Culture

Culture

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

Yet more ponies for Jean

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After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s superb The Child that Books Built exists, we need this new memoir by Lucy Mangan, about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting. Where Spufford mined the depths of his childhood anguish in his

A thing of shreds and patches

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On the wall of her tumbledown house in central Baghdad, an elderly Christian widow named Elishva has a beloved icon of St George with his lance raised. She chats with the saint like an old friend, but wonders why, in the picture, he stays frozen mid-thrust and why ‘he hadn’t killed the dragon years ago’.

An unprincipled Principal

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‘Dreaming spires’? Yes, but sometimes there are nightmares. Brian Martin, awarded the MBE for services to English literature, is at home in Oxford, where he spent most of his career teaching, and seems to know all about the professional and psychological complexities of the university. Holt College, his fourth novel, written with dedicated probity and

Dominic Green

Ankle-deep in LSD

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‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910, ‘Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots/, And the Cabots talk only to God.’ Also home, in 1968, to Mel Lyman, a folk musician turned LSD guru who believed he was God, and to Van

Pirates of the Southern Ocean

Lead book review

Sea Shepherd is a radical protest group made famous — or notorious — by the American cable TV series Whale Wars and by the support of numerous Hollywood celebrities and rock stars. Having previously concentrated on obstructing whale-hunting from Japan to the Faroe Islands, it now focuses on other devastating acts of marine plunder. In

Join the club

Miscellaneous

I’m bored.’ ‘Read a book.’ This sequence more or less summarises my childhood (along with ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Eat some fruit.’) At the time, such instruction was loathsome and it never ceased to amaze me that the grown-ups didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I had obviously considered, and rejected, the idea of picking up

Spectator competition winners: sequels to a six-word story

The latest assignment was to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Long before Twitter, so urban legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini-masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turned out to be a load

Année érotique

Arts feature

By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio in rue La Boétie, in the ritzy 8th arrondissement, owner of a country mansion in the north-west, towards Normandy, and was chauffeured around in an adored Hispano-Suiza. He stored the thousands of French francs from

Faulty connections

Exhibitions

In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art: Graham Sutherland was going to be the leading painter. ‘Then downstage left, picking his nose, Francis Bacon sauntered on. And the whole scene was changed.’ But how did it alter? What happened to figurative painting

Hammer horror

Cinema

You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the first thing to say is that it is exceptionally violent. I don’t say this disapprovingly but if your threshold for violence is as low as mine — I incurred a paper cut

Fashion victim

Television

By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas of 2016. Produced by Ryan Murphy, it laid out the story in a beautifully clear, largely chronological way that made us appreciate, all over again, just how strange the whole O.J. business was — not

Gallic pieties

Music

My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back on to my DVDs and CDs — vinyl, even — I took the opportunity to survey some of the manifestations and investigations of religious feeling in 20th-century French music. I began with Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal,

Lloyd Evans

Save the children

Theatre

Fanny & Alexander opens like a Chekhov comedy and turns into an Ibsen tragedy. Ingmar Bergman’s movie script, adapted by Stephen Beresford, has been directed for the stage by Max Webster. The children, Fanny and Alexander, belong to the famous Ekdahl acting dynasty who live in Bohemian chaos. Their home is full of jokes and

Ladies first | 8 March 2018

Radio

You can’t move for women’s voices on the airwaves at the moment — Julie Walters on Classic FM leading off its new big series on turning points in music. Kate Molleson and Georgia Mann joining Sarah Walker and Fiona Talkington on Radio 3 (which this week also gave a big nod to female composers such

Rod Liddle

Nils Frahm: All Melody

More from Arts

Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has its fair share of tuneless charlatans and chancers. Frahm is not one of those. There are of course the repetitive synthesiser arpeggios familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to sit in some achingly

Feeling sorry for Frankenstein’s monster is hardly new

In the last couple of days my Twitter feed, always a cheerful place, has been more full of jokes than usual. The source of the mirth is Exeter University academic Nick Groom, and his ex cathedra pronouncements on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. According to Groom, it is possible – gasp – to read Frankenstein’s creature

Shadows of the past

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The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section turns in on the next, binding them together with devastating effect. It is one of the oddest and most radically structured moments in pop, and one that came to mind when reading these three very

A time for reflection | 8 March 2018

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The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an uncomfortable one — for reflection. She sifts through her own immediate and past experience: caring for her dying mother in her early twenties; her relationship with her partner Johannes; her childhood; the birth of her

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Wendy Cope

In this week’s Books podcast, I’m joined by the great Wendy Cope, whose new collection Anecdotal Evidence is just out. I talk to her about why she’s funniest when she’s most serious, the fascination of writing in form, the disappearance of Jake Strugnell, the recent row over whether the spoken-word work of Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest

Flitting from flower to flower

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‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book with this assertion by Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and it rather sums up the whole endeavour of the volume. Feigel weaves close readings of Lessing’s prose, both fiction and

They fill you with the faults they had

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You attempt to write a review with a stiff dose of objectivity, but it’s hard not to start with a degree of fondness for an anthology put together by a magician who has performed in North Korea. Dale Salwak also has a sideline as a professor of literature at Citrus College in Los Angeles, and

Listing or sinking?

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The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century was no glamorous picnic, as she grappled with a ceremonial sword in a golf bag, three months supply of toothpaste, a crate of hot water bottles and enough safety pins for every emergency. Born in

Going down in glory

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In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato — the largest and heaviest in history — embarked upon a suicide mission. The ship sailed to Okinawa, where a huge American assault was taking place. Under extensive enemy fire, it sank, as was expected, to the bottom of the Pacific. With it, it took 2,280 of its

Sam Leith

Getting so much better all the time

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Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at any point in human history, only a stone-cold idiot would choose any time other than the present. On average, humans are by orders of magnitude healthier, wealthier, nicer, happier, longer lived, more free and better