The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him they should do a cover story on Meghan Markle, the star of Suits. Carter had never heard of Markle, but then nor had most people. In her own eyes she was a huge Hollywood celebrity,
The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly
Recent years have not been kind to the campaign for universal justice. The notion that some crimes are so serious that perpetrators should be hunted down and prosecuted irrespective of where the atrocities were actually committed has taken something of a beating since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened for business in the Hague in
Brawling, boozing and womanising, those vaunted hell-raisers of the 1960s – Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and, of course, Richard Harris – were all frightful bores. Because their professional lives involved dressing up and wearing mascara and silly wigs, it was essential for them to show what he-men they were: how hard. Like Stanley
In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts
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What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy
Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may have been, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say, the Princess Diana of her day. But then disaster strikes: she turns 40. I know, but in 1877 that is old. That
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing special – certainly not spectacular. Your neighbour is struggling to stay awake. The reception, however, is tumultuous. The audience is on its feet, squealing, whistling and whooping as though someone has just found the cure
Grade: B+ By the time the 1970s had come along – post Altamont and post hope – the Beach Boys were tired of being beach boys and thus became, for a while, just another rather mediocre rawk band. The two albums they released in the first three years of the decade, Carl and the Passions
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop. It’s
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s work. I’ve mulled over this in print elsewhere several times, and I feel conscious that if Bourne reads reviews – perhaps he doesn’t – he might be groaning into his Corn Flakes. But his reputation
The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram account to the Sun. Rebekah denied the charge and sued Coleen. The case reached the High Court last summer and has now arrived in the West End in a verbatim script by Liv Hennessy. The
It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’ in 1937. ‘I can’t remember a worse December, just watch those icicles form,’ he wrote, a sentiment many of us can surely relate to right now – but wait! ‘What
Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Cahn suggested going to
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog dancer and music-hall performer, not much taller than Ronnie Corbett. He was preceded by others, notably James Rogers, who in 1861, in Aladdin,played a character called Widow Twankey, named after a cheap and revolting tea.
Tourists who queue for hours outside the Uffizi to see Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and ‘Birth of Venus’ are sometimes surprised to find his world-famous paintings upstaged by the work of a non-Italian they’ve never heard of. At three metres tall and five metres wide, Hugo van der Goes’s ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ – known as the
The late Sir Roger Scruton often pronounced in a harsh manner on modern architecture and modern music, perceiving in various work an assault on bourgeois culture and a break with tradition. Back in the 1950s, music critic and CIA agent Henry Pleasants (a station chief in Bonn) delivered if anything a more scathing view of
In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory
Fiasco is a podcast series on Audible that dives deeply into episodes in recent American history. It takes listeners through the smaller moments. Often those that, within the larger epoch-defining events, have been lost to history. In the first season, for example, which centred on the Bush v. Gore election, the opening episode is devoted
Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime
‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of the corner of his mouth. The two men, busy bundling sticks in a wood, look around apprehensively while a third man up a ladder attacks a tree with a billhook. The three of them are
Grade: B+ We are all very touched, up here, that the esoteric French artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar, in honour of our once vibrant beachside steel town. Perhaps she was impressed by the newish ‘vertical pier’, or enjoyed a nutritious meal in the Light of Asia.
Like so many of history’s great catastrophes, the story begins with an eccentric Victorian Englishman. Francis Galton was a maker of maps and compiler of tables; ‘Whenever you can, count,’ was his mantra. Galton was the first man to plot a weather map and the grandfather of forensic fingerprinting. His quixotic mania for quantification would
These days, everyone who was knocking around a few decades ago predicted the internet. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the internet in 1962. Orson Scott Card predicted the internet in 1986. Even David Bowie is supposed to have seen it coming. But I think Don DeLillo really did prophesise our 21st-century technological reality in his 1985
Crude eccentricities damage the potential brilliance of Othello at the National. Some of the visual gestures seem to have been approved by crazies from the neo-fascist fringe. The Moor is first seen doing a work-out with a punch bag but he doesn’t strike the bag, he grabs a broom handle and uses it to perform
Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous than the undigested, neo-Malthusian eco-propaganda that it serves up in its collaborations with Sir David Attenborough? More dangerous than its notorious movie Cuties, whose portrayal of hypersexualised children prompted a worldwide ‘Cancel Netflix’ campaign? The
As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the
In 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of
