The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In this Olympic year, when we feel less guilty than usual about promoting and celebrating all things British, it is appropriate to be lauding our greatest writers. Shakespeare is commemorated at the British Museum, but what about Dickens? Unbelievably, in what is after all the bicentenary of his birth, the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty
Bicycles can be powerful images in cinema. Like the 1948 masterpiece Ladri di Biciclette, Wadjda, the first film ever to be filmed in Saudi Arabia, is about a child and a bike. But whereas two wheels in Vittorio De Sica’s brutally neorealist film represented the shackles of poverty, here they embody freedom. Or at least
A vital sign that radio is so much more vibrant these days than tired old TV is the way the networks are rebranding themselves, extending their range, developing their programme base. On Radio 1 on Monday night Keeping Mum took on the subject of young adult carers in a feature that could easily have been
I don’t know quite what I was thinking when I went to see this film as it is full of everything I personally hate. Low-life gangsters. Drugs. Violence. Liberal use of ‘pussy’ and the c-word, which I loathe so much I cannot say it myself. My son, when he was little, once overheard it somewhere
As I entered the O2 Academy in Oxford last Saturday, something felt strange. The air was thick, the bar was crowded and the DJ was already playing in anticipation of the headline act. It all seemed perfectly normal. Yet, something was amiss. And then my friend turned round to me; her face pale, a mildly
What begins with the borrowing of some capital ends 14 hours later with cataclysmic disaster. It is a drama thousands and thousands in the western hemisphere watch these days — from Seattle to New York, from London to Milan, and from Munich to St Petersburg. Ticket prices are high, although sponsorship money flows in luxuriant
How should you feel at the end of a Ring cycle, before — at any rate if you’re a reviewer — starting to list the pros and cons? Nothing very simple, obviously, but some kind of exaltation, of however confused or complex a kind. Famously Wagner had severe problems with the conclusion to the cycle:
High ambitions at the Donmar. Artistic supremo Josie Rourke has chosen to direct one of Racine’s more impenetrable dramas, Berenice. The play introduces us to the emperor Titus, a besotted weakling, and his lover, Queen Berenice, an ageing sexpot from Palestine. Berenice wants to become Titus’s official squeeze but the xenophobic Romans don’t care for
‘If you liked that, why not try this?’ Such tempting words, so hard to resist. I love the idea that some immeasurably complex computer algorithm, lovingly created by nerds, can sift through the teeming piles of new music out there and find something for me that I didn’t know I was going to like. One
He comes most nights — I hear his car pull up Outside and catch the glancing blur of lights Through curtains. Drinking Nescafe, we watch The Epilogue, laugh at the priest, then think Where to drive that night — we catalogue The usual suggestions and arrive At the same decision as usual. The road lies
What used to be called the National Film Theatre, now BFI Southbank, is a weird sort of place. On the outside it is unprepossessing to the point of ugliness: a concrete mass sitting beneath the southern end of Waterloo Bridge, squat against the Thames, where it sulks away from the sunlight and overhead traffic. Whereas,
Fifty years ago, the Stanley Spencer Gallery was founded in a converted Wesleyan Chapel by a group of local enthusiasts who wanted to celebrate the extraordinary achievement of Cookham’s most famous son. As Joan George recounts in her fascinating book, Stanley Spencer Remembered (Taderon Press, £6), at the gallery’s inauguration, Gilbert Spencer (Stan’s younger brother)
Who was Conrad Marca-Relli? Figureheads of the so-called New York School such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have long since become art world icons — with attention-grabbing auction prices, fat biographies and plays or films about them to match. By comparison, few people in this country are likely to have heard of Marca-Relli. Tate
Twitter superstar @SteveHiltonGuru disappeared with his real life namesake – the departed Downing Street policy wonk; but he’s back for one week only. After teasing Westminster for months, the brains behind the spoof account of the brains behind Dave, has written for this week’s Spectator about how he did it. @SteveHiltonGuru may be gone, but
Every so often a story appears in the newspapers which, while it might seem on the surface sensational and arresting, actually leaves you feeling somewhat less than astonished, all things considered. There have been at least two of these stories recently. The first, in the Daily Telegraph, alleged that Scotland Yard was investigating suspiciously large
We don’t do burlesque here. We do bawdy, Benny Hill, end-of-pier prurience instead. Montmartre may have the Moulin Rouge, but the closest we get to saucy is John Major not ‘on’ Edwina Currie — titter — but on our tradition of music hall. As a nation we can-cannot do the can-can. So I found it
‘They were Jews with guns! Understand that…’ declares Raymond Massey, chillingly, in the final scene of The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, first heard across America on Sunday, 12 December 1943. Notice that date: 1943. Not 1953, or even 1945. Just six months after the Jews who had been herded into the Polish capital by
Hunted (Thursday, BBC1) made a terrific start, but whether the first episode has set the standard for the next seven is another matter — a thriller, after all, has a duty to overwhelm, seduce and deceive with its opening gambit. This series was not conceived by fluke: anyone with half an eye on Bond, Bourne,
I’ve just come back from India. At least that’s how it feels after a double attack of subcontinental drama. Tara Arts, in Wandsworth, has relocated Molière’s The Miser to modern India and commissioned a script from the Glaswegian standup, Hardeep Singh Kohli. He brings the two cultures together with the insouciant aplomb of an experimental
There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the
The perks of being a wallflower are few and far between, in my experience, and I’m not even convinced you can be a wallflower if you are as ravishing as, say, Emma Watson, who modelled for Burberry whenever her Harry Potter schedule would allow, which isn’t the way it usually works for wallflowers, but what
It is 0422, pitch black outside and pouring with rain. The candles are being extinguished one by one as the last of the congregation leave the chapel. They look tired but determined. I notice that, for the first time in my adult life when awake at this hour, I am sober. We have just sung
October comes: the year resigns. The currents down life’s widening stream run faster now. Like unpaid fines the leaves pile up. Dark evenings seem drawn out and under-loaded: lines from poems that won’t come right: a dream of emptier nights. Encoded signs for endings rather more extreme.
There are nearly 160 bronze sculptures ranged throughout the Royal Academy’s main galleries in Bronze, a glorious exhibition (until 9 December) covering a period of 5,000 years — effectively the entire history of the medium. The progression of this durable and universal art form is laid out at a relaxed pace in an exhibition that
An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are performing at the Albert Hall: playing their tiny instruments in a very big space. There must be 5,000 people here, but the orchestra’s friendly jokes, the modesty of the ukulele sound and the familiarity of the audience make the concert seem intimate. The Ukes have been going for
I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents. Why do I not
‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive,
Holy Motors is so mad, deranged, lunatic, bonkers, cuckoo and away with the fairies that, if you were on a bus, and saw it boarding, you’d pray it didn’t sit next to you, although, knowing your luck, it probably would. That said, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so prissy and stand-offish. This film is a