The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his pioneering works on ancient woodland? He certainly pointed out more than 40 years ago that 10,000 centurion oaks ‘are not a substitute for one 500-year-old oak’. Since then, shelves of books have been written on
Elvis only ever appeared in one commercial in his life — for Southern Maid, his favourite jam doughnut shop. That commercial appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1955. But since his death in 1977, Elvis has appeared in adverts all over the world: ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ has been borrowed to flog
We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’ been a contender!’ in On the Waterfront still resonates — but I have a problem with heroic thickos: Othello, so easily duped; purblind Lear… So I’m ambivalent about the leading character in the new novel
Six years ago, the Canadian author Clancy Martin made a splash with his autobiographical novel How to Sell, based on the hard-drinking years he spent as a jewellery salesman before going to college and beginning the brilliant academic career he currently enjoys as a philosopher. Now he has come up with a weird, densely focused
All organic beings descended from a single primordial blob, according to Darwin. Some of them developed sufficiently to leave the commodious depths and widths of the sea to scramble ashore. Was that wise? In this intricately detailed history, David Miles, a distinguished Oxford archaeologist, takes up the story of human evolution since our species and
To call Nils Büttner a killjoy is perhaps a little unfair, but not very. The professor at Stuttgart’s State Academy of Art and Design has written a revisionist biography of Hieronymus Bosch: one which tells us that the Early Netherlandish painter wasn’t, as many over the centuries have suggested, the devil incarnate or Satan’s crazed
This lovely, modest and precise book tells the story of the most productive friendship among the modernists, and the most surprising. Stanley Price calls James Joyce and Italo Svevo two of the four great modernists, along with Kafka and Proust. That may overstate the case for Svevo, but no reader will reach the delightful, happy
Fifty years ago this summer, a new show appeared on American TV screens. These, the opening titles explained, were the voyages of the starship Enterprise; its mission — to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations. Half a century later the Star Trek franchise still rumbles irrepressibly on, but now
Madeleine Thien’s third novel, recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, begins in Vancouver with Marie, who, like the author, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to Canada. Marie tells us that her father committed suicide in 1989 and that, soon after, the 19-year-old Ai-ming — whose father knew Marie’s father — came to stay,
Parsifal Bayreuth Festival, until 28 August In the days leading up to this year’s Bayreuth Festival, Bavaria was rocked by a spate of violent attacks. Security measures ran high for the premiere of a new Parsifal rumoured to be awash in Islamic symbolism. Such reports proved true, with the production set in a contemporary Middle Eastern
My ancient Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary of 1849 defines choreia as ‘a dancing, especially with joy’. The word choros has a more technical definition: a round dance, or a dance accompanied with song (hence the word chorus). From whichever word ‘choreographer’ is declared to derive, the British dancemaker Rosemary Butcher, who died last month
Michael Heath, The Spectator’s brilliant cartoon editor, has been on Desert Island Discs – which is like a knighthood, but without the cronyism. He’s been talking through his illustrious career and his decades-long association with The Spectator. Subscribers know how well he draws; but his wit is a secret hitherto shared with those of us lucky
Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety and reaches out in speculative attempts to do something new; exists on the outer edges of lives, looking inwards with hopes, some day, to be more essential. Art, literature and music are, in short, suburbs
In 1965 William Eggleston took the first colour photograph that, he felt, really succeeded. The location was outside a supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee; the time — to judge from the rich golden light and long shadows — late afternoon. Eggleston’s subject — a young man with a heavily slicked, early Elvis hairstyle stacking trolleys outside
The unacknowledged subtitle of Channel 4’s new reality series Eden (Mondays) is Die, Hippies! Die! Obviously they’re not going to admit this because that wouldn’t be right. But I’m sure Channel 4 is hoping that a terrible Lord of the Flies-type scenario will unfold for the 23 victims who’ve volunteered to get back to nature
It’s a brave dramatist who would seek to adapt for radio the hit novels of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. As soon as her quartet of novels set in Naples from the 1950s onwards began appearing in English translation a few years ago they created a bestselling stir because of the unusually bold flavour of
For almost 60 years, whatever the political weather, Russia and Britain have maintained mutually assured respect as far as ballet is concerned. In October 1956, the Soviet Union finally allowed its Bolshoi troupe to appear in the west, in London, a state cultural exchange that should have entailed the debut of the comparatively green Sadler’s
Consider it commercially. So powerful is the pull of the Potter franchise that the characters could simply re-enact the plot of ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and the fans would swoon with joy. The stage show has been written by a two-man committee, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, with the help of billionaire equality campaigner J.K. Rowling. Harry
In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, the ‘exterminating angel’ of the title is a mystery illness. A debilitating virus — much worse even than man flu — that attacks the social immune system and shuts down your ability to act, to think, to be. It prevents you from remembering how to behave at middle-class dinner parties.
The Carer is a Hungarian-British co-production about a cantankerous old thesp (Brian Cox) and the young Hungarian woman (Coco König) who is dispatched to look after him, much against his wishes, and whom he’ll eventually throw out on her ear. I’m joshing you. She wins him over, naturally, and mutual respect develops, naturally, and a
I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall, the only summer festival I’d pay to attend. Indeed, I ended up paying through the nose. Not only did I rent a teepee so that we wouldn’t have to lug our bell tent from the car park to the campsite and back, but I bought Caroline
May I write a review of a review? I have to get this out of my system, having been unable to sleep last night, for anger at Christopher Howse’s beastly, scoffing and unjust treatment of a new book: Simon Loveday’s The Bible for Grown-Ups, reviewed in our 30 July issue. Somebody needs to call a
Oh, the longueurs of aristocratic Georgian leisure. What on earth did they do all day, with no domestic chores, no Wi-Fi, no television, no telephones for chatting and the slowest of transports to move their lives from the sticks to the bright lights of London or Bath? Kate Felus has written a fascinating book which
Cher Hughes loved the beauty, the white sand beaches and sun-kissed climate of the tropical islands of Bocas del Toro in Panama. So she sold her thriving sign business in Florida and spent the profits on creating a new life on the Caribbean archipelago. She and her husband built a beautiful home filled with fine
Born in Michigan, raised in Lagos and educated in London and New York, Teju Cole is about as cosmopolitan as they come. In an interview with the American writer Aleksandar Hemon, republished in Known and Strange Things, he declares that ‘cities are our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they
Surrealism was, at least initially, as much about writing as painting. A plaque on the Hotel des Grands Hommes in Paris’s Place du Pantheon records that the oneiric movement began in 1919 when André Breton and Philippe Soupault invented ‘l’ecriture automatique’ at numéro 17. Automatic writing, with consciousness suspended, was supposed to open a conduit
In the first year or so of the Iraq occupation — or ‘big Army goatfuck’, as it is not quite specifically referred to in former US Army soldier Roy Scranton’s debut novel — three central storylines move through and around each other. Specialist Wilson, whose commanders can’t read maps but watch Black Hawk Down for
In The Circle, Dave Eggers’s satirical dystopia about an insatiable Google-like conglomerate, there’s a scene in which drones hound a social-media refusenik to his live-streamed doom; the character’s name, Mercer, was a nod to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1841 essay ‘Self-Reliance’ saw Twitter coming. At least that’s a hunch that looks fairly
Cards on the table. Before I’d published my first novel, or written for newspapers, or won awards for my writing, before all of that, in 2004, I presented a paper at an academic conference about Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Nashville, Tennessee. I couldn’t really afford to go to that conference. I didn’t have time