The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Every musical career has its own narrative, and most of them include at least one comeback. To come back, you first have to go away; then you have to stay away; and finally, when everyone has forgotten your name, you wander nonchalantly back under the arc-lights and wave modestly to screaming fans and waiting reporters.
Although you’ll have heard that Dallas Buyers Club is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career, I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it directly from me so here you are: it is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career. In fact, it may be the best
Every time there’s a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni I have to ask the same question: why is this opera, which 50 years ago was considered an unqualified masterpiece and an invariable success in the theatre, now always a wretched failure when it is staged? I would hesitate to say that the new production
Why, oh why, the producers ask, are the national press so reluctant to cover the London fringe? The snag is that a national paper has to justify a report about a play produced in a Deptford yoga studio, or in a Wandsworth priest hole, to readers living in Liskeard, Inverness, Great Yarmouth and Carlisle. Rather
Last year saw the centenary of the London Group, a broad-based exhibiting body set up in a time of stylistic ferment in the art world as an independent alternative to the closed shops of the academies. Formed from the amalgamation of the Allied Artists’ Association and the Camden Town Group, it boasted such notable founder
Celebrity deaths have no decorum. From Elvis on his toilet to Whitney face down in her bathtub, their last moments sit alongside their songs, or films, or their drunken stumbles out of nightclubs. Kurt Cobain, my teenage idol, had been dead from a shotgun blast to the mouth for — what? Days? Hours, even? —
Whatever savants say, the world is flat, not round; the ships that crowd the bay are for its limit bound. Their cargoes likewise, all consigned to one address, at the world’s waterfall plunge into nothingness. The brightwork, the white sails unfurled against the sky, the million knots and nails for such a voyage, why?
The Oscar-award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead, aged just 46, in his New York apartment this evening. According to reports, he appears to have died from a drug overdose. Hoffman was known to have battled substance abuse for several years. Hoffman was popular with The Spectator’s critics. Last April Clarissa Tan wrote that Hoffman
I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter to this week’s edition of the magazine, from a person called Chris Doyle. He is a member of the ‘Council for Arab-British Understanding’ and has taken exception to last week’s cover cartoon. He objects that the drawing of ‘two bearded, large hooked nose, weapon-wielding men’ was a
The Works on Paper annual fair runs from 6 to 9 February at the Science Museum. Its name is a bit of a giveaway: all art must be on paper. There is a huge range of work on display: early, modern and contemporary watercolours, prints, posters and photographs — from the late-15th century to the
When my colleague Charles Moore first began accusing Radio 3 of becoming ‘babyish’, and talking down to us as if we’re too ignorant to understand anything complicated, I had to agree. The constant twittering between items, the gimmicky brainteasers and Classical Top Ten are irritating. Those emails and texts from clever-clogs listeners determined to show
Why are we so fascinated by the first world war? As its 100th anniversary approaches, we’re already mired in arguments about whether for Britain it was a ‘just war’ or a ‘pointless sacrifice’ of millions of lives. I don’t see why it has to be one or the other. Surely this huge and horrific event
It is often said of John Craxton (1922–2009) that he knew how to live well and considered this more important than art. Perhaps there is a certain truth in this, but if he really believed it, did he have any business in being an artist? And an artist he undoubtedly was, by temperament and sensibility,
Directors appear to have two design options when approaching a Shakespeare tragedy. Woodstock or jackboot. Woodstock means papal robes, shoulder-length hair and silver Excaliburs gleaming from jewelled belts. Jackboot means pistols, berets, holsters and submachine-guns. Sam Mendes sticks the jackboot into King Lear in an attempt to find ‘a modern understanding of the story’, as
Alex Gibney’s The Armstrong Lies is fascinating as far as it goes but it may not go as far as you would like, and may not ask the questions you would like. It’s a documentary portrait of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong: seven-time winner of the Tour de France, worldwide symbol of physical courage (having
Anyone who frequents the internet will have come across YouTube and soon learned that what may have been planned as a quick information-seeking visit turns into several happy hours, as tempting suggestions are made as to what you might also be interested in seeing; another thing leads to yet another; and that is the afternoon
Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music written from the beginnings of symphonic composition to the present day, and audiences took it for granted that, if they knew what they were doing with Mozart and Beethoven, they could be trusted with Handel
With all the enormous fuss over Sherlock on the telly, David Suchet’s recent retirement from Poirot should not be forgotten. What an incredible innings! The actor finally hung up his patent-leather shoes after a quarter-century of playing the sleuth in 70 stories. The case is not closed for fans, however. Agatha Christie’s Belgian brainbox —
My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel
‘The Wood Thrush can sing a duet by itself, using Two separate voices,’ as opposed To the whip-bird, one cry, two creatures And nothing between them no, not even if you listen On Point Sublime we are one, we are one
‘Pshaw!’ That was my first reaction to news of the BBC’s new ten-part Sunday night adaptation of The Three Musketeers. After all, wasn’t it about a fortnight ago I was in the Gaumont in Redditch watching the classic 1973 movie version that had just come out with Michael York (and Oliver Reed and Roy Kinnear…)?
You might think the main storyline in The Archers is all about Helen’s affair with dastardly Rob. (What does she see in him? It’s so obvious he’s a mean-spirited control freak.) Or the new ‘voice’ for Tony, as David Troughton takes over from Colin Skipp, who has played the part for more than 40 years.
Here’s a heartwarming tale from the London fringe. A company named Above the Stag was merrily plying its trade at a small pub attic in Victoria. Then in March 2012 a bulldozer squashed the pub flat. In its place rose a glittering steel tower full of geeks, screens, beeps and loot. Undeterred by demolition trucks
Fellini’s credo ‘the visionary is the only true realist’ could also be applied to the life of Claudio Abbado, who died earlier this week in Bologna at the age of 80. It would be wrong to think of Abbado as a dreamer, for conducting at the angelic heights to which he ascended is a matter
If you and your family are bored — if, for example, it’s one of those dull Sunday afternoons that seem to drag on for ever and it feels as if it’s never going to be time for The Antiques Road Show — you could gather together and play your own version of the family drama
The death of painting has been so often foretold — almost as frequently as its renaissance — that any such prediction today is nothing short of foolhardy. Of course, painting is alive and well and living in London, but you wouldn’t know that from the current exhibition of five artists at Tate Millbank. (By the
Yet more performances of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s setting of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ramped-up, neurosis-riddled 1903 reworking of Sophocles, are unlikely to force any anniversary-year reassessments of the composer. But the piece’s current ubiquity does reflect the fact that we’re now relatively well off for singers equipped to tackle the fearsome title role. At their head,
There is, we all know, only one anniversary that matters this year: 20 March 2014, 50 years since The Twilight Zone episode ‘The Masks’ was first beamed into America’s cathode-ray tubes. Bunting will be stretched from television screen to television screen in celebration. Champagne will be spilt over remote controls. After all, ‘The Masks’ isn’t
We think we’re immune to whatever the art world can throw at us. A urinal here, an unmade bed there, a dead shark to the head. But occasionally we forget our indifference, and become very worked up. Hurrah! Proof we aren’t all suffering from a prolonged bout of cultural nonchalance. Dasha Zhukova – Roman Abramovich’s