The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In this week’s books podcast I talk about Treasure Palaces with its editor Maggie Fergusson. This is a remarkable collection of essays by writers on revisiting museums that have meant something special to them. The book has a stellar cast-list — Alice Oswald, Julian Barnes, Andrew Motion, Margaret Drabble, Roddy Doyle, William Boyd and Ali
Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World is a collection of pieces by the American essayist Andrew Solomon (Chatto, £25). From Moscow to Mongolia, Antarctica to Afghanistan, Solomon observes the world and reflects what he sees both on himself and on his own country. Resilience, hope, flux: Solomon has an outsider’s eagle eye.
Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (Hogarth, £16.99), her modern version of The Taming of the Shrew, came as a surprise: the funniest book she has written, much funnier than Shakespeare. Private Eye considers that I should not praise Ferdinand Mount because I was at Eton with him but we never spoke to each other there, so
I’ve chosen two very different stories of young American lives. In Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian/Faber, £16.99), the journalist Gary Younge anatomises American society and its squandered potential by means of a simple conceit: he chose a random date in 2013 and investigated the lives of those children and teenagers shot and
On 27 July 1613 a man prostrated himself in the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, having first made a solemn declaration: ‘I, Juan Bautista Maíno, make profession and promised obedience…’ Thus he became a Dominican friar. At the time, Maíno was halfway through painting ten canvases for the high altar of this very
Charlie Zailer wasn’t sure if she’d won or lost. On the victory side of the equation, she’d managed to avoid spending Christmas Day with her sister, and she’d successfully blamed it on work. Her ‘Sorry, but I have to go in for at least a few hours’, delivered in a tone that suggested it was
My father had many faces. There was much that made up the man. If you think you ‘know’ John R. Cash, think again. There are many layers, so much beneath the surface. First, I knew him to be fun. Within the first six years of my life, if asked what Dad was to me I
There have been two revolutions in television during my lifetime. The first happened in 1975 when Sony launched its Betamax video system — which allowed viewers to record shows and see them when they wanted. Of course, Betamax was found to be clunky and unreliable and it was soon replaced by VHS but, without realising
They will be sitting there right now, listening tearfully to the song for one last time on their dinky little iPods, before deleting it for ever. ‘-Heathcliff — it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home, so co-wo-wo-wold, let me into your window.’ No, Kate. You are never coming in through our windows again. What about the
What if? is the engine of every great story. What if the toys came to life when their owner left the room? What if the prince’s uncle killed the king, seduced the queen, and stole the crown? Lucy Kirkwood asks: what if an elderly atomic physicist volunteered to take charge of the team decommissioning a
For the past few weeks I have been working my way through Decca’s gigantic set of every note Mozart wrote and quite a few that he probably didn’t — 220 CDs in a monumental hernia-inducing box. Chronological listening is not recommended. Mozart was technically a phenomenon, of course, but he didn’t reach maturity of expression,
When I was a child in the 1970s, the two big excitements of the run-up to Christmas were first the chocolate Advent calendar which, somehow, I managed to smuggle past the prison-guard inspection at my Colditz-like prep school; and second, browsing the Radio Times to see what televisual delights the Christmas hols had in store.
Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must
In this season of watching and waiting as we approach Christmas and year’s end, radio has a precious role. At the switch of a button you can be taken straightaway into another kind of life, a different world, where present realities are not relevant or can at least be made to feel less imperative. While
‘Brahms and Liszt’ is a lovely bit of rhyming slang, but it doesn’t have the ring of authenticity. Can you really imagine cockney barrow boys whistling tunes from the Tragic Overture and the Transcendental Études? Also, the Oxford English Dictionary reckons it only dates back to the 1930s. It always made me snigger, though, because
Elsie de Wolfe was the pioneer interior designer whose motto was ‘plenty of optimism and white paint’. She banished brown Victoriana from America. And her work on Henry Clay Frick’s private apartments introduced new American money to old French furniture. If only she were with us today. For his first television interview as president-elect, Donald
The death of Jeremy Thorpe aged 85 in 2014 finally made it possible to tell his extraordinary story without fear of the libel laws. John Preston has seized the opportunity in his gripping account A Very English Scandal (Penguin/Viking, £16.99). The leader of a political party involved in a murder plot easily trumps any other
In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research among those who condemned him, and learned that a strange thing was happening among young British Muslim men and women. I first wrote about this strange thing in my novel The Black Album, which concerns
In 2013, Pavel Dmitrichenko, disgruntled principal dancer of the Bolshoi, exacted a now infamous revenge on the company’s artistic director, Sergey Filin, for overlooking his girlfriend in casting the starring role in that most Russian of ballet classics, Swan Lake. The circumstances surrounding the acid attack, which seemed to combine ballet’s glamour with a murky
The story of the extraordinary boom in children’s literature over the last 100 years could be bookended with a ‘Tale of Two Potters’ — Beatrix and Harry. The adventures of the latter have sold millions, but the foundations of his success were laid by the former, whose series of ‘little tales’ Matthew Denison estimates in
1. Kingsley Amis 2. Beatrix Potter 3. Graham Greene 4. Salman Rushdie 5. Nick Hornby 6. Arthur Conan Doyle 7. Louis de Bernières 8. Doris Lessing 9. Sebastian Faulks 10. Virginia Woolf
In these books, two handsome and popular telly adventurers consider, from viewpoints that are sometimes overly autobiographical, the culture of internal combustion in two of its most distinctive forms. Ben Fogle is obsessed by Land Rovers while Richard Hammond is fascinated by motorbikes. Fogle came to notice in 2000 when he survived a harrowing year
Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto: Semper in ventrem aliquid novi). Dedicated to the memory and gastronomic exploits of Francis Trevelyan (Frank) Buckland (1826–1880), the Oxford-born surgeon, natural historian and popular writer who aspired to eat a member of every living
If you’ve ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you’ll remember the shock: expecting to enjoy a heartwarming tale of 18th-century babies being rescued from destitution and brought to live in a lovely safe place, you will have found instead that the tale was mostly about babies dying after they
All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed me as this one, just as events alarmed and frightened its central character. She is Okatsu, a young woman from the samurai Satsuma Clan in mid-19th-century Japan. The country has been ruled by the shogunate,
Here are two approachable and distinctive books on our churches, great and small. Simon Jenkins’s cathedrals survey follows his earlier volumes on England’s best churches and houses, and like them includes fine photography by the late Paul Barker of Country Life. Too hefty to serve as a guide book, it can be consulted as a
In August 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a 28-year-old aid-worker, had been employed as a reporter for less than a week by the Daily Telegraph when she landed her first serious journalistic coup. Using feminine wiles and diplomatic skills extraordinaire, she convinced a friend in the Foreign Office to lend her his chauffeured car. Stocking up with
Cometh the hour, cometh the book, and so Christmas brings us once again a tidal wave of titles relating to food and drink: cookbooks of seasonal dishes from around the world, never once to be consulted, and endless tomes of wine connoisseurship for all of us dedicated cheapskate consumers of Lidl and Aldi plonk. So