The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in the suburbs of America. A prosperous middle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours in the garden of his comfortable home, but by nightfall his family has been destroyed. This is one of the most momentous convulsions in all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting, which he never again
The climactic central scene of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd ends unexpectedly. The naval court has reached a verdict of death, and Captain Vere must depart to tell Billy his fate. Voices fall silent, the stage empties, and for two whole minutes the unseen drama is distilled into just 34 chords. And not sprawling elbowfuls of
Channel 4’s When I Grow Up had an important lesson for middle-class white males everywhere: you’re never too young to be held up as a git. The series, billed as ‘a radical experiment in social mobility’, gets a group of seven- and eight-year-old children from different backgrounds to work together in a real-life office setting
Grade: A Old skag head’s back, then — older (40 now!), probably none the wiser, still a very good songwriter. This may be the best thing he’s ever done, at least since those incendiary first moments of the Libertines. Yeah, I can do without the affected drawl skittering this way and that around the melody
‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayeshea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was talking from Colombo to David Amanor of the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which looks at current news stories from the
It was never given the choicest slot in the schedule, airing first thing on Sunday morning with a repeat at the end of the day. But in its 24 years Something Understood, guided and often presented by the esteemed foreign correspondent Mark Tully, has gathered an impressive audience. Its blend of poetry, prose and music
There’s no avoiding the Britishness of British art. It hits me every time I walk outside and see dappled trees against a silver-grey cloud that looks like it was painted by Thomas Gainsborough, or look in the mirror and feel the same gooseflesh anxiety as I do when I see a portrait by Lucian Freud.
It starts at a secretarial college. The stage is occupied by a dignified elderly lady who recalls her pleasure at learning shorthand in the 1920s. She lived in Germany and she took a job at a firm headed by a man named Goldberg. He was Jewish. These unremarkable disclosures are spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, a
‘I spend a lot of time helping teenagers who’ve been sexually abused…’ — beat — ‘…find their way out of my house.’ You’d scarcely imagine, listening to Frankie Boyle now, that this was the kind of joke he was telling on TV as recently as this decade. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t
Bel Canto is an adaptation of the Ann Patchett novel first published in 2001, which I remembered as being brilliant and unputdownable, even if I recalled only a few of the details — hostages, an opera singer; that was about it. So I found it on the bookshelf and read it again, which was daft.
Notre Dame is only important from a Shakespeare’s-birthplace point of view. Architecturally it is a nullity beside the cathedrals of Beauvais and Laon, Albi and Marseille, Rouen and Clermont-Ferrand (a sinister marvel of black tufa). The ashes of the cathedral are now the site of a proxy struggle between some of the greatest fortunes on
‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,’ wrote Stravinsky in one of his more honest moments, and when it comes to humour the old fox had a point. Strip away words, visuals, parody and extra-musical associations (the flatulent bassoon; the raspberry-blowing trumpet) and Orpheus, unaided, doesn’t
Sean Scully once told me about his early days as a plasterer’s mate. At the age of 17 he was helping a craftsman who would often accidentally drop a good deal of plaster on his youthful assistant’s head, especially after a midday break in the pub. Scully spent his own lunchtimes differently. He would roar
This week, the Wolfson History Prize announced its shortlist. It is always worth drawing attention to, precisely because it is not attention-seeking. Neither ‘woke’ nor stuffy, the prize is simply interested in serious history. This year’s list of six ranges in terms of subject from birds in the ancient world and building Anglo-Saxon England, through
The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good pilgrimage takes effort. Count Dracula (also acquainted with the north Yorkshire town) cheated — he climbed the steps in the guise of a black hound. These days, with its new £1.6 million museum and visitor
No wonder we feel the agony of Notre-Dame so acutely in Britain. Not only does the cathedral hold a special place in British hearts. But our greatest cathedrals and churches owe a huge stylistic debt to Notre-Dame. Most of Britain’s great cathedrals are Gothic – and the Gothic style was born in northern France. And
Last autumn, anyone who a) has an interest in pop music, and b) reads the weightier end of the press, would have come to the conclusion that the world was shortly to enter some kind of musical singularity, in which all of civilisation would be transformed by the 39-year-old Swedish pop singer Robyn. ‘After more
Fans of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, The Great Beauty (which won an Oscar) and his HBO series, The Young Pope, will have been keenly anticipating Loro, his take on the life and times of Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon and former Italian prime minister who has been involved in one lurid scandal after another. But
Nigel Slater is popular because he’s an exceptionally meek cook. Not for him the sprawling restaurant empire or the transatlantic TV career to excite envy and loathing. He writes about his trade in simple vivid prose and his bestselling memoir, Toast, has become a play. Young Nigel enters as a 1960s schoolboy, with shorts and
Total immersion weekends can prove tricky. The established masters don’t need them, while lesser-known figures often turn out to be relatively obscure for sound reasons. Nonetheless, there are plenty of composers whose works are too rarely performed, not so much through neglect as because of the awkwardness of their demands — huge orchestras and choruses,
If you’ve ever faced the social embarrassment of having to admit that you’ve never seen Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday), then imagine what it’s like when you’re a TV reviewer. The customary excuse of ‘There really isn’t time to keep up with everything on telly’ might work for most series. But now that GoT
As if in defiance of the BBC’s current obsession with programming designed to entice in that elusive young and modish audience, Radio 4 has set us an Easter challenge. Each afternoon over the weekend Jeremy Irons is reading a chunk from The Psalms for half an hour, without illustration (except a bit of music), explication
Before embarking on this hymn to hymns, I’ll admit that hymn-enthusiasts feel a slight sense of anticlimax on Easter Sunday, when the pleasingly austere hymns of Lent are replaced with the too-happy, exclamation-mark-ridden hymns of Easter. Within minutes of the start of the Easter Eucharist, our mouths will ache from repetitive singing of the over-vowelled
‘I’m still warmed up from last night,’ said Sophie Bevan early on a Sunday morning in the practice-room behind the presbytery of St Birinus Catholic Church in the charming village of Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire – a tiny Pugin-esque gem dwarfed by the enormous Anglican abbey up the road. She and the other four members of the
On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance 100 solos in each venue in honour of the late iconoclastic choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would have turned 100 that day. It is a spectacularly ambitious wake for the choreographer who for 70 years denied
An eyewitness described Edvard Munch supervising the print of a colour lithograph in 1896. He stood in front of the stones on which the head of a masterpiece was drawn. He then closed his eyes tightly, stabbed the air with his finger, and gave his instructions. ‘Print… grey, green, blue, brown.’ Then he opened his
