The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a masterclass in the practice of history’ — is as good a description of this brilliant new biography of Charlemagne as we are likely to get. The broader contours of the life will be familiar to
In this week’s books podcast, we’re getting Romantic. I’m joined by the writer Adam Nicolson and the artist Tom Hammick to talk about their new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and their Year of Marvels. In it, Adam describes how — inspired by Richard Holmes’s ‘footsteps’ approach — he attempted to imaginatively inhabit
Last year I found myself giving a lecture in Helsinki. When I came to the end, I asked the audience if there were any questions. There followed a period of complete silence, after which a man cleared his throat and explained that, being Finnish, it was extremely difficult for them to speak in public; they
Games for Lovers feels like a smart, sexy TV comedy. Martha is still in love with her old flame Logan whose new girlfriend has a huge libido which he can’t hope to satisfy. When Martha starts flat-hunting she answers an advert coincidentally posted by Logan’s best friend, Darren. Thus, perhaps too neatly, the two warring
In 1871, the polymath and computer pioneer Charles Babbage died at his home in Marylebone. The encyclopaedias have it that a urinary tract infection got him. In truth, his final hours were spent in an agony brought on by the performances of itinerant hurdy-gurdy players parked underneath his window. I know how he felt. My
My favourite epithet about my favourite TV series was the headline in a review by the Irish Times: ‘Gomorrah. Where characters die before they become characters.’ The review appeared to suggest that this was a bad thing. But I disagree. What made Game of Thrones so original and compelling, especially in the early seasons, was
Ritesh Batra had a smash hit with his gentle romance The Lunchbox (2013) and then made a couple of less impactful English language films, The Sense of an Ending and Our Souls At Night. But now he has returned to India with Photograph, which is another romance and it is slow, slow, so very slooooooow.
Should a secret pleasure ever be shared? Spoiler alert: Susanna’s secret, unknown to her husband Gil, is that she smokes. And when, in his opera Il segreto di Susanna, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari finally gets her alone with her longed-for cigarette, he makes it feel like nothing in heaven or earth could top the sensuous bliss of
By the age of eight Vaira Vike-Freiberga had learnt that life was both ‘very strange and very unfair’. Her baby sister had died from pneumonia the previous year because of the harsh conditions of life in a refugee camp in Germany (this was late 1944 and her family had fled their native Latvia for fear
Anyone picking up a book by Wendell Berry, whether it be fiction, essays or a collection of his lucid and engaged poetry, will quickly find themselves in the company of one who is unafraid to tackle the larger subjects (time, place, environment, community) in terms familiar to Virginia Woolf’s ‘common reader’, a creature who seems
It would be hard to have better travel-writer credentials than Sara Wheeler. Here the author of The Magnetic North and Terra Incognita, a specialist in Arctic and Antarctic adventure, turns her attentions to the land mass that sprawls across eight time zones, where any traveller is guaranteed to receive an ostentatiously frosty reception — initially,
Robert Caro, at the age of 83, continues to work full-time on his grand inquiry into the nature of political power. He has studied two figures in particular: Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. Moses — the subject of Caro’s first book The Power Broker — was the man who, over several decades, built the
This is horrible. But it’s a book by Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, so it’s compelling: an almost perfect true crime story. Two sisters, aged ten and 12, disappeared from a shopping mall in 1975 and were never seen again. What happened to them was a mystery for 40 years.
Do you regard fat as a noun, a food substance all humans eat and need? Or as an adjective, denoting something you want to avoid being? Though the subtitle seems to indicate that this disturbing, closely argued book has the olive oil vs lard culinary axis as its subject, Christopher Forth dispenses with the food
Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and 25 novels, starred in movies, directed theatre and produced his own film. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He founded a right-wing militia to defend the emperor from Marxists and,
It is bad enough when we learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But later in life there comes another trauma, deeper still: when we discover that the beloved books of our childhood were in fact thinly veiled political theses, laden with economic metaphors and turgid intellectual ideas. My youngest child is not yet two. How
In a sense, the song of the bird in the title of this short, hugely thoughtful and fascinating book is a measure of the gap between nature and human culture. On the one hand stands the most mythologised, celebrated and interrogated maker of natural sound on earth: the nightingale. On the other, the most densely
We could begin almost anywhere. But let’s start in Ukraine, with Babar Aliev. Babar is a former gang leader who used social media disinformation campaigns to undermine a separatist movement. When his opponents won, he was picked up and put on a train out of town. His great disappointment, he tells Peter Pomerantsev in This
The star New York Times columnist David Brooks has never been afraid to go beyond the usual remit of day-to-day politics. His new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to the Meaning of Life, somewhere between a spiritual autobiography and a manual for
Bunnies were out. Beatrix Potter had the monopoly on rabbits, kittens, ducks and Mrs Tittlemouses. ‘I knew I had to bring in creatures of some kind,’ wrote Roald Dahl on his first thoughts towards a children’s book. ‘But I didn’t want to use all the old favourites that had been used so often before, like
Superficially, the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern can seem like a theme park. To enter many of the exhibits, you have to queue. The average age of the crowds in the galleries is much lower than it might be at, say, the RA. And most visitors keep their phones permanently ready to snap a
Last weekend, in a pleasant park outside Maidstone, a most unusual rock festival took place. For one thing, it was a rock festival. Despite ‘rock festival’ being a common term for any live music event featuring multiple artists taking place outdoors, there are very few actual rock festivals any more. There are festivals for specific
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is Nick Broomfield’s documentary chronicling the muse-artist relationship between Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen. Her name comes first because Broomfield wished to tell her story but, even so, this could be titled Marianne & Leonard: And A Lot More On Him. Hard to fathom what the point is, really.
BBC2’s How the Middle Classes Ruined Britain (Tuesday) began rather promisingly. ‘I’m a working-class comedian who voted Leave,’ announced presenter Geoff Norcott, ‘and I think it’s about time you lot heard some home truths.’ But then came the programme itself — which turned out to be the TV equivalent of a footballer who, faced with
Every so often an idea for a show will come along that is perfect, and therefore should never be made. A sitcom based on Julian Assange’s time in the Ecuadorian embassy. Or a gender-flipped version of What Women Want. These are concepts to treasure, to return to, to discuss with friends. Once made flesh though,
Think back to when you were 12, and the sensation of re-opening your favourite book. (This is The Spectator; I’m assuming you were all bookish 12-year-olds.) The Silver Chair, perhaps, or The Phoenix and the Carpet — some fantastic alternative world, anyway, filled with characters who felt like old friends. The lumbering iron giants, powered
Equus is a psychological thriller from 1973 which opens with a revolting discovery. An unbalanced stable-lad, Alan, spends his evenings taking the horses out for an illicit gallop. Meanwhile, he’s busy seducing a hot young cowgirl at the farm but his awakening sexuality confuses him. The girl’s erotic nature brings out his closeted gay side
When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby and the Cambridge Five, that preening group of loudmouths that still dominate our national history of Soviet treachery. In his own quiet, devastating way, Fuchs proved more significant than all of them put together. A
My uncle Edward did not like talking about his service in Burma during the second world war. When I asked him what fighting in the jungle was like, his response was brief. ‘Grown men were crying for their mothers,’ he said, and would say no more: the worst combat theatre of that war was not