The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston is the most recognisable face of the Falklands war. He was terribly burnt when the Guards were bombed while waiting on the RFA Sir Galahad on 8 June 1982. He later became a national figure, talking openly about the difficulties of recovery, and working for burns victims and injured veterans.
The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with
Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations
The chapter headings alone are enough to induce a panic attack: ‘Disrepair – how modern diets harm brain health in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’; ‘How ultra-processed food hacks our brains’; ‘How solving the last crisis in the food system caused the current one’. It’s not a new thing for books examining our food system
War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year. But I doubt many other critics are going to rave about it or even notice it, for some of the very same reasons that I
It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he
I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working my way through Golders Green Library. I guess she came shortly after Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. I only later became aware of her virulent anti-Semitism, and on this count she was not half-hearted
Ask a member of Generation Z where in the world they would most like to live, and chances are they will say South Korea. K-pop and kimchi have made it indisputably fashionable, and if the Instagram account of one of my Korean friends is anything to go by, life there is really quite idyllic, provided
I was tired when I went to see Milk at the Wellcome Collection, having been up for much of the night feeding my baby. In European and Christian imagery, one sign said, ‘a lactating woman often represents fertility, charity and abundance’, but I was not feeling full of the milk of human kindness. Nor was
I’m not a natural lender. I’m a reasonably soft touch when it comes to money, but regarding the important things in life – books, music, pens – I loan with a gently thrumming underscore of anxiety. While I’ve weaned myself off my mother’s habit of writing her name in every book she buys, I still
A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is set in a New York apartment shared by four mega-successful yuppies: an architect, a fine artist, a film star and a Wall Street attorney, Jude, played by James Norton. A friendly doctor tags along occasionally and an older lawyer, in his sixties, joins the gang after
Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not counting excursions to Wembley Arena. The current revival has been running (by all accounts, to capacity houses) since 10 March. The compelling reason for reviewing such a well-worn revival mid-run is that this performance featured
When Sir Christopher Wren’s servant went to rouse his master from an afternoon nap on 25 February 1723, and found that the old man would never wake again, the reputation of the nation’s greatest architect was already on the wane. He had walked away from St Paul’s in a fit of pique, with the cathedral
Rachel Ingalls might just be the best writer of the late 20th century you’ve never heard of. Born in Boston in 1940 (her father was a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard), Ingalls dropped out of school and studied in Germany before winning a place at Radcliffe College. Shakespeare’s quadricentennial drew her to London and in
Louise Erdrich intrigues with her very first sentence: ‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me.’ She explores this integration in her astonishing account of her trips to the lakes and islands of Minnesota and Ontario, where ancient painted signs on rocks inspire her to perceive
Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the
One of the great unsung heroes of modern times is Lt Colonel Harald Jäger, an East German border guard who was the commanding officer at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in central Berlin on that wondrous night of 9 November 1989. There are heart-rending stories of those who were shot ‘wall jumping’, the near-impossible method of
‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone. Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the
British nature is having a moment, thanks to David Attenborough’s Wild Isles (BBC One). As ever, spring brings a crop of new nature writing, but you are unlikely to come across anything like Once Upon a Raven’s Nest. This is the story of the life of an Exmoor man – Hedley Ralph Collard, known as
This is the second excellent book by Benjamin Balint to consider the cross-cultural perils of being a great writer after you’re dead. His first, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, described legal battles over the residence of Kafka’s literary estate. This new one shifts the focus to a very different (and equally
Thanks to the work of the caricaturists of the late 18th century, the mistresses of the future George IV – Mrs Fitzherbert, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and Lady Jersey among them – are better known to us than his eventual wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Prince of Wales’s decadent, spendthrift lifestyle (we see him emerging in
Romance, and romantic comedy, make up a third of all novels sold – by far the highest-earning genre of fiction. They outdo crime novels 2:1. They are very rarely reviewed, and are generally excluded from year-end round ups, awards, gongs and TV book shows. They do not have their own festivals or celebrations; romance writers
One rather surprising fact emerges from a history of humanism: most humanists were nice people. This might, on the surface, appear a totally fatuous observation. There is not much value in debating whether, say, architects, chancellors of the exchequer, engineers, surgeons or gardeners have been obviously nice people, and we would roll our eyes if
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting
Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks
Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The show begins with the former Italian prime minister preening triumphantly on a white marble set that resembles the Capitol in Rome where Caesar was murdered by rivals who’d grown sick of his power lust. Berlusconi
Godland is a film to see on the big screen: not just for its awesome, immersive cinematography, but because it is so remorselessly bleak that if you’re watching it at home you are likely to give up. To get the most out of it you need to be trapped. Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), an upright,
Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters
Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed, like their owners, in Christmas jumpers. It seemed bizarre at the time but wouldn’t surprise me now. During lockdown the local dog population exploded and the smaller breeds now wear jumpers all winter. There are