The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Andrew Lambirth delights in the National Gallery’s exhibition of a Golden Age I’ve been reading Still Life with a Bridle by the poet Zbigniew Herbert in preparation for Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Franz Hals at the National Gallery. It’s a fascinating collection of essays which examines and pays tribute to the Golden
Peter Suderman and Isaac Chotiner each highlight an interview with Matt Damon (who is promoting the latest Jason Bourne thrilla, The Bourne Ultimatum). I like Damon. He’s an increasingly interesting actor and his excellent performance in The Good Shepherd last year was every bit as under-rated as the movie itself. Nevertheless, he’s also an ass.
It’s official. A nation mourns. Mr Eugenides strikes a mournful, plangent note: Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy T-bone,Silence the tambourines and with muffled drumsBring out the burger buns, let the ketchup come. Let cattle trucks circle moaning round the barnScribbling in the dirt the message,
If like me you’re a complete sucker for all things Banksy, do check out the graffiti artist’s new website. Hat tip: Andrew
These are difficult times for the BBC. The fine for the Blue Peter phone-in fraud was, in its way, as big a shock as the famous vandalising of its garden. The silly Crowngate affair in which what they claimed was the Queen staging an angry walk-out turned out to be her staging an angry walk-in.
Back in the US in the Fifties, just as atomic fear was gripping the American nation and the McCarthyite witch hunts were at their most vicious, a rather extraordinary radio programme was created by the journalist Edward R. Murrow and his production team at CBS radio. This I Believe presented ‘The living philosophies of thoughtful
Glass Eels / Love’s Labour’s Lost / Saint Joan Squelchy trotters up in Hampstead. Nell Leyshon’s new play is set on a Somerset flood plain where a family of bumpkin farmers are coping with a suicide. Before the action commences Mum has done a Virginia Woolf in the nearby river and her premature submersion furnishes
This film is fun. It is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. It might be the most fun you can have with your clothes on or, if you have been married a good while, then with them off. John Travolta as Mrs Edna Turnblad is fun. Christopher Walken as Mr Wilbur Turnblad is riotous fun. Newcomer
Bach’s St Matthew Passion doesn’t seem an obvious ‘Glyndebourne opera’, except from the point of view of the non-Londoner having to use public transport to get there, who might well regard the whole outing as a penitential pilgrimage. At the third performance the atmosphere did seem unusually hushed. What we were offered was an almost
The summer ballet season in London, with the traditional arrival of illustrious foreign guests, has a well-established historical tradition. It was during the summer months that, in the 19th century, famous and not-so-famous foreign ballet stars appeared on the stages of theatres such as the Her Majesty’s, the Alhambra and the Empire. Later on, renowned
Hockney on Turner Watercolours at Tate BritainAnnely Juda — A Celebration at Annely Juda Fine Art If you enter Tate Britain via the side entrance on Atterbury Street, you will find five large new landscape paintings by David Hockney hanging above the stairs to the main galleries, to celebrate his 70th birthday. Each painting is
The word ‘virtuoso’ is often bandied about. Stephen Pettitt explains what it means to him Serious music critics — and I do not except myself from the breed — have many tendencies that mark them out from the rest of society. One of them is the habit of bandying around the word ‘virtuoso’. We know
“Can you believe it?” Every time Barbra Streisand remembered how long it was since she had first sung a song, visited a town, tried a local delicacy – “1961!” – 23,000 adoring fans agreed that, no, it was quite unbelievable. Most of the audience at the 02 arena last night could not quite believe they
Great news, guys. Thanks to Live Earth (BBC1 and BBC2, most of last Saturday), recycling is up by almost 6,000 per cent, the icecaps are regenerating, Kilimanjaro has got its snow back and polar bear experts are reporting that the latest batch of cubs are whiter, cuter and fluffier than at any time since records
If this column has any overarching theme, it’s that critics know nothing and shouldn’t be trusted. (Which obviously applies to me as much as to anyone.) But this intransigent suspicion of mine does create difficulties. In the never-ending search for the next fantastic record I didn’t know existed, I will look anywhere and consult anyone
Theatre people know why America invaded Iraq. To secure the West’s supply of angry plays. Here’s the latest, Baghdad Wedding, which opens with a US pilot mistaking a nuptial party for a column of enemy tanks and — whoopsidaisy — opening fire. Bride and groom are wiped out. Their relatives go into mourning. Then the
I’m not quite sure which of the political weeklies has been the inspiration for His Master’s Voice, the new comedy series on Radio Four (Wednesdays) set in the offices of a true blue magazine, but I can assure you that life at The Blue Touch bears little resemblance to The Spectator. No one at Blue
Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you
My first visit to the made-over Royal Festival Hall was to see a semi-staged production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It wasn’t an artistic success, as could be judged from the extravagantly genial response of the audience, roaring with laughter that had no trace of nervousness, and applauding one number after another. Sweeney is a failure
Masquerade: the work of James Ensor (1860–1949) It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for a James Ensor exhibition than the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, the squeaky-clean temple to Edwardian taste in art founded by Viscount Leverhulme on the profits of soap. Among the fragrant creations of Millais, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones,
‘Heath Robinson’s Helpful Solutions’ and ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract’ I went with high hopes to the Cartoon Museum. Actually, I think the appellation ‘museum’ rather grand for a couple of rooms off a back street in Bloomsbury, particularly when the real thing — the British Museum — is just round the corner. Still, I can applaud
Peter Phillips on Nicholas Kenyon’s Proms swansong and a lost masterpiece Nicholas Kenyon’s swansong at the Proms this summer is surely the most elaborately complicated, one might say contrapuntally conceived, series of concerts ever staged. Just reading the blurb makes one’s head spin — so many themes, so many anniversaries, so many reasons for paying
If you can’t be bothered ploughing through the Campbell memoirs, BBC2 has done a superb job filleting it. I’ve just had a preview of the three-part documentary starting on Wednesday – complete with his bleeped-out expletives and thoughts on everything from homicide to suicide. Fittingly, it’s from the same production company that did Grumpy Old
Read Matthew d’Ancona’s Live Earth reports: Live from Live Earth, Rocking for the Planet, Gore’s message is confusing, can Geri be clearer?, Let’s save this funny old world, Nan-archy in the UK, The Excellence of Tree Stock, Turning it up to 11 and Nobody does it better.
During Terence Stamp’s summing up speech at Live Earth, I very nearly lost the will to live – a self-defeating performance by the actor, given that the whole point of the concert was to rev up our collective instinct for survival. Five minutes in to Terry’s oration, we were longing for a nearby glacier to
There are few sights in Western civilisation to compare with Spinal Tap performing ‘Stonehenge’ and it is at least arguable that the risk of impending apocalypse caused by climate change was worth it to get Nigel, the boys and the dancing dwarves back on stage. Two billion people watching around the world are surely happier
Teatime has come and gone here at Tree-Stock, and we have yawned our way through tepid sets by Corinne Bailey Rae and the insufferably wimpy Keane. Don’t send a bunch of boys to play a man’s stadium. Thank God for Metallica who are presently restoring some sinew and cojones to proceedings. Front man James Hetfield
Call it ‘nan-archy’: the anarchy of rock’n’roll grafted onto the spirit of the nanny state. The Red Hot Chili Peppers bounce and rave pleasingly in front of a huge rolling message board which instructs us to recycle our old mobiles, not to wash our towels too often, and to ‘rethink’ how we bring our shopping
Almost exactly 24 years ago, in July 1983, the IRA planned to kill Charles and Diana by bombing a Duran Duran concert at the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road. I was at that gig, aged 15, and here I am again, aged 39, watching the same band and trying to work out whether Simon Le Bon
