Culture

Culture

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

The mediums who pioneered abstract art

Exhibitions

In the 1850s Britain was hit by an epidemic likened by The Illustrated London News to a ‘grippe or the cholera morbus’. It came from America rather than China and afflicted the mind rather than the body. The craze for table-turning was sparked in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 after two young sisters, Maggie and

As immersive art goes, nothing can compete with Berghain

Exhibitions

In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it Nightclub, and if you kept it going 24 hours a day it would be

Rod Liddle

More mimsy soft rock from Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2 reviewed

The Listener

Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME credentials bestowing upon him an edginess which his mimsy fragile-voiced soft rock never really deserved. It’s the kind of retrospective benediction usually only death from some bad skag at the age of 27 can provide.

Where will our inventions lead?

More from Books

When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a blurb on the paperback edition, so I want to be clear: when I say that George Dyson’s Analogia reminds me of Robert Pirsig’s New Age classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I do

Too many of our children are battling severe depression

More from Books

Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was many years ago — the great male essayist and orator has been dead for a decade — and Moran has matured into a bold, wise, middle-aged comedienne. When she was growing up in the 1980s,

Born to be wild: the plight of salmon worldwide

More from Books

In the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans paint images of salmon on to stones. They say that if you rub those stones you will acquire the fish’s two great qualities: determination and energy. Not so long ago these communities’ diets consisted of more than 80 per cent salmon, and they believed it to be a wondrous

Ladies’ man: Tom Stoppard’s love life revealed

Lead book review

Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Not here. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to

The beautiful upside-down world of Georg Baselitz

Exhibitions

The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves in southern France, Indonesia and Argentina, made up to 50,000 years ago, which, although no doubt an illusion, seem to be waving at us across a vast gulf of time. The gigantic paintings of golden

Tanya Gold

This is what cinema is for: Netflix’s Cuties reviewed

Film

Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf), an 11-year-old Franco-Senegalese girl living in Paris, who learns that her father is taking a second wife. (Polygamy is widespread in west Africa, but you wouldn’t know it from mainstream cinema. You wouldn’t know much

The gentle genius of Mervyn Peake

Arts feature

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move

Tacky and incomprehensible: The Sandman audiobook reviewed

Radio

Listening to the tacky and incomprehensible audio-adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series Sandman, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 19th-century Swiss artist Rodolphe Töppfer. Did Mr Töppfer realise what he was doing when he one day decided to draw a narrative in sequential panels with captions underneath? His satirical novel in pictures, Histoire de

Is Germany really such a role model?

More from Books

The British romance with Germany has always been an on-off affair. At the turn of the century, Kaiser Bill enjoyed brief popularity, based on dynastic ties, until his bombastic militarism set Germany on a path to war. Thirty years on, as Tim Bouverie reminds us in his book Appeasing Hitler, many in the English ruling

The Special Relationship was never very special

More from Books

I have a book of essays from 1986 by a group of British and American scholars called The Special Relationship. The editor, Professor Roger Louis, was advised to give it another title. The director of Chatham House, the late David Watt no less, called it ‘rhetorical nonsense’. Yet, as Louis noted: The ‘Special Relationship’ would

A dazzling fable about loneliness: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, reviewed

More from Books

Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut from a cookery book editor seemed to promise an unfailing fountain of the creative imagination: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a three-volume reworking of Britain’s military tussle with Napoleon, but with added fairies, felt like

Bringing up Benzene: Charlie Gilmour adopts a magpie

More from Books

One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely to survive. As the writer Charlie Gilmour and his set-designer fiancée Janina (Yana) find themselves scrutinised by the tiny creature’s ‘gemstone eyes’ they become caught up in an unexpected urge to save the fledgling’s life.