The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Alastair Campbell is a man of many parts. Journalist, spin doctor extraordinaire, diarist and now novelist. For this, his third novel, he has teamed up with the former professional footballer Paul Fletcher to produce a very readable thriller. The division of labour seems to be that Campbell has done most of the writing while Fletcher
This remorselessly slow-moving, hazily allegorical drama about ageing and xenophobia is Jim Crace’s 12th book, and the first to appear since he announced his retirement from writing in 2013. Like much of his other work, it lays its scene in a topographical and temporal bubble of the author’s own devising, where recognisable aspects of society
A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the army that has recently advanced over the literary landscape? Perhaps a drizzle of nature writers? Here they come, heads down in the rain, turning out their pockets for the samples of fungi and moss they
That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without thinking about his women. For Charlotte Bingham, though, the connection occurred at a deeper level. When her father, John — legendary spook, long believed to be the model for George Smiley — called her into
Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped the bed curtains open on a previously secretive profession. Steeped as medicine is in uncomfortable facts about debilitating illness, pain and the stress of treating intractable conditions, it was a subject ripe for exposure. Under
I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of
Reading the lip-smacking reports of the latest troubled celebrity relationships (Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux definitely high and dry, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne allegedly on the rocks) I couldn’t help musing that stars – and more specifically, the place they occupy in our mass psychological landscape – have very much changed since the first
To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel — to see Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ at Turner Contemporary. The exhibition has been organised by a group of local residents, who selected the exhibits, designed the layout, and wrote the exhibition texts. In
One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction of visitors. Some are getting on a bit and their pangs of recognition as they pass 1970s straightening tongs or Carmen heated rollers are evident. One woman exclaimed, as she passed a Ronson hairdryer with
Listen closely, among the shelves of the last remaining music shops, in student dorm rooms and amid the flat whites and reclaimed wood of certain coffee shops, and you’ll hear a sound that many thought long banished. Check out the steadily rising sales figures of the past few years and there’s little doubt: the vinyl
This week’s edition of Ramblings with Clare Balding did all the usual things: a walk in the country (cue breathy conversation as we followed her up hill and down dale), braving the elements (there’s always rain at some point) with a dog in tow, and in the company of someone for whom the walk has
Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on and that punky, guitar-driven power-pop funk has long since been expunged. Singer Alex Kapranos expressed a wish for Franz Ferdinand to reinvent themselves — and has turned to the same source inspiration as did their
Dark River is the much-anticipated third feature from British writer/director Clio Barnard and it is one of those bleak, rural- England dramas featuring cement-coloured skies, wind, rain, mud, rusted old farm machinery and dead animals — do people who move out from the city know what they are letting themselves in for? — as well
ITV’s Marcella (Monday) represents another triumphant breakthrough in the portrayal of female cops on television. Of course, thanks to more or less every other crime show around, we already know that women in their forties can be senior police officers. But what Marcella makes even clearer than, say, Vera or No Offence is that so
Audio description, or AD, as it is fondly called, is coming of age. Once consigned to the utility room of grey voices reading boring cues to inform blind people what was going on on stage or screen, AD is now a dynamic narrative form that is findinga presence in almost all the arts (from opera,
A bumper fortnight for Covent Garden florists thanks to a 20th-anniversary flower shower for the Royal Ballet’s Marianela Nunez and bales of bouquets to mark major debuts by new(ish) principals Francesca Hayward and Yasmine Naghdi. Giselle, the timid village beauty whose ghost returns to forgive her duplicitous lover, was never an obvious vehicle for Nunez’s
None of us is above YouTube, and nothing is beneath it. We have of course all long since submitted to a universal medium whose sole purpose appears to be the promotion of the universal below-average, but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t pleasure to be had from watching content created by so-called ‘content-creators’ whose created
The Donmar’s new show, The York Realist, dates from 2001. The programme notes tell us that the playwright, Peter Gill, ‘is one of the most important and influential writers and directors of the past 30 years’. Who wrote that? Not Peter Gill, I hope. The play, directed by Robert Hastie, follows a gay affair between
‘Welcome to our hearts again, Iolanthe!’ sings the fairy chorus in Gilbert and Sullivan’s fantasy-satire, and during this exuberant new production by Cal McCrystal you could almost hear the assembled G&S fans sighing in agreement. Iolanthe is our trump card against the sceptics, and not merely because Gilbert’s digs at parliamentary politics are still so
The impermanence of works of art is a worry for curators though not usually for artists, especially not at the start of their careers. But Anthony McCall was only in his mid-thirties when his creations vanished before his eyes. It was in New York in the early 1970s that McCall came up with the idea
Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the Spanish-born waiter in Bonn’s Casa Pepe approached my table, it struck me as an opportune moment to solicit his opinion about the former dictator. ‘No sé mucho,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know a whole lot.’
Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The Adulterants, however, talks of ‘the modern everyman… stubbornly ensconced in an adolescence that has extended well beyond his biological prime’. We thus expect a man-child, resiling from responsibility and dependent on internet porn and gaming
This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that – despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at
Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines a society better described by the formula ‘the future = technology – sex’. There is no procreation in it, and any manifestation of sexuality is a crime. Its inhabitants have left Earth for a space
The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely it. However, we now have a new contender: Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series. It was a brief but intriguing review in the TLS that first alerted me to the books, with their sidelined spooks, contemptuously
The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says: ‘My wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice.’ Arce stayed on in the capital, Tegucigalpa, ‘fighting against addictions, sadness and depression’. He believes he ‘won’ that fight, ‘but only because each morning
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It up-ends your thoughts, turns bone into flesh, makes life unlivable, death seem glorious.’ In her first book, the literary critic and art historian Laura Freeman is determined to tell the truth about her recovery from
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries tend to be popular. We generally think of radicals as being primarily like Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez, whose works, after decades, still mainly appeal to a small group of sophisticates. But if one