The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The massacre of nearly 400 unarmed civilians and the wounding of over 1,000 others in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh (a barren enclosure walled in by houses) on the unlucky 13 April 1919 has a far greater historical resonance than the incident would seem to merit. This is not to make light of what the Secretary of
The initial reaction to this solid little book must be ‘Oh no, not another!’ As Claire Tomalin says on the jacket, ‘A new approach seemed impossible.’ But ‘Susannah Fuller- ton, the President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, has brilliantly hit on one.’ Her theme is crime and punishment and it has yielded up
There are plenty of books about the first world war, but that’s not to say there isn’t room for another. In any case, this, I think, is the first novel to take as its hero a young Irish volunteer, stepping up to fight for the Allies in 1915. Too short to be a policeman like
This volume of several pounds weight and over 600 pages duration is an undeniably serious estimation of the last 250 years of European and American literature. The word panoptic might have been coined for Bayley: if not the monarch, he is at least the master of all he surveys. His readers had better be almost
Certain concepts send even the least reputable historian scuttling for cover. The Holy Grail heads the list. The Knights Templar inspire grave suspicion; so do Atlantis and the Round Table. The Ark of the Covenant is up there with the best — or worst — of them. The Ark was the repository for the two
At the Berlin Staatsoper, the evening after he conducted Parsifal Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen, a sequence that would have had a strong appeal for Nietzsche, who advertised the Mediterranean virtues of the latter’s music over the ‘tragic grunts’ of the former. Whether Nietzsche would have approved of Barenboim’s way with Carmen is more doubtful. Though
This is the fourth of the Holburne’s recent exhibitions devoted to 18th-century British portraiture, a series which has done much to put the Museum on the map of enlightened gallery-goers. Previous subjects have been Love’s Prospect (dealing with the marriage portrait), Pickpocketing the Rich (portrait-painting in Bath) and Every Look Speaks (portraits of David Garrick).
There was a time, half a century ago, when vegetable gardening was the preserve of old boys on allotments and jobbing gardeners in spacious suburban gardens. No longer. These days, the vegetable grower is as likely to be a 30-year-old female social worker with a small urban garden and a Point of View about pesticides
When you’ve seen how much vilification Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have endured from the tabloids and the republican broadsheets over the years, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see or hear the Prince’s muttered comments about the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell in Klosters last week. Witchell, known inexplicably among his colleagues as
There are 13 Canalettos and 19 Guardis in our National Gallery; there are no paintings by either artist in the Rijksmuseum. The Dutch, having been painting landscape views for years, had enough of their own by the 18th century not to bother with Venice: canals were not exactly a novelty to them. So while the
Literature feeds off other literature and why ever not? Think of Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, bred from, respectively, Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway. Think of Shakespeare for that matter, who told a good story provided someone else had told it to him first. To get the most out
Science is sexy. It always was, as we who were forced to give up biology at the age of 14, for the irrelevant reason that we were quite good at French, have always resentfully suspected. Now, accessible and even inaccessible books on how the physical world ticks become bestsellers. The new president-elect of the Royal
That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While this may be true, I imagine none but a dedicated cineaste can now name a film of Gloria Swanson’s apart from Sunset Boulevard, or
From the timing of Michael Crick’s book on the Leader of the Opposition we can surmise that the author, like most of the rest of us, has made his mind up already about the result of the imminent election. There will be nothing significant to add after 5 May. The Tory party will not win
It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not
Institutional history is a tricky genre, so prone to over-reverence, so likely to be tedious to anyone but those attached to the institution described. So it was superficially brave of a commercial press to commission a quincentenary history of a Cambridge college: brave, that is, until one discovers that its authors include Quentin Skinner, the
Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences,
‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or
‘You’re not going to write about them, are you?’ said my wife contemptuously, when I announced that I was going to devote this month’s column to the Grateful Dead. ‘They’re one of the worst.’ As regular readers will know, my wife hates all pop music with a passion, but she especially dislikes the Dead because
When I spotted that the conservative American writer and wit P.J. O’Rourke was giving two 20-minute talks on Radio Four, the first on Easter Sunday, I rubbed my eyes thinking there must have been some mistake. Or maybe a printing error. How did he get past the Guardianistas at the BBC? Did he slip in
Andrew Lambirth finds plenty to enjoy at the V&A’s Arts and Crafts show, despite the gloom International Arts and Crafts is the third of the V&A’s major 19th/20th century ‘lifestyle’ themed exhibitions, following on from the successes of Art Nouveau (2000) and Art Deco (2003). Both those shows were ingenious and loving tributes to their
In a 1925 essay, Freud unearthed an important linguistic truth about the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich). He noticed that it had drifted very close to its apparent antonym heimlich, which starts out as ‘homely’ and can, via ‘private and personal’, become ‘secretive and repressed’. This enabled him to offer the more important psychological insight
For many people in the West, the Middle East is a source of perplexity and foreboding. Home to morose despotisms, political violence and a thoroughly ruined natural environment, the Middle East now sends us its refugees, headscarves and, most notably since 11 September 2001, violence. The peoples of the Middle East reply that their lives
This posthumous book is the summation of a lifetime’s research into aspects of the 18th-century interior in the British Isles by the leading historian of the subject. I say British Isles, for John Cornforth had strong interests in Irish and Scottish Georgian architecture, as well as English. As the former architectural editor of Country Life
Shakespeare was the great glory of England. So wrote Victor Hugo. But he added that if you went to England to admire the statue of Shakespeare you would find instead the statue of Wellington. The English did not like Shakespeare. His fame came to England from overseas. And Hugo believed that the French played their
In his 12th novel, Tim Parks revisits a subject that has been dominating his writing of late: the middle-aged man, plunged into crisis, forced to re- evaluate his life. Destiny (1999) revolved around a suicidal son and a crumbling marriage, Judge Savage (2003) involved a crumbling marriage and a distressed daughter. In Rapids, the divorce
In the last several years, English-speaking readers have been treated to a plethora of Soviet history books unlike others before them. The opening of Soviet archives has given us everything from Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad to Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s book on Stalin’s court, to new biographies of Rasputin, Lenin and Trotsky. Now, however, we have The Soviet
Defying the geographical promise of its title, The India House turns out to be set in Shropshire. Here, in sequest- ered, Eden-era retreat, two generations of a decayed rentier family — embittered grandma Mrs Covington and frosty daughter Evelyn — are doing their utmost to prevent any noxious post-war fall-out from contaminating the third. They
Most great artists begin as mimics. They do not, as Clara Schumann claimed Brahms did, come into the world ‘ready-made’. Manet prided himself on painting ‘straight from nature’, but he had spent many hours copying Old Masters in the Louvre, and his friend Degas thought they were guiding his brush as surely as they were