The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Until last week I was the only person on the planet not to have seen The History Boys. I now rejoin the human race in a state of wonder. Such a whopping hit, such flimsy materials. The setting happens to be familiar to me, a state school in the 1980s where a group of smart
If Sean Langan isn’t the bravest, best and most likeable foreign correspondent on TV, I don’t know who is. And what a bumper week this has been for his admirers. On Monday, a Dispatches documentary (Fighting the Taleban, Channel 4) about the six-day battle he witnessed in Garmser, Helmand, when a half-platoon of British infantrymen
Some time after 10 p.m. on 28 November 1966 Truman Capote sashayed into the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York to place himself at the epicentre of New York society. All that autumn New York had speculated about the possible guest list for Capote’s Black and White ball. Capote had nurtured and
Bob Dylan on Radio Two? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. His Bobness, the hippie troubadour and Voice of Sixties America on the Light Programme, the station for Hooverers and flu-sufferers? But Radio Two has been transforming itself in the past few years, sneaking in Jamie Cullum and Suzi Quatro alongside Cliff and Terry, Ronan
Although it must be a nightmare to administer a museum in these philistine and turnstile-obsessed times, the nation’s galleries are still doing their best to provide a service of sorts to the minds and hearts of the populace. If there is a perceptible drift towards dead-cert favourites, who can blame the institutions which now have
A couple of Christmases ago I recommended in this column an exceedingly unfestive offering: Torsten Rasch’s song cycle/symphony Mein Herz brennt with its lacerating mix of heavy-metal pop and late romantic/early modern orchestral intensity, whose music wholly transcended the callow protest of its lyrics in unforgettable excoriation. This year, something at the opposite end of
Shakespeare’s ill-advised reimagining of Falstaff as a buffoon at large in Windsor has always been fair game for adaptation. The story goes that he wrote The Merry Wives in response to Queen Elizabeth’s wish to see Sir John in love. The fee may have been a good one and the Bard actually subverts the wish
You won’t yet have made your New Year resolutions but one thing you might want to add to your list is Join a Choir. It’ll be much cheaper and so much less boring than going to the gym, and yet all that hard work breathing in the right places and struggling to hit top C
One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is
Another major show at the V&A, this time devoted to the more distant past, and thus inevitably of less general interest than a survey of, say, Modernism. It’s not always easy to bring to life a period so different from ours as the courtly and sophisticated Renaissance, though the mix of civilisation and barbarity that
In the five years that I’ve been The Spectator’s drama critic, one of the nicest afternoons I’ve spent was in the company of my fellow critics. No, not at a matinée, but at a lunch for John Gross, who was retiring as the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls after 16 years. Charles Spencer made
Puccini’s Bohemians really knew how to have a good time at Christmas. Huddled in a freezing cold Parisian garret, Rodolfo is reduced to burning his own play for warmth and has just consigned the final act to the flames when Schaunard bursts in and flings on to the table a shower of coins he has
The opening scene in Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It has our heroine distressing supermarket mince pies with a rolling pin in the hope that other parents at the school carol concert will presume them home-made. I loved her for that, just as I did the Calendar Girl who wins the cake
There is a strange kind of amnesia that overtakes me in certain shops: bookshops, DVD shops, CD shops. I stare hopelessly at the rows of titles, usually becoming desperate to spend a penny within a matter of seconds, before buying something I’ve never heard of, or have read/seen/heard already, and rushing out to find a
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Living rooms up and down the country will reverberate to the sound of families rowing, and the television being turned on to provide distraction. But whereas a generation ago the nation could be united by watching the only film on offer, The Sound of Music on BBC1, today’s
Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an excellent choice for one of the music colleges to put on, containing as it does a fairly large number of characters, none of them with extremely demanding parts, though they all need to be as good actors as they are singers. The RCM’s cast that I saw,
It’s always puzzled me that so few theatre critics are involved in making (rather than interpreting, dissecting and sometimes destroying) theatre. Hats off to Time Out reviewer Robert Shore, who’s quitted the breaker’s yard for the production line. Anxious about this new departure, he admits he ‘finds criticism almost impossible to bear’, although he ‘doesn’t
This Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war has all the things you might expect from a Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war: suffering; pain; Soviet-style concrete estates with stinking stairwells; drab little apartments; dreary knitwear; hard-faced people tramping wearily though the slush and the snow; more suffering; more pain,
I have been listening a lot to David Gilmour’s album, On An Island (EMI). We must now call him David, as he is a portly gent of a certain age who will probably get a knighthood the next time a Pink Floyd fan moves into No. 10. Obviously, though, we think of him as Dave,
I wonder whether Tony (‘Education, education, education’) Blair or any of his cohorts in the Education Department were listening to the BBC World Service’s School Day 24 last week. Children from around the world were brought together in live link-ups as part of the BBC’s Generation Next week of programmes designed to give young people,
This being the Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, we asked the television companies for a few seasonal preview discs. There wasn’t much ‘ho, ho, ho!’ about any of them. Some were merely grim: Three Kings at War (Channel 4, Thursday), for example, chronicled how three cousins — George V, Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill — helped,
Mary Wakefield talks to Craigie Aitchison about Bedlingtons — and about his painting By five o’clock last Thursday evening, Craigie Aitchison and I had been talking about dogs for nearly an hour. It was grey outside but, inside, the pink walls of Craigie’s sitting room glowed in the orange light of an electric fire, and
Georg Gerster (born 1928) is a Swiss photographer who specialises in shooting from above. For more than 40 years he has been taking aerial photographs, and has flown over 111 countries. Concentrating on archaeological and heritage sites, Gerster has made what might accurately be called an ‘overview’ that has greatly enhanced our archaeological understanding. His
In November 1905, in the Galerie Ernst Arnold, four young architecture students from the Dresden Technical School had their first encounter with Vincent van Gogh. Only six months earlier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl had formed an avant-garde artists’ group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), to represent ‘all who express directly
Any article about a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle has to begin by saying that it is the supreme challenge a company can face, and how much more so when the company is based in a remote foreign city, and flies in to mount the tetralogy a few hours after it has been performing something
Periodically, Radio Three sails into stormy waters, a section of its listeners taking a dislike to some new policy intiative and crying ‘dumbed down’. Off the top of my head, I can remember the phasing out of the old talks department; the threat to the regional BBC orchestras; the greater emphasis on jazz; the general
Some playwrights mellow with age, but not David Hare. His sense of righteous indignation knows no bounds. According to press reports, the reason he decided to open his latest play on Broadway is that he still bears a grudge against Nicholas Hytner for refusing to schedule more performances of Stuff Happens at the National. Alas,
It was one of those perfect New York days that make you feel grateful to be alive. I’d eaten my favourite breakfast — pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon — then salved my conscience with a huge bowl of fresh fruit, and was now taking a post-prandial walk in Central Park. The sky was
There’s a programme I sometimes do on the right-wing guerilla media website 18 Doughty Street which I think you might enjoy. It’s called Culture Clash, presented by Peter Whittle, and it’s a bit like Newsnight Review would be if you took away the pseudery, the left-liberal cant and Ekow Eshun. Obviously, the production values are