obstructed understanding of France’s 20th century. A francocentric view of the world has added to the problem. So, until recently, has the
Bess of Hardwick has usually been viewed as a hard-hearted schemer, an unscrupulous woman who triumphed in male-dominated Tudor England by never allowing emotion to impede her ambition. Allegedly driven by acquisitiveness and a lust for power, she married four times, always moving on to a husband richer than the last. Having gained a sizeable
Frankie Burnaby is 12. She lives on a remote farm in British Columbia, where ‘the clear turbulent Thompson River joins the vaster opaque Fraser’. This novella, first published in 1947, charts the two conflicting emotional currents that, like the rivers of Frankie’s birthplace, struggle for dominance. Any new arrival is exciting in this thinly populated
One of the oddest forms of contemporary masochism is our passion for surveys that reveal how ignorant and stupid we have become. Scarcely a week goes by without the publication of some poll telling us how many schoolchildren believe that Churchill was victorious at Waterloo or that Hornblower commanded at Trafalgar. The teaching of traditional
Otello is the most simple of Verdi’s operas, from a narrative point of view, and in the motivations of its characters, while being the most sophisticated musically, Falstaff as always excepted. Its three chief characters — and Verdi is less interested in any of the subordinate ones than usual — are almost caricatures in their
The fourth in the National Gallery’s series of touring exhibitions (remember Paradise in 2003 and Making Faces last year?) comes to London after showing in Bristol and Newcastle. Entitled this time The Stuff of Life, it is a welcome excuse — should excuse be needed — to look at a group of first-rate still-life paintings,
Unfortunately I was in deepest Wales on the day when TV made me briefly famous so I missed all the phone calls from friends saying nice things. I did pop into Builth Wells the next day, wearing the same glasses I wore on my TV programme, just in case anyone felt like recognising me. But
Sensory deprivation has, it would seem, become fashionable these days. As well as restaurants opening in Paris and London for seeing people to experience not seeing (dining in the dark), there is now a dating service where you meet your ‘blind’ date in the dark (supposedly avoiding image issues), and spas have created weekend packages
Many things lead to addiction and obsessiveness, even madness, but one of the most surprising, and lasting, is cricket. You don’t even have to be any good (I know); it can still take over too much of your life. Marcus Berkmann, a writer (how he finds time to write anything during the summer is a
Picture this scene: in the delivery room of a Botswana hospital, a woman howls with the pain of childbirth and her midwife becomes increasingly bothered that she is disturbing the other patients. Whatever tension there is in this exchange — a woman suffering labour without drugs, an underpaid, overstretched health worker having a bad day
Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To
To a British reader who knows the subject, 1776 may seem pretty thin. To one who doesn’t, it may be confusing. It is an account of the military history of a single year of the American revolution, so the ambitions of the author are oddly limited. David McCullough doesn’t explain why the revolution began. He
Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is something I have been longing to see for the whole of my opera-going life. No one, surely, can fail to fall in love with the overture, which used to be the opening item of very many concerts when they began in that kind of way. Such irresistible tunes
The other day on Radio Four David Hare set one of his namesakes running when he remarked that the RSC was ‘completely irrelevant to the theatrical life of the country’. Well, certainly in so far as it’s a company dedicated to the Swan of Avon rather than the Bard of Hampstead. Is it self-evident that
The height of summer is celebrated by the television networks telling us things we already know. Such as, Frank Sinatra was in hock to the Mafia. Actually, Sinatra: Dark Star (shown on Thursday, BBC1, though made as a co-production with American, German and French money) was a perfectly entertaining trot round a familiar block —
St Mary-at-Lambeth, built beside the walls of the Archbishop’s Palace, was once the parish church of Lambeth, until it fell into disuse in 1972. Thankfully, this handsome building was rescued from demolition some five years later by the foundation of the Museum of Garden History and the Tradescant Trust, appropriately named after the great family
Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was
It is surely rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me. Not only are both the leading players very much alive, most of the varied cast are still vigorously kicking. Mrs Melly writes the story of her grippingly
Like Philip Mansel I am a passionate believer in the importance of trivia in history, or rather what most academic historians would regard as such. Years ago, at the close of the Sixties, I was the first chair of the newly formed Costume Society, in the main because I could keep the warring women gathered
Matthew’s sad gospel Matthew Parris has decided to sing yet another chorus of the same sad atheistical song (Another Voice, 23 July). What is the basis of his comment that ‘religion often seems to have more of a purchase on those who have become dissatisfied with the way they are living their lives than with
Sponsored by Hubert Burda Media, the Schroder Family and WestLB AG. In the sober grey vaults of Somerset House, trunk-loads of treasures from the state art collections of Saxony shimmer and sparkle. While the reconstruction of their home in the Gr
Andrew Lambirth on Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrating our landscape art This summer seems to be developing into a season of British Art — with exhibitions of the quality of Stubbs at the National, Reynolds at the Tate and Sutherland at Dulwich, and now also with A Picture of Britain (until 4 September). This generously mixed
The curtain goes up late in Israel. Performances start at 8.30p.m. or 9p.m. On a Saturday this is considered so early by the partygoers of Tel Aviv that it is dubbed ‘the matinée’. Intervals are often dropped, too. Audiences go in for a short, sharp hit and are then released into the night. We could
Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in
To anyone who enjoyed Fernand Braudel’s masterly work on the Mediterranean or Neal Ascher- son’s wonderful Black Sea, the idea of a book on the Baltic is an appealing one. It is Europe’s other great inland sea, fed by the snows of Scandinavia and rivers such as the Elbe, the Vistula, the Niemen and the
In 1991, A.S. Byatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in which she recalls that she had: the eternal first novelist’s problem … I didn’t want to write a ‘me-novel’ [but] I didn’t know anything — about life, at least. Highly autobiographical first novels are