The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Invention of Love opens with death. Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman starts on the banks of the Styx, where the recently deceased poet is waiting for Charon, the boatman, to ferry him across the water. Charon has been told to pick up ‘a scholar and a poet’ and he’s expecting two souls, not
The Natural History Museum is one of the most beautiful buildings in London, but its gardens have long been a bit boring – just a pavement on the way in to Alfred Waterhouse’s ornate ‘cathedral to nature’. Most people noticed them solely when the ice rink appeared at Christmas. There was a wildlife garden in
There must have been a time when slow-burn psychological thrillers didn’t start with a scene of high drama followed by a caption that reads ‘Three months earlier’ – but if so, it’s getting hard to remember it. The latest programme to deploy the tactic was Playing Nice, which began with James Norton running towards the
Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer of all time, was once asked if he reckoned he could have maintained his batting average of 99.94 against the fearsome West Indian bowling attack of the time. Oh no, he said. Not a chance. He’d probably be hitting in the 50s, like the very best batsmen of the time.
The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to
Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed
In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature
Alexander Pushkin was brought to ruin by his letters more than once. When the Russian postal police intercepted a letter suggesting that atheism was ‘the most plausible’ philosophy, he was exiled to his mother’s bleak estate in the rural north-west. But his own temper was far more dangerous. In the autumn of 1836, he received
‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic.
Eva, the protagonist of Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel, is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Over an unspecified period, anchored by references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s first election victory, we follow her from her adolescence in Brooklyn, through friendships and heartbreak at an ‘excellent college’,
With Christmas only just gone, I hope it’s not too late to recommend Ingvild Rishoi’s bittersweet seasonal novella – a bestseller in Norway which now comes into English in Caroline Waight’s crisp and fluent prose. Here’s a child’s-eye story about adult griefs and troubles which uses dramatic irony to consistent effect; a skinny little narrative
For many people, the mental picture of a Viking is of a blond giant in a horned helmet leaping out of a sharp-prowed longboat to pillage and slaughter the terrified inhabitants of the nearest village or monastery. The horned helmet is a myth, but the Vikings were, in general, red-haired or blond and taller than
Versailles was a palace of science, as Anna Ferrari shows in this stimulating and innovative study, accompanying a dazzling exhibition of the same title at the Science Museum, London (until 21 April). Soldiers were subjected to electricity experiments in the Galerie des Glaces. The king watched the dissection of an elephant or a horse in
At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former
It might help if we stopped calling them ‘the Brothers Grimm’, which always makes them sound like characters in one of their fairy tales. We don’t talk about ‘the Sisters Brontë’, after all. In reality, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been described, very accurately, as ‘visionary drudges’. The Children’s and Household Tales, the first edition
Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Around the middle of the year, there was a sort of retrospective; a stock-taking, if you like, as he made the transition to this third act of his career. Warner Classics released a
Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among them is a copper flagon made in Syria and buried in Essex in the late 500s. It is believed that the flagon belonged to an English mercenary who went to fight for the Byzantines against
Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North Carolina has been described by the press as Americana, slacker rock, indie and alt-country. But we at The Spectator will call it how it is: this is country rock, pure and simple. And if country
The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. We first meet the future prime minister at a nursery school in Paisley where she orders the teachers to call her Elizabeth and not to use her first name, Mary. This establishes her combative, self-righteous
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Most subsidised theatres hanker for political relevance. Even so, when the Royal Shakespeare Company planned its new production of Twelfth Night, they can hardly have expected that by Christmas 2024 we’d have Malvolio as prime minister. The curious thing is
If your heart sinks at the prospect of a thriller series starring Keira Knightley as a highly trained undercover agent with unfeasible martial skills, join the club. The reason I was drawn to Black Doves was when I realised it had been written by that master of tongue-in-cheek, ultraviolent, popcorn TV, Joe Barton (Giri/Haji). However
We Live in Time is a rom-com (of sorts), starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. They have terrific chemistry and elevate the material by around 1,000 per cent (a conservative estimate), but it’s still deeply annoying. It’s a weepie – a cancer story as well as a love story; at some screenings tissues were handed
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over machismo, money and majesty, the future keeps crashing in. The Science Museum has now laid its cards on the table with Versailles: Science and Splendour. Think gilt, not guilt. Is there anything in our lives
The catalogue of 20th-century writers who committed suicide is long and sad: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Kane, Stefan Zweig and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name only a few. Yet even amid this litany of literary misery, one name stands out for being perhaps more famous for their death than their work:
According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why. The novel is quick to mock the posturing of the academic world, especially in Buenos Aires The novel
One of the key charges made by the hard of thinking is that because the devastating accusation ‘racist’ has been thrown around so casually in these days of febrile public discourse, it no longer has meaning. Similarly, ever since Rik called Vyv (and a bank manager and the BBC) a fascist in The Young Ones,
For Anna, wickedness istypified by the villain ofa fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of
This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’
In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Bernard Mandeville,