Culture

Culture

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

A life among movie stars can damage your health

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Mothers of America             let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body                               but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery             images… So wrote Frank O’Hara

A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed

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‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of

What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition

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We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It’s a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten’s possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru

The wolf as symbol of European anxieties

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On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last,

What was millennial girl power really about?

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The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were

The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history

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On 3 June 1960, a letter appeared in The Spectator which began: Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act upon the

The politics of horror

Arts feature

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian

The cheering fantasies of Oliver Messel

Exhibitions

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch

London’s best contemporary art show is in Penge

Exhibitions

If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its periodic ‘moments’. A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their online

Damian Thompson

Astonishing ‘lost tapes’ from a piano great

Classical

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was

James Delingpole

Style, wit and pace: Netflix’s Dept. Q reviewed

Television

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis

The artistic benefits of not being publicly subsidised

Dance

Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them

Lloyd Evans

Superb: Stereophonic, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

Stereophonic is a slow-burning drama set in an American recording studio in 1976. A collection of hugely successful musicians, loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, are working on a new album which they hope will match the success of their previous number one smash. This is an absolute treat for anyone who appreciates subtle, oblique and

Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed

Cinema

First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later  (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last

The rose-tinted view of female friendship shatters

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There is no such thing as a bad friend. The societal expectations and collective imagination of what friendship should look like have, over the past century, set unrealistic expectations, meaning we are all doomed at some point to fail as friends. At least this is what the cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues in her

Cindy Yu

Haunted by my great-grandfather’s second wife – by Alice Mah

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Alice Mah didn’t enjoy finding her roots. Even though ‘ancestor tourism’ is increasingly popular among westernised descendants of Chinese émigrés like her, she felt a nameless sort of dread when visiting the village in the Cantonese county of Taishan where her great-grandfather came from. It didn’t help that she’d just attended the morbid Qingming festival,

The bloodstained origins of the Italian Renaissance

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War – huh – what is it good for? According to Duncan Weldon, throughout most of history it’s been fantastic for economic growth and development and has perhaps fuelled technological innovation and more. Blood and Treasure is a delightfully quirky approach to military history. Colonial Spain was thought to be cursed by the gold brought

North and South America have always been interdependent

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In 1797, following a written plea for troops to counter an incursion by an American Revolutionary War veteran into Louisiana, Manuel Godoy, minister to the Spanish crown, made a note in the margin: No es posible poner puertas al campo (‘It is not possible to put up doors in a field’). Both literally and metaphorically,

The stigma still surrounding leprosy

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One of the earliest leper hospitals in Britain was built in London near the beginning of the 12th century by Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I. It was a benign combination of housing, hospital and chapel, with patients free to come and go as they wished. Matilda started a fashion among the wealthy, so

A small world: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, reviewed

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Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in

Comfort reading for the interwar years

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A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows,

Is nothing private any more?

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How did the UK become a place where young people think it’s permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others? A few years ago, when I taught at university,

‘Genius’ is a dangerously misused word

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For several centuries, the word ‘celebrity’ meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by ‘genius’. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds,

The importance of feeling shame

Lead book review

In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely