The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The centenary of the Russian Revolution has arrived right on time, just as the liberal democratic world is getting a taste of what it’s like to feel political gravity give way. In 2017, Lenin lives. ‘In many ways he was a thoroughly modern phenomenon,’ writes Victor Sebestyen in Lenin the Dictator, the kind of demagogue
The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther producing his 95 Theses, to break it up into bite-size pieces in order to sample its distinctive local flavours. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of Christian history at Cambridge, takes England as his territory, and
Kahlil Gibran was 40 years old, a short — he was just 5’3” — dapper man with doleful eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, and in the first throes of the alcoholism that would result in his early death, when in 1923 he published The Prophet. A collection of 26 prose-poems, written in quasi-Biblical language,
In Yoko Tawada’s surreal and beguiling novel we meet three bears: mother, daughter and grandson. But there will be no porridge or bed-testing here: these are bears with a difference. Tawada has form in animal-linked fiction: The Bridegroom Was a Dog won a major Japanese award. Writing in Japanese and German, she is a prizewinner
Talleyrand was 76 when he took up the post of French ambassador in London in 1830. Linda Kelly deals only with the last phase of Talleyrand’s long and tumultuous career, but this short book brings him marvellously to life. He was not an impressive figure. Little over 5’3” in height, he walked with a limp
Michael Fishwick’s new novel tells the story of a young man called Robbie, who has been uprooted from his London home after his mother’s death. He finds himself in rural Dorset, where he inhabits a capacious present that has ample room for the intrusions of the mythic past. Struggling with his loss, Robbie has taken
Trailing rave US reviews, fan letters from Yann Martel and Khaled Hosseini and a reputation as ‘Doctor Zhivago for the 21st century’, comes this outstanding historical saga from debut novelist Sana Krasikov. It’s a dazzling and addictive piece of work from an author born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia whose family emigrated to New
The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning ‘counter’) was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici bank, founded in Florence in 1397, operated like a prototype mafia consortium: it rubbed out rivals and spread tentacles into what Niccolò Machiavelli called the alti luoghi (‘high places’) of local power interests. Undoubtedly, Medici money was
Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can anyone know more?’ In Susan Hill’s new novel, Olive’s acceptance of the primacy of feeling represents a coming of age. Her maturity is achieved at a cost. As in a number of her recent novels
Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist religious autocracy, is portrayed as being totally intolerant of free-thinkers. This is a powerful satire on an Islamist dictatorship. It is unsurprising that Sansal’s writings are censored in his native Algeria. The religious structure of
I can recall exactly where I was 40 years ago when I didn’t buy the first issue — or ‘prog’ —of 2000 AD. The just-launched sci-fi comic, featuring ‘space-age dinosaurs’, ‘the new Dan Dare’ and a ‘FREE SPACE SPINNER’, i.e. a mini frisbee, looked quite exciting and, at 8p, good value for pocket money; but,
Belatedly, goodnight to Chuck Berry. Almost everything that has been worthwhile in rock music for 60-odd years has derived from his clever, knowing, mix of cracker-country and black blues. Most of the guitar solos you ever heard had their roots in that raucous and effective two string – E and b – chiming of Chuck’s:
Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete sentence in the past imperfect: ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti the Florentine was making…’. The implication was that actually completing a perfect masterpiece was an unattainable goal, so instead he just had to leave off (a great many
Wouldn’t it be nice, in these divided times, for humanity to have a common enemy – preferably an inanimate one. Welcome to the What’s That Thing? Award. We’re in our second year, hunting down the most execrable new pieces of public art that have appeared in the past year in this country and this time we’ve teamed up with the Architecture Foundation.
Creaking doors, rustling leaves and leaky taps make up the soundtrack of Olivier Assayas’ improbable horror film Personal Shopper. But the most unnerving (and grating) sound in this supernatural fashion show are the iMessage alerts that may or may not be coming from the beyond. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because, like so much else
I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger, in the new production by Kasper Holten. The run of the Royal Opera’s recent productions of Wagner — appalling Tristans, a dire succession of Parsifals, mediocre Rings — hadn’t prepared me for
The exit signs were switched off and the stalls were in utter darkness. One by one, 15 invisible dancers, their joints attached to tiny spotlights, began to colonise the far end of the hall, forming fresh constellations with every pose. The audience smiled in wonder, like tots at a planetarium. Tree of Codes, which had
To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay
Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his
It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he wrote. But he had, I think, another secret up his sleeve that is still little known. He was a tailgunner in the RAF. Indeed the service was his family and a thread of blue serge
It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political and economic isolation. The discovery on 16 November 2011 of the dead body of the British businessman Neil Heywood in Room 1605 of the Lucky Holiday Hotel in the Chinese city of Chongqing was not
The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the Dutch director released RoboCop and the excitement among me and my friends at catching two hours of unmitigated ultra-violence reached fever pitch. He did not disappoint. That was in 1988 and it was interesting later
Nowadays, most of us living in the liberal West agree that there can never be anything morally wrong with love between consenting adults. This is good for society but bad for novelists. The tale of the grand passion that runs foul of societal mores is a staple of literature. What is Madame Bovary if Emma
In the autumn of 1888 London was in a state of terrified excitement over Jack the Ripper. There had never been a killer like this in England before, wrote Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, the joint editors of The Spectator. They congratulated the British public on not succumbing to the continental habit of lynching
This is an odd one, not least because it claims to be a novel, which it isn’t. Emmanuel Carrère, writer and film-maker, looks back on an earlier self when, as a young man, he had a phase of being a devout Catholic, going to Mass daily, making his confession, the whole caboodle. He decides to
When Australia imposed generic packaging in its war on cigarettes, there was consumer research into the most deterrent colour. Pantone 448 was chosen, a sort of sludgy green-brown. When it was described as ‘olive’, Oz’s federation of olive growers formally complained. Certainly, colours move us. Interior designers know that yellow makes people angry, while in
Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy,
The minister’s private secretary wrote to another cabinet minister about the previous day’s cabinet meeting: They cannot agree about what occurred. There must have been some decision, as Bright’s resignation shows. My chief has told me to ask you what the devil was decided, for he be damned if he knows. Will you ask Mr
Last year, I attempted to pass through security in an American airport carrying a small black box, containing eight batteries and a visible circuit board. If the switch was flipped, the display counted down in red flashing numbers. Unsuprisingly, the officer in Salt Lake City pulled it out of my hand baggage. ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s