The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of
Opinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a non-academic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the
One of the more amusing characteristics of the English upper classes is their habit of going around disclaiming their upper-classness. Just as Anthony Powell, a lieutenant-colonel’s son educated at Eton and Balliol and married to an earl’s daughter, used quite seriously to maintain that he was ‘a poor boy made good’, so Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an
In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection. For the purposes of this quintessentially Great
Peter Hall and Richard Eyre both published diaries about their time running the National Theatre, edited in Hall’s case by his head of PR, John Goodwin. Alan Bennett’s diaries are a bestseller. So are Joe Orton’s, with their devotion over a mere eight months to extra-curricular, often subterranean activity. The ‘celebrity diary’ as a literary
The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of
Even as the Christmas season draws in upon us, the academy’s best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was
There has never been a film of The Merchant of Venice before. This is not surprising. Different Shakespeare plays give trouble to different ages: we are not at ease with Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant because we do not share his views on, respectively, chastity, feminism and anti-Semitism. Also,
Penguin Classics uses details from the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich to illustrate the covers of some of its Nietzsche volumes (for instance, ‘Riesengebirge’, on display here, features on the cover of its Nietzsche Reader). Walking around this exhibition, one gets the same heady, slightly giddy feeling one gets from reading a lot of the
In the official account of British 20th-century art, the big names belong to the international players whose universal vision won them a place in the annals of world art. This is understandable. What is harder to explain is the official version’s almost total neglect of those native artists who kept alive, through this century of
The very fact that this exhibition’s subtitle has to explain who Nicholson is stands as a blatant admission of his supposed obscurity. The Academy is surely faint-hearted here — does it underestimate the intelligence of its audience? How many visitors might, without benefit of subtitle, have naturally assumed that Nicholson was an Iranian swordsmith? I
Two programmes this week made the case that popular music has taken over the tradition of the great classical composers. In Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats (Channel 4, Saturday) the composer told us that modern ‘serious’ composers had abandoned the Western musical traditions of melody and harmony. By going on their journey to nowhere, they
I wonder how many people are in my position, wanting the BBC to be seen to represent their own special interest, quick to belabour the authorities with their righteous indignation when they feel left out. It is too easy to expect a service which is publicly owned and paid for in effect by us all
It must have been some time in 1967: I was fresh (well, freshish) out of Oxford and had, rather to my amazement, been invited by Sir No
The province of Extremadura is as different from the brochure-bright picture of tourist Spain as it is possible to be. Stretched along the Portuguese frontier, it has a sombre, restrained dignity, with mile upon mile of grassland like vast lawns studded with evergreen holm oak and cork trees, each handsome, solemn, monochrome in its private
Robert Service has set himself a formidable task. He has to explain how the son of a wife- beating, dirt-poor Georgian cobbler, brutalised by drink, became a Russian despot as ruthless as Ivan the Terrible. A master of his sources, which include the partially opened Soviet official archives, Service triumphs in portraying Stalin’s personality in
The Wolof call it a goui, the Tswana a moana, the French the calabash tree and all Australia the boab. Welcome to the strange world of the baobab tree, the subject of Thomas Pakenham’s excellent new book. The tree was discovered for Europe in 1749 by a 21-year-old Frenchman, Michel Adanson, after whom it has,
This beguiling little book, nostalgically illustrated with faded family snapshots, describes the long and arduous life of a tortoise who died earlier this year at Powderham Castle near Exeter, aged 160. According to the blurb, Timothy survived six monarchs, two world wars and many generations of the family who looked after him. The story that
Jeremy Bernstein is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, well qualified to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer that is both authoritative and extremely readable. In the first place, he is himself an eminent physicist, a professor for nearly 40 years and the author of some 50 technical papers. In the second place, he is an exceptionally gifted
Millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group’s origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad
Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to
Miles Fitzalan-Howard was one of eight children of a fairly distant cousin of the previous two Dukes of Norfolk, and so grew up in the give and take of life in a large family. Up until the age of about 30, he had no great expectation that he would succeed his predecessor, who was married,
A question posed early on in Mark Cousins’s book is bound to spur a reviewer’s pride: ‘Who are Griffith, Dovzhenko, Keaton, Ozu, Riefenstahl, Ford, Toland, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Ouedraogo, Cissé, Dulac, Chahine, Imamura, Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Almod
During the mid-17th century the idea gained ground in various parts of Europe that the world was about to come to an end. Bewildered by the effects of widespread war and revolution, bad harvests and a miniature Ice Age taking the form of savage winters, people made ready for the sounding of the Last Trumpet,
It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a
This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to
The major challenge faced by biographers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which
This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories
The late Paul Getty has left gardeners a surprising legacy. Gardens of the Roman World by Patrick Bowe was published in America last year by Getty publications and the copyright belongs to the J. Paul Getty Trust. Did our run-of-the-mill publishers miss a trick here? I imagine the proposal for a book about Roman gardens