The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Did you know that the 8th-century Kingdom of Northumbria was the epicentre of an international exotic reptile trade? I only discovered this myself from watching episode six of Vikings (History Channel, Tuesday) and being introduced to the snake-pit maintained by King Aelle. What particularly impressed me were not just the variety of pythons and boas
First, a confession. Even an ardent radio addict can enjoy a fortnight away from the airwaves, disconnected, switched off, unlistening. On return even the programmes that are usually ignored because they’ve become so familiar catch your attention. I grew up with Gardeners’ Question Time as a regular weekly slot on Sunday afternoons, snooze time for
Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress has been a rich resource for artists. Film-makers recognise his modern moral subjects as an ancestor to the storyboard. But in this age of mass media can the format still hold its own and tell us something about ourselves? A new exhibition at the Foundling Museum (until 7 September) suggests so.
Nice one, Roy. Across the West End secret toasts are being drunk to the England supremo for his exquisitely crafted belly flop in Brazil. A decent run by our boys in the World Cup has the potential to put a nasty dent in the box-office takings. As a welcome home present the lads deserve free
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without hands down a tree-lined road, weaving in and out of shadow. What I count as treasure is a robin’s nest neatly cached in a corner of my windowbox, a tight squirm of five hatchlings, mum
Nick Penny announced that he is stepping down as head of the National Gallery. Next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne also announced that he is leaving. Could he be after the job at the NG? Nick Penny’s predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, came from the NPG but his lack of knowledge about the NG collection is
Country Life’s ‘Gentleman of the Year’ awards were announced last week, and contrary to the bookies’ expectations, David Beckham has finished in second place. The winner, their panel decided, was another David. David Dimbleby, in fact, for being: ‘an anchor in every sense of the world’ and ‘holding the nation steady when the water gets
‘Oompa Loompa juice,’ says the actor Alex Jennings when I ask if he takes any supplements to preserve his looks. He’s 57 but could pass for a decade younger. We meet backstage in his Drury Lane suite, which boasts a fridge crammed with pink champagne, where he’s preparing to play the lead role in Charlie
Tragically, Ian Welsh (1944–2014) did not live to see this exhibition of his latest work. Diagnosed with terminal cancer on the eve of his 70th birthday, he struggled to finish the two large paintings in his last series of works, entitled ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. He found it increasingly difficult to stand to paint, but he worked,
When she thinks (if she does) of the first James it is of a six-year-old who died when she was fourteen, of meningitis. His spirit, like a trespassing sprite, flew into his parents’ marriage bed and lurked there as they comforted each other. A month later, conspiring with the genie of ovulation and the hormone
The Fault in Our Stars, which is based on the bestselling young-adult novel by John Green, is about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love and it’s a sort of Love Story for younger people, God help them, although unlike Love Story it’s not set to mislead an entire generation. (In my experience, love
BBC4’s The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (Tuesday) began with the overstated-sounding claim that it would be tackling ‘perhaps the most remarkable period in the history of animal science’. In fact, though, the longer the programme went on, the more convincing this claim felt — even if the word ‘period’ should possibly have been replaced
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Mannenberg, the seminal album by the Cape Townian jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand). Recorded against a backdrop of forced removals as the apartheid government evicted Coloured families from District Six, the title track was inspired by and named after the township
Fans of Chekhov have to endure both feast and famine. Feast because his works are revived everywhere. Famine because he concentrated all his riches in just four great plays that grow stale with repetition. For fresh nourishment we turn to Brian Friel, whose stage adaptations of the short stories go some way to appease our
Can you tell how intelligent a musician is by listening to him play? Last year I discovered a recording of Schumann’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, a sprawling and spidery work that can fall apart even under the nimblest fingers. Not this time. Francesco Piemontesi, a young Swiss–Italian pianist, totally nails it. Believe
To suggest that the ageing Jules Massenet identified himself with the title character of his Don Quichotte is nothing new — and late works such as this by definition encourage biographical interpretations. One of the main liberties of the opera, premièred in 1910 and very loosely based (via a contemporary verse play) on Cervantes, was
If I begged you to, would you hitchhike to the ice-sculpture factory, where the drunken cow was just presented, and the sleeping horse was celebrated? Ah, those caught animals, where else would they be paraded? I visualise you sitting on a black camel, wearing a red fedora, and a maroon, velvet dress. It would be
Tony Hall made some terrible music announcements yesterday. They come hot on the heels of some terrible arts announcements he made a few months ago. Among the most lousy is the proposal to set up a music awards ceremony – because we don’t have enough of those. The suggestion is that the ceremony would become
If art is the new religion, we were always going to end up here. With high priests, acolytes and ‘energy’. That’s the set up at the Serpentine Gallery at the moment: us as the potential believers queuing around the block ready to be received, and Marina Abramović as the high priestess armed with nothing (literally
An eccentric English aristocrat who constructed a 20-mile network of underground corridors to avoid coming into contact with his fellow humans on his country estate; a Japanese dentist who has amassed an enormous collection of decorative details from buildings spanning a century, retrieved from Tokyo demolition sites; the German inventor of ‘Scalology’, who has spent
One of the great traditions of the RA’s Summer Exhibition has always been that each work submitted was seen in person by the Hanging Committee, passed in front of their keen or bemused gaze by a succession of porters. Of course this method had its drawbacks: judges could miss something in a state of postprandial
I find it easy to forget that Piet Mondrian is a Dutch artist. The linear, gridlocked works he is famed for seem to beat with the energy of the New York metropolis. But it was not always so. His path to abstraction was a precarious one that bumped into a number of styles drifting round
God, opera singers are touchy. You dare to analyse how they look, you dare to criticise the enormous subsidies they get, you have the temerity to call someone an opera singer who hasn’t been vetted by an opera commissar and they go all Al-Qaeda on you. Yesterday the Today programme had an interview with Russell
While in the mirror I’m an aging face More or less the same day after day, In the mind’s darker space There are these handles to enticing doors Of occasional abrupt transition, Doors of entry, doors Of intercommunications Obeying the same laws. So many rooms! Such impatience! Backwards and forwards I make my way With
Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers, or at least performers, able to persuade and cajole both us in the audience and the other characters on stage through their eloquence. Berlioz, in his first opera, presents the renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, in
It’s hilarious. It’s also annoying that it’s so hilarious. Jonathan Munby’s earthy and glamorous production of Antony and Cleopatra goes almost too far to please the Globe’s fidgety, giggly crowds. The Egyptian queen is often treated as a female Lear, a trophy role, a lap of honour for a transatlantic facelift as she enters her
It’s a long time, a very, very long time, since I bought a Coldplay album. Has any band of the past 20 years been so consistently irritating? Oasis were aggressively annoying, which isn’t the same thing. I quite liked the first Coldplay album, particularly ‘Trouble’, and A Rush of Blood to the Head was a
You know what the world needs most right now? What it needs is five good-looking-ish, talented-ish blokes dressed in a mélange of artfully deconstructed dove-grey suits singing one of the songs out of Les Misérables, like a boy band but one that does numbers from musicals rather than original compositions, oh, and preferably with the
The Royal Court Theatre, the Young Vic Theatre and the London Library (above) are buildings of varied character and rich history. What they have in common is that each has been unpicked and reassembled by the architects Haworth Tompkins, recently announced as winners of the RIBA London Architect of the Year. This firm, founded in