The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When the poems of Philip Larkin came to the fore in the late Fifties, I admired his graceful colloquialism but was dismayed by his almost proselytising gloom; life wasn’t given much of a chance. So I decided that he was a great Comic poet — stretching the idea of Comedy to almost Renaissance widths and
We Don’t Live Here Anymore is very faithfully adapted from a couple of Andre Dubus novellas I read a long time ago. Quite how long ago I didn’t realise until the point in the movie when Hank, a failed writer teaching literature at some small-town New England college, gets yet another rejection letter and ceremonially
I was in a troubled mood when I sat down to watch Guys and Dolls and, alas, it didn’t do much to raise my spirits. Before I started reviewing plays four years ago, I had no time for musicals. I have a tin ear for music and almost no visual sense, and the only pleasure
Every 10 years, it seems, we are blessed or afflicted, depending on your point of view, with a major exhibition of the internationally acclaimed sculptor, poet and filmmaker Rebecca Horn (born 1944). The first show I remember was at the Serpentine in 1984. Then in 1994 she had the Tate and the Serpentine. Now it’s
Quite the most upsetting thing I saw on TV all week was Bob Geldof on the Jonathan Ross show (Friday), talking about all the dead Africans who are found washed up on the shores of Lampedusa, between Libya and Sicily. So many, he said, that the mayor of Lampedusa complained that he had ‘literally’ no
It was something of a shock to hear the first episode this week of Radio Four’s adaptation of BBC television’s popular 1950s series Dixon of Dock Green (Wednesday). Were policemen ever like the bluff, wise, shrewd and avuncular constable George Dixon? As a child watching the series, I thought they were, and we expected them
Mark Glazebrook applauds Gilbert & George’s latest work at the Venice Biennale When I was learning some art history by teaching it, at Maidstone College of Art some 40 years ago, there was a student who invariably raised his hand after each lecture, no matter what the subject or period. ‘Excuse me, sir, but what
Despite the not guilty verdict, Michael Jackson’s reputation has collapsed as dramatically as the ravaged features on his face. The revelations about his fondness for boyish company will haunt him for the rest of his life, even though he was cleared of charges of molestation. It cannot be happily ever after in Neverland. For all
Ian Fleming pretended they were glamorous, John le Carré claimed they were brainy and unscrupulous. Commander Crabb, in real-life 1956, made Britain’s spies into the figures of fun they went on being until the Iraq fiasco showed they could be dangerous, too. He was the middle-aged chap, tripping over his flippers in a baggy wet-suit,
When banking families fell out in Renaissance Florence, disputes tended not to be settled by the financial regulator. In April 1478 in Florence cathedral, members of the Pazzi family murdered Giuliano Medici and came close to killing Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. Several of the Pazzi conspirators were hanged and left to dangle from the windows
Martin Meredith ended his 1984 book on Africa, The First Dance of Freedom, with a quote from a recent report by the Economic Commission for Africa which looked ahead to the continent’s future over the next 25 years. On existing trends, it predicted, poverty in rural areas would reach ‘unimaginable dimensions’, while the towns would
When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or
Coleridge was supposed to have been the last person ever to have read everything, and that was in 1834. So Peter Watson, a Cam- bridge archaeology don, is up against it when he tries to squeeze the history of all the clever things that mankind has ever thought into 822 pages. He makes a pretty
It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed
What is the point of William Cobbett? Richard Ingrams claims that Cobbett was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived, yet his life is largely forgotten. He is remembered, if he is known at all, as the author of Rural Rides, a classic account of his travels around the English countryside in the 1820s.
A collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Philip Glass, even though it necessarily had to be posthumous, sounds like a bad idea, and so it proved to be in an admirable production by the Royal Opera of Orphée at the Linbury Studio. This two-act opera played continuously for 100 minutes, so there was no escape. I
I love Australia, and I used to love Australian movies. But a certain stiffness seems to have set in. Swimming Upstream has two terrific actors, Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis, and they’re never less than compelling, but Russell Mulcahy directs with a plonking clunkiness that makes the material even more pedestrian than it is. Perhaps
Hard to know where to start with On the Shore of the Wide World. The title, maybe: a sweet, rambling, lyrical phrase made up of vacuous and seductive borrowings. Like the show. We open with Susan, played by Susannah Harker, waddling on stage, apparently up the duff. Her aggrandising tum operates as a sort of
‘Times have changed,’ I was told by one disgruntled Academician. Once the members were guaranteed to have their work hung ‘on the line’ (i.e., in pride of place at eye-level), and non-members would get the remaining positions if they were lucky. This year John Hoyland’s large paintings have been ‘skied’, and one of Craigie Aitchison’s
There are weeks when I even feel privileged to be a television critic. You’re vaguely aware that out there somewhere people are watching Celebrity Love Island (though not very many), those dreary Saturday-night dancing contests, and Your 100 Favourite Embarrassing TV Animal Moments on Channel 4. Then along comes a clutch of shows and you
Like every red-blooded male, I do like a gadget, and the latest pointless item of electrical flummery to adorn our absurdly small flat is a digital radio. What a wonderful machine it is. The excellence of the sound quality, the ease of use, and the fact that Radio Two is no longer blotted out by
C. R. Cockerell RA (1788–1863) The Professor’s Dream is the title of a small exhibition (until 25 September) in the Tennant Room at the Royal Academy, a relatively new space that links with the John Madejski Fine Rooms, formerly the piano nobile of old Burlington House. Who was this professor, and what was his dream?
The proposal that the English have a long tradition of violence is the opening of Adam Nicolson’s book and he supports his belief by invoking the Book of Revelations, Virgil, Homer, Joanna Southcott, the Methodists, Jane Austen and William Blake to bring this together at Trafalgar. That occasion cannot, of course, be without Nelson, and
‘I used to be an atheist,’ says ten-year-old Oskar Schell, ‘which means I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be observed… It’s not that I believe in things that can’t be observed now, because I don’t. It’s that I believe things are extremely complicated.’ On 11 September 2001, Oskar is sent home from school when
‘Canada,’ wrote the Toronto journalist Michael Valpy, ‘is the only country in the world where you can buy a book on federal-provincial relations at an airport.’ Things are looking up. Travellers eager to broaden their horizons can now curl up with this extended disquisition on globalisation by the consort of Canada’s outgoing Governor-General. His Excellency
When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come
Well, it wasn’t quite the theatrical event of the year I was expecting. Theatre of Blood is an adaptation of the 1973 cult film in which a disgruntled actor murders a group of drama critics and I was hoping that members of the current crop, like the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, would be instantly recognisable.
Glyndebourne began in what is now the traditional manner: high winds and driving rain. This year there was the further discouragement of being kept out of the theatre until 15 minutes after the performance should have begun, which seemed wantonly unprofessional. Then the overture to Rossini’s La Cenerentola began, and we were in whatever kind
To be honest, I haven’t been watching an awful lot of TV lately. It gets in the way of bedtime reading and an early night. You think you’re safe watching a programme at 9 p.m., which is when all the best ones are on, but that means you can’t start your pre-bed countdown (lights; cat;