Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Among the aliens

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I’ve long been intrigued by the language of EU-fanatics, particularly when they ascribe motives to those opposed to the EU constitution and the euro. There’ve been some fine examples on the radio recently. On Today on Monday morning, for example, Roger Liddle, a former Tony Blair adviser now working for Peter Mandelson in Brussels, suggested

James Delingpole

Battle of the sexes

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The programme I’m enjoying most at the moment is The Apprentice (BBC2, Wednesday), in which teams of men and women, all of whom have supposedly resigned from their high-powered jobs for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, take part in various business-related competitions and are whittled down week by week until there is only one survivor. His prize

Russian revelation

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The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s meretricious opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, so my palate was clear for the second evening, a double bill

Irish horror

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In Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Giselle for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre there are no pretty peasants on pointes and no picturesque rustic cottages. What you get instead is a small Irish rural community thriving on poisonous gossip, petty jealousy and highly repressed sexual urges. The heroine, too, is not the quintessential embodiment of any Romantic female ideal.

Dual experience

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This brace of exhibitions takes up the whole of Level 4 (aside from the coffee bar and souvenir shop) of Tate Modern; I say ‘take up’ rather than fill because the Strindberg is stretched so thin it almost achieves invisibility, while the Beuys needs a lot of room to ‘breathe’. In the case of the

Toby Young

Appealingly tragic

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Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote —

James Delingpole

A construct, of course

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Can I tell you about my latest adventures? Oh, can I? Can I? OK, well I’ve been making a TV documentary for Channel 4 and, en route, I met the greatest concentration of Spectator readers I’ve ever encountered. Why am I so totally unsurprised to discover that yer typical Speccie reader spends his February in

Gathering darkness

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Michelangelo Merisi (1571–1610), called Caravaggio after his place of birth, has become something of a mythical figure in the half-century or so since his reputation was rescued from obscurity. Today he is celebrated as the great precursor of realism, the archetypal bohemian artist, and the prototype genius who behaved badly and died young. Caravaggio is

A little Anglo-Irish devil who painted like an archangel

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I seldom set foot on the South Bank if I can help it. Once across the River Thames, civilisation ceases and you are in the regions of urban swamps with motorised alligators snapping at your heels, and angry deserts of decay, peopled by Surrey Touregs looking for mugs. Just to get to the Imperial War

Respectful boredom

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The new production of Mozart’s penultimate opera La Clemenza di Tito (why is the title not translated?) by ENO generates an atmosphere of resigned, dignified and respectful boredom. That is hardly at all the fault of anyone but Metastasio and Mozart, the latter of whom was pouring almost all his genius into The Magic Flute.

Visual poetry

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It could so easily not have worked, this bold (some might say foolhardy) juxtaposition of three such dissimilar artists. Particularly if one of them was felt to be somehow of inferior power — the sick man of the trio — a position which might have been reserved (by those who judge from ignorance) for James

Dull but odd

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We tend to import American television as seen — comedies and cop shows, mainly — whereas they create their own versions of ours: The Weakest Link, The Office and, perhaps apocryphally, a Fawlty Towers which omitted the Basil character because he was too offensive. Now we make our own American hits. Take The Bafta Awards

Take the yellow brick road

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Ever since W.S. Gilbert’s Lady Jane lamented, ‘Oh, South Kensington!’ in Patience, 1881, the place has carried a regretful quality. Owing to the extraordinary lack of confidence shown by successive governments and Treasury officials in the educational values that Prince Albert hoped to promote through the estates of the 1851 Commission, the gentle, south-facing slope

Happy with unhappiness

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This is the time of year when the Royal Opera aims to keep people happy by providing standard fare, usually, it almost goes without saying, about people who are very unhappy indeed. True to form, it is alternating La Traviata and Turandot for almost a month before rising to Mozart. All the more important that

Surrealist legend

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The ravishing new exhibition of Lee Miller’s portrait photographs at the NPG is prefaced by a corridor selection of shots of Miller by others — principally by the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene (whose assistant she was on French Vogue in 1930) and her long-standing friend and lover, Life photographer David E. Scherman. Miller (1907–77) was

James Delingpole

Cash rich

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The best pop video ever made was the one Mark Romanek directed in 2003 for Johnny Cash’s swansong — ‘Hurt’. It’s also definitely the bleakest. The Man in Black was on his last legs when he made it, a doddery, rheumy-eyed 72, and here you see him very consciously bidding farewell to his adoring wife

Taking a break

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Tired. I am exhausted. For one reason and another the workload has been intense recently, and the pressures have been unyielding. After a while you wander through the days in a numbed haze, faintly aware of passing deadlines, and thinking only of pillows. The occasional hangovers hit as hard as Mike Tyson circa 1988. Look

Short and sweet

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Somehow I missed A Nitro at the Opera when it was first put on at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio in 2003. Last week it was revived for four performances. The title — the most irritating feature of the evening — means nothing to me, but it is a collective one for songs and music-theatrical

Spendthrift fever

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I’m trying to write a novel at the moment, which means, of course, that I am spending a great deal of time looking for other things to do. It’s amazing how attractive the washing-up seems in comparison with sitting in front of a computer screen, making things up and struggling to find the words to

Master orator

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Apart from a strange and silly piece on Today accusing Sir Winston Churchill of being a racist over his attitude to India — he was, after all, a product of the age of Empire — it was a good week on Radio Four for our greatest prime minister. To mark the 40th anniversary of his

Loitering with Mozart

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Evidence that we live in clichéd times is everywhere about us, but I didn’t think it would extend to The Magic Roundabout. The new film, for which several of my colleagues have recently been recording the title music, is being trailed as follows: ‘The Magic Roundabout lies in ruins: the evil ice sorcerer ZeBadDee is

Toby Young

Better left unsaid

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One of the cardinal rules of theatre reviewing is that you’re not supposed to talk about the play until you’ve left the venue. This is ostensibly to stop critics influencing one another’s opinions, to force them to make up their own minds, but there’s another — better — reason, as I discovered last week. On

James Delingpole

Competing children

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The thing five-year-olds most dread on their first day at school, according to Child of Our Time (BBC1, Tuesday), is using the dirty, smelly, alien toilets. I remember the moment well. Peeing in the urinal all men quickly learn to dread — the middle one — I was mortified to notice that the two boys

Manically busy

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Jennifer’s Diary: wild flows the Don. Who says we’re a lazy bunch of sinecure-holders? Much of this first week of a new term at Cambridge has been spent checking titles and abstracts for students’ dissertations (deadline Friday). As everyone knows, 100 words are harder to get right than 1,000, and the trenchant-yet-appropriate title harder still.

An art of surprises

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Sir Anthony Caro celebrated his 80th birthday last year, and this slightly belated but determinedly triumphal exhibition marks a half-century of remarkable and sustained achievement. Caro is phenomenally successful, an international figure almost as prominent as Henry Moore, and equally if not more important historically. For it was Caro who revolutionised sculpture in the early

A cure for melancholy: Parmigianino, Dickens, Schubert

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My grandfather used to say, ‘Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.’ It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators