Culture

Culture

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

Sam Leith

Spectator Books: how pigeons won the War

Pigeons: revolting pests who can’t tell the difference between fag-butts and chips, right? Not so, according to my latest podcast guest Jon Day, distinguished man of letters, critic, academic and… pigeon-fancier. Jon’s new book Homing describes how — suffering an early midlife crisis in young married life with fatherhood approaching — he took up racing

Striking the wrong note | 18 July 2019

Arts feature

Every summer for the past six years, Bayreuth has risen to its feet to acclaim an English Brünnhilde. Catherine Foster, from Nottingham, was the heroine of Frank Castorf’s anti-capitalist staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. The director was booed to the rafters, the singer hailed as saviour. Three perfectionist conductors, Kirill Petrenko, Marek Janowski and

Joining the tea set

Exhibitions

It had to happen. Since almost everything became either ‘artisan’ or ‘curated’, conditions have been ripe for a curator of artisan teas. And sure enough, if you Google ‘tea curator’ you’ll find one promising regular infusions of ‘a curated selection of single-origin, artisan teas’. Now Compton Verney has done the sensible thing and curated an

Rod Liddle

Don’t believe the headlines

Columns

I suppose it was a bit naive to wander on to Newsnight having been booked to talk about Brexit and my new book and expect to talk about Brexit and my new book. I should have expected instead to be shrieked at about ‘racism’ by a fishwife on acid, which is what happened. In the

Lloyd Evans

Hare-brained | 18 July 2019

Theatre

The National Theatre’s boss, Rufus Norris, has confessed that he ‘took his eye off the ball’ when it came to female writers and he plans to strike an equal balance between the sexes in future. Good news for male scribblers who’ll know that they’ve been selected on merit but rather demoralising for females who’ll suspect

Listening space

Radio

Television has the pictures but the most spine-tingling moments in the recordings from the Apollo space missions are the bursts of crackling conversation between the spacecraft and mission control. Never a word wasted, absolute precision and the most surprising clarity even when there are only seconds to spare before total disaster is averted. The wonderful

James Delingpole

Saints and sinners | 18 July 2019

Television

I’m beginning to feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: almost the last person on Earth who hasn’t been assimilated by the evil, shapeshifting, floral pod creatures from outer space. Losing my comrade Christopher Booker the other day didn’t help. Nor did turning to the once robustly sceptical Sun newspaper this morning

Pole position | 18 July 2019

Music

Of all the daft notions about the classical music business, the daftest is that it’s a business at all. Seriously: an industry that’s structured to make a loss, unable to survive without subsidy? If you enjoy conspiracy theories, classical music’s façade of white-tied affluence, combined with fading memories of Herbert von Karajan’s private jet, might

Beetle invasion

More from Books

Silicon Valley moguls might not find Zed a particularly amusing read. Joanna Kavenna’s latest mindbender features the CEO of a multinational tech company whose sway has long outstripped that of mere governments. Guy Matthias’s creation, Beetle, has invaded western lives to an unprecedented degree. BeetleBands on wrists advise users when they need to eat, hydrate

Everyday wonders

More from Books

Walking home from work one day during the half-year I lived in London’s Maida Vale (almost three decades ago now), I was just about to turn into an archway leading to the mews house in which I rented a room when into my path a steady stream of grey feathers suddenly began falling. From directly

Brother sun and sister moon

More from Books

At the very back of the eye is a cluster of cells called ipRGCs. They are cells that don’t depend on vision to sense light, and that keep the circadian rhythms of both sighted and non-sighted people in sync with the sun. Without them, we would not feel the pull of sleep at night; we

The husband trap

More from Books

Around 25 years ago it became clear that there existed only two groups that could still be bullied by journalists without fear of public backlash. These were the upper classes and husbands. Female ramblings about how annoying men are began, and continue, to go down well and strike a chord of recognition among wearied women.

Manhunt in the taiga

More from Books

The Siberian-born novelist Andreï Makine has, as we say in the book world, a shedload of French literary bling. He’s the only writer to win the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis for a single novel (Le Testament Français) which is, in pop cultural terms, like winning The Great British Bake Off and Strictly on

Distant voices, shattered lives

Lead book review

In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front in the trolleybus queue. Complaining about this at some point, I was struck and shamed by a Russian friend’s reaction: ‘Oh, but it’s sad… Imagine how hard their lives have been, to make them like

Hiding in plain sight

Exhibitions

Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter Tate Modern’s survey show. And ‘Magnetic Fields’ (1969) is pretty enough: the work of this self-taught artist, now in his nineties, has rarely been so gentle, or so intuitive. But there’s a problem. ‘I would

‘I merge into the background, me’

Arts feature

‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most recognisable actors in this united luvviedom. ‘Am I?’ he asks gently. Oh come on. You’re Bridget Jones’s dad, Del Boy’s arch-enemy Roy Slater, Lord Longford campaigning for Myra Hindley’s parole, dotty antiques-shop owner Samuel Gruber

Rocket men | 11 July 2019

Television

As the title suggests, 8 Days: To the Moon and Back (BBC2, Wednesday) comprehensively disproved the always questionable idea put forward by Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’: that being an astronaut is ‘just [a] job five days a week’. More importantly perhaps, by concentrating purely on how Apollo 11’s lunar voyage unfolded over the eight days

Out of this world | 11 July 2019

Music

In Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI hands become fists, arms and elbows clubs, shoving, pounding and ker-pow-ing the keyboard to near oblivion. No wonder Pierre-Laurent Aimard had slipped on a pair of gloves before starting to stop his fingers from bruising or bleeding. The sound created is monstrous, alarming, thrilling. Aimard threw the full weight of his

Chilling out | 11 July 2019

Opera

Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like, but actual children. There are Mozart’s Three Boys, Menotti’s Amahl, possibly Debussy’s Yniold and Handel’s Oberto and, if you stretch a point, Marie’s little son in Wozzeck. But that’s about it. Until, that is, you

The invisible man | 11 July 2019

Cinema

The Brink is Alison Klayman’s documentary portrait of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist (he shaped the ‘America First’ campaign, proposed the Muslim travel ban, etc.) and former boss of Breitbart News, the place where unsuccessful white men go to whine. The film follows him for 15 months from the autumn of 2017 as

Lloyd Evans

Split decisions

Theatre

Europe. Big word. Big theme. It was used by David Greig as the title of his 1994 play about frontiers in the age of mass migration. The setting is a railway station in eastern Europe and it opens like a kids’ TV show with each character entering and doing something ‘typical’. Everyone is either good

Sables, ruffs and doublets

More from Books

Roy Strong first encountered the portraiture of Elizabeth I and her court while a schoolboy in post-war Edmonton. In the early 1950s, as a second Elizabethan age beckoned, the teenaged Strong unexpectedly found himself face to face with the ‘Ermine’ and ‘Rainbow’ portraits of the Virgin Queen on a day trip to nearby Hatfield House.