The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories shows that she can pack all the astute social commentary of her novels just as deftly into the short form. A case in point is ‘Sentimental Education’, a comic homage to Flaubert featuring a decidedly unsentimental protagonist, Monica. Middle-aged (‘Next stop menopause and no more denim’) and feeling
This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair,
Paul Hendrickson’s previous (and very fine) book was Hemingway’s Boat, published in Britain in 2012. It was a nice conceit to see the writer’s life through his singular obsession with Pilar, the boat he commissioned from a Brooklyn shipyard, which remained the steadiest companion in his choppy voyage. The enormous life of Frank Lloyd Wright
My guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of ‘post-truth politics’ in his bestselling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. His fascinating and dismaying new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War
On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile protégé, Paul Gauguin, who had explained to him how artists in the future would ‘find salvation by replenishing themselves’ from the works of remote peoples and places. Pissarro was not convinced. Gauguin, he grumbled, was
Call me soppy, but when the credits rolled on ‘Wooden Boulder’, a film made by earth artist David Nash over 25 years, I was blinking back tears. Funny what the mind will make human. Within a few minutes I started to think of Nash’s boulder, hewn from a storm-struck oak in the Ffestiniog valley in
New York The Roy Cohn documentary Bully. Coward. Victim: the Story of Roy Cohn was successfully screened at the Lincoln Center last week to a full house. Cohn was once Donald Trump’s lawyer, and after the screening the event turned into an anti-Trump show. Had I known this would happen, I would have stayed
Exciting news from the BBC, where every employee has just received a flyer from the Director-General, Lord Hall, informing them about the creation of a new post — Director of Creative Diversity. Should they all apply? Certainly, when I found out about it, I thought I might throw my hat in the ring. I’d immediately employ
I have never ever watched a TV series I have enjoyed more than Succession (Now TV). There’s stuff I’d put in the same league, maybe — Fauda, Babylon Berlin, Band of Brothers, Utopia, Gomorrah, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and so on — but absolutely nothing beats it. It is, quite simply, a work of pure,
The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it is a ‘comedy of terrors’, you could say. But this time, rather than a group of hapless home-grown Muslim suicide bombers we’ve decamped to America and it’s the FBI that will do anything to get
Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent trying to out-badass each other, the guitars getting louder, the lyrics either more obtuse or (in the case of David Allan Coe) more obscene. This takes it all one stage further. I don’t think Sound
Podcasts will soon be like porn. Every interest, desire or idle flicker of curiosity will have been anticipated and catered for. Whatever you’re into there’ll be a podcast devoted to it, waiting to make itself heard. That’s easy for me to say because I’ve already found my perfect match: Is It Rolling, Bob? in which
It’s Act Three of Emma Rice’s new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Eurydice (Mary Bevan) is trapped in the backroom of a Soho peep show. But that doesn’t really matter because Jupiter (Willard White), a cigar-toking love walrus in a silk bathrobe, has transformed himself into a fly and is about to
Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy, Noises Off, is the theatre’s answer to Trooping the Colour. Everyone agrees that it’s an amazing display of synchronised choreography but does anyone actually want to see it? Yes, to judge by the press-night crowd at the Garrick. The joint was packed. The show opens at the dress rehearsal of a
In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the unexpected for Patti Smith. It starts badly at New Year: ‘Some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots.’ Then it gets worse, private tragedies and political shocks drawing Smith into
Vibrations, chemicals and light-waves exist in the world; sounds, tastes, smells and colours only seem to. ‘Many sensations which are supposed to be qualities residing in external objects have no real existence save in us,’ said Galileo in the 17th century. ‘They reside only in the consciousness.’ But is consciousness itself, then, other than, and
The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56. It was a technical and engineering triumph which yielded a vast hoard of intelligence and, crucially, guaranteed early warning of any surprise Russian attack (as was mooted by the Russian military). Yet it was betrayed to the Russians by the
No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, for example, the Confederates had managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims, exalted by the myth of a noble lost cause. The South had lost 20 per
In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British Museum reading room poring over piles of books about Mesopotamia. His name was George Smith, and this was his secret passion. Then, one day, a museum attendant remarked that it was a shame no one
In Hamlet a gravedigger asks the riddle: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ Answer: ‘A grave-maker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday.’And yet they do not; this character has disturbed the bones of Yorick. ‘Doomsday’ is, of course, the archaic word for ‘judgment day’
Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear submarine, which he describes variously as ‘sleek, black and athletic looking’, and ‘this fierce black messenger of death’, and ‘this huge, black leviathan’, and ‘a killing machine’, and ‘silent as death’. The first time he
Neil Hegarty’s new novel, The Jewel, is a mass of contradictions. It’s about an art heist, but it’s not fun. It’s a love story, but it’s not romantic. And it features a woman’s wasted life, but it’s not without salvation. The overarching plot follows three characters. John, a ‘seedy’ artist-cum-art-forger-cum-art-thief, has been commissioned to steal
In their lifetime, and afterwards, the Soong sisters from Shanghai seemed like figures from a Chinese fairy tale. There were three of them: ‘One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country.’ They came from a family of prosperous Methodist converts and, for almost 100 years, one or other of them presided at
In this week’s Spectator Books podcast my guest is Jung Chang — whose latest book is the gripping story of three sisters whose political differences put the Mitford even the Johnson clans in perspective. In Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, Jung narrates the lives of the Soong Girls — one of whom was married to
Your latest challenge, inspired by Joan Didion’s wonderful essay of that title, was to write a short story with the last line ‘I can’t get that monster out of my mind’. Another notable American female essayist, Susan Sontag, has come in for a bit of stick in these pages over the past few weeks, and
Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only flounder in antiquity for appropriate descriptions. We see a black and white photograph that shows a swarm of tiny figures, ant-like in their relentless pursuit of some mysterious purpose around the edges of a dark,
While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security