The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there been one or two more rehearsals, and a replacement of one of the singers. Vladimir Jurowski plans to perform the whole Ring cycle in due course with the LPO, but he needs to remember that
It’s a pity Will Self didn’t embark on his bus tour round Britain before the Brexit vote. If he had, we might have all had a better understanding of what’s going on in the shires. In his series of ten short programmes on Radio 4, Great British Bus Journey (produced by Laurence Grissell), Self sets
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of Freudian neurosis. Where class resentment exists it is said to emanate less from angry young proletarians than from well-spoken youths intent on garrotting their dividend-drawing fathers. Most contemporary accounts of the Cambridge spy ring, which
The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies, social misfits and minor criminals from an insider’s perspective — which is not surprising, considering his own history of drug and alcohol abuse. Certainly his most celebrated work, the hilarious yet profoundly moving story collection,
Early every morning through the spring of 2002, US troops at Bagram airfield on the Shomali plains north of Kabul assembled on a makeshift parade ground. After the daily briefing, an officer announced the number of days since 9/11, read a short obituary of a victim of the attack and reminded the troops of their
In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the award-festooned writer Mohsin Hamid about his latest novel Exit West — touching on the effects of technology, the migrant crisis, political writing and why his eight-year-old daughter is shaping up to be an emo kid. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like
It was approximately 4.50 a.m. in Ibiza: peak time on the dance floor. I was on the decks in one of the many sumptuous rooms of the superclub Pacha, spinning breakbeat on vinyl (early Noughties) and warming up for a live broadcast back to the UK. Without warning, a Pacha henchman burst into the DJ
‘This guy’s crazy,’ says a taxi driver, listening to a BBC interview with a man who has decided to become the first exporter of coffee from Mokha, Yemen, in 80 years. The man being interviewed, we have learned, has risked his life quite a few times over, in the most hair-raising ways imaginable it would
In the words of Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer: ‘We’re all doomed.’ Life remains a dangerous business whose outcome is always fatal. Despite all kinds of medical progress, the death rate is stubbornly fixed at 100 per cent, while the ways in which we die remain unchanged. At the same time, in a magnificent demonstration of
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have or not’. The Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies 1848–1887 is in the peculiarly unfortunate position of having produced a whole library that falls pretty much into this category. His novels such as Bevis (1882) or
If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple having a blank-faced argument in Tesco or a mother remonstrating with her toddler even though you couldn’t hear the words exchanged, then you understand the importance of the human voice. Command of tone, timbre, pitch
Tony White’s latest novel begins for all the world like a police procedural, following the delightfully named sleuth Rex King as he investigates the grisly murder of man in a Covent Garden theatre. Rex, who has a penchant for fish and chips, laments the tedium of police bureaucracy and frets over a cover-up relating to
For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin’s bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late to do him any good. Abandoned by his Native American mother and Irish American father, he has exiled himself from the only people who love him, an elderly couple on a sheep ranch in deepest
I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few years ago. Then it was confirmed. Cynicism seemed to ooze out of every millimetre of his vast, shiny sculpture. It was vividly apparent that this artwork wasn’t about beauty or transcendence or emotion. It was
Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters,’ he wrote from London in 1629, ‘I have never seen such a large number in one place.’ In Charles I: King and Collector the Royal Academy has reassembled only a fraction of what
The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t bother to reassemble them. The setting is a derelict seaside town on the south coast. Petey, a thick deckchair attendant, runs a guest-house with his ageing wife, Meg. She’s a zero-IQ cook whose signature dish
Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you had anticipated. The driver has the radio on and this limp, witless, landfill R&B crap is hammering into your sinuses. You want to tell him to turn it off right now but don’t because you
Gurn loves Effy, Effy is engaged to James but James is away with the fairies: a recipe for love tragedy. Tamara Rojo’s English National Ballet hasn’t danced August Bournonville’s La Sylphide since 1989 (before most of today’s dancers were born or thought of). The easy elevation and unshowy brilliance of the Danish style do not
Last year was a bit of a year for Radio 4 anniversaries; maybe most notably, Desert Island Discs celebrated 70 years on air. But oddly enough, so did another show. Round Britain Quiz, which you may remember vaguely from your childhood, or possibly your parents’ childhood, also reached 70 in 2017. There have been one
Downsizing is a film with the most brilliant premise. What if, to save the planet, we were all made tiny? What if we only took up a tiny amount of space and flew in tiny planes and produced tiny amounts of rubbish? And what if we could live in the sort of mansions that would
If you were to ask me by the end of the week what I had written about in this column at the beginning I would probably look blank, fumble desperately through a foggy recollection of plays, news items, snatches of interviews and then reply, ‘I’ve no idea.’ This business of forgetting so soon what was
These days, when it comes to people who used to be on the telly, the answer to the classic newspaper question ‘Where are they now?’ tends to be a fairly predictable one: they’re still on the telly — if, that is, you look carefully enough. They’re also quite likely to be travelling abroad with a
One of the Royal Opera’s greatest virtues is the care it takes with its revivals, even those that are virtually annuals, such as Jonathan Kent’s Tosca, the unnecessary replacement for Zeffirelli’s classic production. Kent’s version, with elaborate sets by the much-missed Paul Brown, was unveiled in 2006 and now has its ninth revival. It is
The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century Metroland, joins the local tennis club, where he dismisses all the girls his age as wholesome ‘Carolines’ but falls for Mrs Susan Macleod, a spirited, sarcastic woman in her forties. Paul shocks the village by
Accounts of the founding of the British Empire once echoed the pages of Boy’s Own, featuring visionaries, armed with a flag, a faith and a funny hat, arriving in exotic lands untouched by civilisation. Overcoming great odds, they would kick-start the regions’ histories, show the locals the proper way to live and extend the imperial
Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the greatest figures of 20th-century physics, with a reputation for infallibility. In Rome, pioneering atomic science under Mussolini, he was nicknamed ‘the Pope’. Escaping to America where he created the world’s first nuclear reactor, he was
This week’s books podcast celebrates the centenary of Muriel Spark. I’m joined by Alan Taylor (author of a new memoir of his friendship with Spark, Appointment in Arezzo) and the critic Philip Hensher to talk about Spark’s life, legacy, special strengths as a novelist — and the mystique that continues to surround the Scottish-born, Tuscan-dwelling author
You’re in the index, but not in the book. This ghostly sensation has been my experience since 1990 after commissioning Auberon Waugh to review Anthony Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts. Waugh’s verdict appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 20 May that year. Next morning, Powell resigned in a celebrated huff from the sister paper, of which I