The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Why did the Roman Empire collapse? It’s a question that’s been puzzling writers ever since Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century. One classicist — a German, inevitably — bothered to count up all the various hypotheses for the fall, and came up
There are nods to dark masters in Malacqua — undercurrents of Kafka, a drumbeat of Beckett — but Nicola Pugliese’s novel has its own compelling voice, filled with the sound of water rushing, gushing, flowing, hammering on rooftops, falling in threads from the sky. Naples is drowning, disintegrating, battered by relentless rain. Buildings collapse; huge
Back in 1990, Roald Dahl wrote a book called The Minpins, which was illustrated by Patrick Benson, a very good artist. By now we regard Dahl (when writing for children) to be inescapably linked with Quentin Blake, to the point where any other combination seems fundamentally unsatisfactory, like trying to decouple Goscinny and Uderzo in
The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless marriage to ‘a perfectly nice but remarkably boring’ barrister, Lord Swinfen, and was dining at the Ritz with a friend from MI6 — she had worked there in April 1940, decoding the positions of German
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity. Leisure travel has given us the possibility of first-hand exposure to once very remote places. You don’t have to be particularly privileged or adventurous to go on holiday in January to south-east Asia: two weeks
Imagine if we had access to over a hundred Shakespeare plays in which the Bard was at or near the top of his game – but we didn’t bother to watch them and couldn’t even remember their names. Bach has as good a claim as any composer to be the Shakespeare of music, yet a
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Mariss Jansons Barbican NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover / Andrew Manze Symphony Hall At the end of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony Mariss Jansons asked the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to stand up, and they refused. That’s not something that occurs in every concert; in fact, you might never see it happen. But this
The latest competition, to submit a Lord’s Prayer for the 21st century, drew a smallish but pleasingly varied entry. One of my favourites, among the many parodies of the Lord’s Prayer already out there, is Ian Dury’s ‘Bus Driver’s Prayer’: ‘Our father,/ who art in Hendon/ Harrow Road be Thy name./ Thy Kingston come; thy
Battle of the Sexes recreates the famed, culture-changing 1973 tennis match between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, a self-proclaimed chauvinist, and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, the world’s top female player who was out to liberate women and herself. (She was just discovering her true sexuality at that time.) Unless you happen to identify with Bobby — ‘Don’t
The late arch-Rossinian Philip Gossett regarded Semiramide as a neoclassical work, vaguely and alarmingly suggesting to me a musical equivalent of Canova, a sculptor I detest. Actually, I don’t think the terminology is helpful. Nor is Semiramide monumental in the way that the programme book suggests. There is a notable lack of ensembles and of
On a bullet train out of Shanghai, a nuclear family catches my eye. The father, weather-beaten and wearing an ill-fitting suit, is clearly a working man. His wife, younger and city sleek, is dressed to impress. Their son, an only child, is four or five years old. Curious, I get talking and discover they are
It’s a weird sensation getting your child back for an extended period when for the previous decade you’ve been packing him off every few weeks back to boarding school. Obviously, it’s quite pleasant, amusing and enlightening to study at close hand and at length this alien thing that you’ve bred. At the same time, though,
The inexplicable popularity of Ivo Van Hove continues. The director’s latest visit to the fairies involves an updated version of Network, a creaky and over-rated news satire from 1976. Van Hove appears to be unconstrained by thrift or self-discipline and he fills the Lyttelton stage with expensive clobber. It’s like a hangar full of half-tested
In the last week of October, the middle-aged Baxter Dury and the boy Baxter Dury were brought together. The 45-year-old man released his fifth album, Prince of Tears, his best so far. The five-year-old boy, meanwhile, appeared on the cover of New Boots and Panties!!, by his father Ian Dury, released in 1977, but re-released
There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in which Tippi Hedren is emptying a safe while a cleaning lady silently drags her mop towards her. Can Hedren, playing the disturbed Marnie, slip down the stairs before the woman turns her head? I felt a twinge of the same panic last week interviewing the composer Nico
If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather than be accused of making false allegations to further their own malign agenda, the chances are you could do with a laugh right now. The resurgent far right’s threat feels frightening but expected, whether from
My guest this week is the comedienne and writer Viv Groskop, and our subject is the greats of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature. In her new book The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Viv tells us (among other things) how Dostoyevsky can calm you down, how Anna Akhmatova can cheer you up and how
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for the manslaughter of Angel Melendez. Alig, leader of New York’s Club Kids during the 1980s and early 1990s, features as a minor character in Jarett Kobek’s breakneck, crazed ride through NYC’s nightlife from 1986 to
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students can only dream of. A psychological crime novel set in 19th-century Scotland, it became a surprise bestseller — and it was also shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. It is not an easy act
In December 1996 Martin Amis told listeners of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs what would relieve his solitude were he to end up cast away in paradise with one piece of music, a luxury and a book for company. He chose Coleman Hawkins’s version of the jazz standard ‘Yesterdays’ as his only record — seduction
Different people find different things impressive. Some claim, for instance, to experience a sense of wonder at the fact of being alive. But one has nothing to compare it to, so why find it surprising? Another sensibility will find joy in the observation of E.M. Cioran, the sardonic Romanian philosopher who wrote: ‘It is not
‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this. Degas is after all one of the greatest names in European art, but there is much about him that remains enigmatic. Some of his works seem secretive, even surreptitious — the extraordinary monotypes he made
The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with a refuge from attack. Inside, a gender-segregating blanket divided the employees’ emergency dormitory in two. But such propriety masked the energy, idiosyncrasy and influence that ballooned within the Portland Place walls during the wartime years.
It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets of the Holy Roman Empire was to provide the royal families of Europe with some of their most dismal consorts. In the century and a half after George I came to the throne in 1714
Wally Funk is on a mission — to make real her dream that a woman will walk on the moon in her lifetime. She was one of 13 female pilots who trained at Nasa alongside the Mercury 7 astronauts as they prepared to go to the moon. But when the Apollo programme was abandoned in
The headlines announcing the opening of the dome-shaped Louvre Abu Dhabi are a cornucopia of superlatives. ‘Spectacular palace of culture shimmers in the desert’ and ‘a cultural cornerstone where East meets West’ were two of the most laudatory. ‘East meets West’ is the frequently used cliché. However the new museum, which cost around $1 billion
Hamlet Theatre Royal, Norwich, and touring until 1 December I had mixed feelings about Brett Dean’s Hamlet as I went into the Theatre Royal in Norwich and mixed feelings when I came out of it: unfavourable, largely, on the way in and favourable, largely, on the way out. I am still left wondering why a
Morrissey, Smiths frontman turned solo crooner turned novelist, has long taken pleasure in rattling the establishment. From mocking the monarchy on the 1986 Smiths album The Queen is Dead, to his lovely ballad about how much he wanted Margaret Thatcher to die, to his frequent foot-stomping over the meat industry, the music industry and industry
Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three David Plante New York Review of Books Classics, 2017, £10.99 Worlds Apart: A Memoir David Plante Bloomsbury, 2016, £10.99 Becoming a Londoner: A Diary David Plante Bloomsbury, 2014, £9.99 The novelist David Plante has been keeping a diary of his life since 1959. Now running to many millions of words,
