The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I have a confession to make, which may upset many readers. Having only a passing acquaintance with his books, I’ve long experienced a faint allergic reaction to the works of P.G. Wodehouse. It is, I think, to do with the mannered, heavily whimsical nature of his world; the circumlocutory sentences; the ‘right-ho’s and ‘dash it’s
In May 1940, as the Nazis invade Belgium, the residents of a sedate apartment block in Place Brugmann, Brussels, wake to find that their longtime neighbours, the Raphaëls, have disappeared. Alice Austen uses this moment as the starting point for her subtle debut novel about how a diverse group of Belgians react to the Nazi
‘Bread is simple. Or is it?’ That is the question David Wright poses about a keystone food that spans the globe and the whole of history. Breaking Bread examines the science behind the ur-loaf, the development of the Chorleywood method, the economics of selling the stuff, the role that it has played in religion and
It was a relatively minor episode in a period marked by the killing of two African presidents, months of massacres in churches, schools and sports stadiums, a biblical exodus by much of the Hutu population, a cholera outbreak in refugee camps established in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a rebel takeover of
There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for
When her brother Lionel was born in 1949, ‘the concept of neurodiversity didn’t exist’, writes Caroline Elton. The subtitle of her profoundly moving memoir, ‘A Portrait of My Autistic Brother’, is misleading. The book is really about the experience of being the sibling of a person who is not like you. Lionel was nine years
Anita Lasker survived the Holocaust because, as a Berlin teenager, she had enjoyed her cello lessons. The Hungarian Lily Mathé’s violin performances had once impressed the man who became the Auschwitz concentration camp commandant. Alma Rosé, among Europe’s most talented musicians and the niece of Gustav Mahler, became the conductor who kept these young women
‘Your muse or your wife’ is quite the ultimatum to throw at an artist. But that was the choice Henri Matisse faced in 1939 when his wife of 30 years (you might know her as ‘Woman with a Hat’, 1905) had had enough of Lydia Delectorskaya (‘The Pink Nude’, 1935). It’s a dilemma which forms
There are several dozen graves from the second world war (and some from the first) in churchyards near my village on Salisbury Plain, but all of them British or Commonwealth ones. Nor have I seen any enemy graves elsewhere, although some 4,500 Germans died on British soil during the last world war, and a far
In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM computer system called Deep Blue. It had defied all expectations, exploring some 300 million possible moves in one second. The most that skilled chess players can contemplate is about 110 moves at any given time. It was a seminal moment in the
On 18 November 1910, 300 women marched on the Houses of Parliament to demand the right to vote. Their protest was met with shameless brutality: punches, kicks, beatings and sexual assault from policemen and male bystanders. Three weeks earlier, a young woman named Ethel Le Neve had been tried for her part in the most
‘I’m full of excitement waiting for this to dry out,’ Sir Frank Bowling exclaims. We are sitting in his studio, a room in a quiet Victorian yard that survives amid the tower blocks of Elephant and Castle. In front of us a semi-finished canvas – a glorious welter of yellow and orange in diverse modulations
Grade: A– There’s a species of music-lover who enjoys pointing out that Elgar isn’t played much on the Continent – the musical equivalent of those social media bores who pop up each April to reveal that Saint George was Turkish, ackshully. It’s all rot, of course. Some of the best Elgar performances of recent years
The photograph on the cover of Jessica Duchen’s magnificent new biography of Dame Myra Hess shows a statuesque lady sitting at the keyboard, hair swept back into the neatest of buns. Add a pair of half-moon spectacles and she could be Dr Evadne Hinge, accompanist to Dame Hilda Bracket. This isn’t to imply that Dame
Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure of merit. Martin Gayford: ‘No one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on.’ Laura Cumming at least gave examples. Of ‘The Cadet and his Sister’ (1988), she commented: ‘Bondage – physical,
You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous week putting together all the essentials for a successful stay: personalised bags of truffle-flavoured popcorn and pretzel nibbles for their bedside; hand-blended, sensually curated bath salts; layer cake flavoured with honey from your private hives;
One of the few indisputably great ballerinas of her generation, Natalia Osipova is a magnificent exemplar of the Russian school, her training at the Bolshoi furnishing her with a steely security of technique, powerful stage personality, and spirit of dauntless daring. Happily based at the Royal Ballet since 2013, she’s now also one of ours.
Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that beloved old fairytale, the Sex Pistols’s Slaying of the Dinosaurs, it’s worth remembering that nothing of the sort occurred. The big beasts of the 1970s – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes – thrived into the 1980s
Punk rock, packaged, parcelled, and boxed up as a treat for nostalgic wrinklies. That’s the deal with Punk Off!, a touring show that recently completed a lap of the country at the Dominion Theatre. Most of the audience were there to recall their rebellious heyday. ‘It’s about to get really, really loud,’ announced the compère,
When Dorothy Mills disappeared to Haiti to research a travel book, the British press led with the headline: EARL’S DAUGHTER GOES TO SEE BABIES EATEN IN BUSH. Mills was never out of the news in the interwar years. She wrote nine novels as well as six travel books, all of which sold briskly, and in
One usually likes to think that scientists know what they’re doing. Here’s something that might shake your confidence. In bio-medical research, scientists often use cell lines. These are in vitro cells, originally taken from a human or animal donor, which can be experimented on to help develop new drugs or treatments. The problem is that,
This hefty book is more about context – the turbulent years of mid-19th-century Europe – than it is about its two protagonists. Details of the many popular uprisings of the time, plus the jockeying for position of the main players and the battles and intrigues involved, are so packed into its pages that teasing out
In 1821, while Byron and Shelley briefly shared what they high-mindedly called an ‘artist’s colony’ in Pisa, along with Mary Shelley and Byron’s current squeeze Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, they both impulsively decided to commission the building of boats in order to explore the gulf of La Spezia. While Shelley, in deference to his friend, named
Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in
Tsundokists of the world, unite! You have a new champion in Lucy Mangan, whose follow up to her entrancing memoir of childhood reading (Bookworm) is an unabashed paean to the pleasure of acquiring more books than you could ever possibly read in your life. That does not stop Mangan from trying, and this is a
The 16th-century Ottoman ruler Sultan Suleyman liked to impose himself on foreign monarchs from the start, always beginning official letters with the uncompromising assertion: ‘I am the great lord and conqueror of the whole world.’ In this sparkling account of his middle years, the second in an ambitious three-volume biography, Christopher de Bellaigue never actually
It is one of academia’s horrible ironies that linguistics, the subject devoted to human communication, has managed to communicate nothing about its many startling and fundamental discoveries to the world outside its university departments. So any book such as this linguistic tour of some of the world’s exotic, hidden and endangered languages is to be
The artist Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, the wife of Clive Bell, is enjoying the limelight this year as an exhibition of her work travels the country. Hot on its coat-tails comes Wendy Hitchmough’s beautifully illustrated new study of Bell’s life and art. As the former curator of the painter’s home at Charleston, Hitchmough writes with
The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is familiarity; there is love. It could be one of the pictures on my phone from last weekend of my daughter with her six-month-old. In fact, it dates from Tuscany c.1290,
