The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Three weeks before Classic FM launched, I was on the radio in Hong Kong, introducing hits by Rick Astley and Wet Wet Wet. I’d just turned 21, and was working as a presenter for British Forces Radio. A phone call came from London. ‘My name is Michael Bukht. I’m setting up a new radio station
In Absolute Friends, one of John le Carré’s lesser works, the central character explains his rebirth as a left-wing firebrand, radicalised by Britain’s support for America’s invasion of Iraq. ‘It’s the old man’s impatience coming on early,’ he says. ‘It’s anger at seeing the show come round again one too many times.’ This is followed
Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well as the region’s exotic reputation, he was drawn by hopes that its benign climate would alleviate his chronic bronchial problems. In 1889 he arrived in Samoa and decided to settle there. He was a hit
The title of this book, By the Pen and What They Write, is a quotation from the Qur’an and comes from the opening of the ‘Surah al-Qalam’ (Chapter of the Pen), in which the authority of the cosmic scribes in heaven, whose writing determines the fate of humanity, is invoked in order to authenticate the
This week, in the books podcast, I talk to Harriett Gilbert – who has a good claim to be the voice of books on radio. With the 15th anniversary of the BBC World Service’s World Book Club (nine Nobel and 17 Booker winners have been guests to date), which she’s presented from its first episode
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember if this is the one about the guy who shagged his mum or the parent who offed their kids. (Bit of both.) For those whose Sophocles is hazy, let me summarise. After a civil war
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading role in Britain’s victory over Nazi Germany. Today it’s owned by Roman Abramovich, apparently — it seems he paid £90 million for it. But during the second world war, and for a few years thereafter,
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest …’ Like the author, this character is called Nicole, lives in Brooklyn, and is a
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent at Broadmoor, where his father was medical superintendent, have given him a solid grounding in psychiatric illness for these disquieting dramas. His ninth novel is set in London’s theatreland in 1947, and the grey, skeletal
Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or robots. Small wonder that Claude Lévi-Strauss specifically invoked science fiction for his theory of ‘binary opposition’. Sometimes these tensions are in the mise-en-scene — not just Earth vs. outer space, but settings — Lilliput and
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity — ostensibly by a narrator who knows that he is not a writer, but only a building contractor. Polyphonic narratives are replaced by a powerful, engaging clarity. This simplicity is the novel’s greatest strength, yet
If there were a prize awarded to the book with the best opening line, A. N. Wilson would be clearing a space on his mantelpiece. ‘Darwin was wrong’, he announces at the start of this hugely enjoyable revisionist biography, which will be read in certain scientific circles to the background noise of teeth being ground
Iain Sinclair is leaving London — like the croakiest of the ravens taking flight from the Tower. It is a proper blow: across five decades, he has been prowling the streets, part poet, part satirist, part prophet. Very few authors have fashioned a London more real than the one we see: Dickens, Conan Doyle, Patrick
Few publishing phenomena in recent years have been as gratifying as Chris Kraus’s cult 1997 masterpiece I Love Dick becoming a signifier of Twitter and Instagram chic. The ‘lonely girl phenomenology’ it exemplified has now attained cultural status, with first person, inventive writing by women often enjoying centre stage. It’s interesting, then, that just as
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale, with their beautiful, haunting songs; or maybe the lyrebird with its astonishing ear for imitation; or perhaps the composer would find his match in the exotic rarity of the ivory-billed woodpecker or giant ibis. But
Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while reading The Spectator. It probably doesn’t cross your mind, but in your hand you hold products from around the world. Your tea is from Ceylon, the sugar in it from Jamaica, and your porcelain cup
Another season of Game of Thrones is over, and nobody knows when it will return. After a run of seven short weeks, last night’s extended ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ brought the curtain down on Westeros for the time being, except the curtain here was the colossal wall of ice that is the last barrier
Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it might not appear to be what it is. What you see is a wrinkled, pinkish surface with a sort of dome of curving green and blueish shapes at the bottom. This, to Hume, is a
Schoenberg began Gurrelieder in 1900, but he didn’t hear it until 1913. By then, he’d moved on, and he ostentatiously refused to acknowledge the applause for what (as it turned out) would be the greatest public triumph of his career. Radical artist snubs ignorant masses: it’s a gesture that could stand for much of classical
Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is a heist caper that, to be fair, does what it says on the can. There is a heist. It is a caper. It also features an all-star cast and is said to be ‘the perfect summer entertainment’, which may or may not wash, depending on whether you believe the enjoyment
Grade: D+ Well, this is truly awful. Perhaps the worst album by a major band since Mardi Gras by Creedence Clearwater Revival back in ’72. And that’s a lot better than this pompous, trite and at times desperate drivel. Their first album, Funeral, was quirkily anthemic and packed with memorable tunes. The second — Neon
This year’s Lucerne Festival is given its identity by having as its theme ‘Identity’. Since the word doesn’t mean anything, that isn’t a lot of help. But does a festival have to have a theme? Surely a glut of fine performances of great, or at least interesting, music is enough? Michael Haefliger, the icy artistic
Truman Capote should have been called Truman Persons. His father, Archulus, abbreviated his first name and introduced himself as Arch Persons. ‘And that,’ scoffed his son, ‘sounded like a flock of bishops.’ The young scribbler was thrilled when his divorced mother married a rich Cuban, Joseph Capote, whose zippy and eccentric name he gladly adopted.
Yet another sign that we are living in very strange times: a pair of celebrities, their names made by TV, have switched over to radio for their next project. Not starring in their own series on BBC2 or Channel 4, but on a medium that could have become redundant yet is refusing to give way
Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ might find a little excessive two minutes before Armageddon. In this respect, then, Atypical is proving rather atypical. The reason for the mixed reception is that its 18-year-old protagonist, Sam, has autism — and, as
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned Beauman’s latest, and arguably most impressive, novel. Two rival expeditions set off from the United States to the jungles of Honduras to find the temple — one with the intention of using it as a
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge of bile’ against the novel. That imperialist bully of a genre has ‘squatted on the writer’s life’ and defines his ‘sense of worth or lack of it’. Our narrator, as it happens, is named ‘Amit
‘I have nothing to doe but work and read my Eyes out,’ complained Anne Vernon in 1734, writing from her country residence in Oxfordshire to a friend in London. She and her circle of correspondents (who included Mary Delany, the artist and bluestocking) swapped rhyming jokes, ‘a Dictionary of hard words’, and notes on what
It’s an irony of our secular age that the more we fear death, the more enticing we find it. The past few years have seen a slew of bestsellers on the subject — Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm