The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
André Aciman’s 2007 debut novel, Call Me By Your Name, was a sensuous, captivating account of the passionate love a cosmopolitan teenage boy bore for an older American man, which has since been made into an elegant and successful film, directed by Luca Guadagnino. For readers of all sexual persuasions, there was universality in young
‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, wrote in 1933. Gandhi would have been 150 years old in 2019, had he taken better care of himself. He remains the most irritating and admired politician of the 20th century: a perfect subverter of
A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. The Infatuations was ostensibly a murder mystery; Thus Bad Begins chronicled a loss of innocence. But
The revival of interest in mid-20th century novelists is one of the most positive and valuable developments of our time. This has particularly brought about a reconsideration of the work of women. Beginning, perhaps, with the creation of the Virago classics, female authors have been brought back into print and given the sort of serious
Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the Camera degli Sposi. Around a great trompe l’oeil oculus, apparently open to the sky, assorted gawpers and cherubs lean nosily over the parapet: ‘What’s going on down there, then?’ Only the Duke and Duchess of
When Soft Cell first appeared on Top of the Pops in summer 1981, miming along to their version of Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’, it felt like a moment of palpable newness. Well, it certainly did if you were prepubescent and really had no idea what sex actually was. Romantic love — in either its glory
William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest. Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After
The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with
This version of A Star Is Born, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, is the fourth iteration (Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, 1937; Judy Garland and James Mason, 1954; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, 1976). So it’s a remake of a remake of a remake and overly familiar, you would think. Oh God, not another
Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced
It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like
The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre feels like the inauguration of a godhead. And it’s not easy to separate the work from the reverence that surrounds it. Pinter One consists of sketches and playlets written
Spy stories, whether the stuff of fictional thrillers or, as in the case of Sergei Skripal, the real deal — often leave a question nagging. For all the tales of tradecraft and tension, double agents and drama, what difference did one person’s decision to spy really make? That is not the case with Oleg Gordievsky.
Most religions bind their adherents into a community of believers. Hinduism segregates them into castes. And people excluded from the hierarchical caste system — the ‘untouchables’ — are permanently doomed to a life of scripturally sanctioned calvary. This hideousness doesn’t, however, hinder Shashi Tharoor from breathlessly exalting Hinduism as ‘a religion for the 21st century’.
Those who study culture — or think about public policy in relation to it — often wrestle with the classic post hoc dilemma: did a work or movement in popular culture influence events in real life, or did it simply reflect the zeitgeist? Were, say, ‘video nasties’ responsible for an uptick in violence and sadism
Nominative determinism is the term for that pleasing accord you occasionally find between name and profession: the immigration minister named Brokenshire, the sprinter named Bolt, and so on. Apparently, there was once a Republican candidate for the California state assembly called Rich White. And how wonderful for there to be a comic novelist called Patrick
William Boyd’s 15th novel begins well enough. In 1894 Edinburgh, a 24-year-old piano tuner is promoted to the Paris branch of the firm he works for. Boyd is good on the inner workings of the piano: ‘the hammers, the rockers, the jacks, the whippens, the dampers — its innards were exposed like a clock with
In the autumn of 1897, after two years in jail on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde absconded to Italy with the deplorable Lord Alfred Douglas. Sodomy, whether with man or beast, carried a sentence of servitude for life in Victorian Britain: prigs protested that Wilde had got off lightly. In Naples, ragamuffin capital
There are only two British television wine presenters taxi drivers have heard of, Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke. Who can forget their double act on Food & Drink in the 1980s and ’90s? Since then innumerable cooks have become household names but there have never been any other wine celebrities who pass the cabbie test.
Coming 12 years after his acclaimed debut, Londonstani, Gautam Malkani’s second novel Distortion features a vivid argot, complicating and defamiliarising everyday terms and activities. In its pages, young people do things in exciting new ways, for example going down stairs: ‘It’s the most longed-out staircase you ever saw. Steps so far apart you gotta keep
Many wars have outsized and enduring effects on the societies that fight them, but for Americans the Vietnam war has one attribute that guarantees its longevity as a suppurating wound in the national psyche: it was a loss. Analyses have been numerous and perennial, from David Halberstam’s contemporary portrait of the policymakers who led the
It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been merchants from 19th-century Moscow. If Russia managed to contrive a semblance of western civilisation in St Petersburg, it was by virtue of being directly under the steely Tsarist eye. Moscow on the other hand, half
Never judge a book by its cover. To look at, this is a coffee-table book with shiny pages which make it too heavy to take on Ryanair, but that does it a disservice. In reality it is a shrewdly observed and engagingly written account of a neglected subject — the royal household. Tinniswood takes a
Churchill must be the most written-about figure in public life since Napoleon Bonaparte (a subject, incidentally, to which Andrew Roberts has already contributed a substantial and prize-winning biography). As the publisher obligingly warns us, there have been over 1,000 previous studies of Churchill’s life, including some dross, but many works of serious importance. To add
I was surprised and delighted to find Morten Morland’s wonderful imitation of a photograph of Margaret Thatcher peering through the curtains of Number Ten on The Spectator’s cover. It reminded me of one of my memorable experiences as a photographer with the ‘Iron Lady’. I was a staff photographer at the Times for about 15 years covering some
‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about
A reflection on still water was perhaps the first picture that Homo sapiens ever encountered. The importance of mirrors in the history of art has been underestimated. Alberti, Vasari and Leonardo recommended them as a tool for painters. Van Eyck delighted in them. Caravaggio had one in his studio. And they haven’t stopped fascinating artists.
‘Ballet is woman’ insisted George Balanchine, but ballet can also be a big man in a dress as any fan of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo will testify. The Trocks began life in 1974, dancing for a select few in pop-up performance spaces in Manhattan, but the troupe’s irresistible blend of low comedy and
