The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
JT LeRoy was a teenage hustler who emerged from a childhood of abuse, drug addiction and homelessness to write about his harrowing experiences and become a literary sensation as taken up by Madonna, Bono, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Lou Reed and Gus Van Sant, among many others. His back story was shocking —
In the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, David Bowie gamely tried to reassure the youth of the Seventies that, despite what their Sixties elders were always telling them, they hadn’t been born too late after all. On the contrary: it was the ‘brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’ who was missing
It cost just £4/10s for 19-year-old Alan Dryland to buy a season ticket that would take him inside the stadium for all ten of the World Cup matches held in London in that magical summer of 1966. The pound was falling, the Vietnam war raging, but England made it through to the final and the
Rupert Sheldrake had it coming. In A New Science of Life (1981), he argued that animals and plants have inherited a collective memory from their predecessors, thanks to ‘morphic resonance’. This also explained why animals had telepathic powers. ‘You see, I told you so,’ I said to my wife when reading about this in Steven
More brides in Britain go down the aisle to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ than to any other tune, Simon Loveday notes. He cannot resist adding that ‘it seems doubtful that they have fully taken in the words of the rest of the song’. That must be true. ‘I’m not that chainedup little person still
‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking.’ Life is always cheap in noir fiction — but it takes it that step further when the protagonist’s homicidal impulses extend to himself. The hero of this fast-moving, agreeably violent
On 11 January 2016 Paul Morley was awoken by an urgent voicemail from the Today Programme. Could he talk about the life and — news just in — the death of David Bowie? (The researcher apologised if this was how he’d heard.) Resistant to gnashing his teeth for a few minutes of radio rent-a-commentary, Morley
All parents worry about the extent to which their children will expose their private weirdness to the world. They tell their teachers that Daddy takes his tea into the toilet and Mummy ‘actually pulled the car over’ for a closer look at the dead badger they passed on the school run. But the traumatic new
Quick tip, should you ever find yourself alone in the interview room at the police headquarters of Prince George’s County, Maryland: don’t go to sleep. The officers will see you through the peephole and assume you’re guilty. Anyone innocent finding themselves in that windowless, 8ft by 8ft room paces around, bounces on their toes and
There is an immediate problem for anyone producing a guide to places in Scotland with literary connections: as Walter Scott wrote in Marmion, ‘Nor hill, nor brook we paced along/ But had its legend or its song.’ Many years ago when the Scottish Borders was marketing itself as the ‘Land of Creativity’ I assembled a
The ambitions of the founding father of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin — that they should be ‘the free trade of the future’ and provide ‘the cause of peace’ with a ‘new and mighty stay’ — were at once wildly optimistic and strangely prescient. Considering that they were first conceived
So, the 2016 longlist – aka the Man Booker Dozen – is out. It invites a cavalcade of instant commentary, almost all of which – as I wrote when I was helping judge the prize myself last year – is unavoidably incredibly stupid. Nobody other than the judges will have read all 150-odd of the
Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with the ‘least spiritually advanced’ in the worst seats. Unsurprisingly it didn’t happen. But perhaps the Southbank Centre should take up the challenge. For its 2016–17 season, the centre has devised a series of concerts and
The last boat I saw in the galleries on the Mound was a canoe that the Scottish painter Jock McFadyen had been using to explore viewpoints around the waterways of London. Now another vessel has sailed in, a full-scale recreation of the studio boat built in 1857 by the French painter Charles-François Daubigny, from the
It was hard to believe that Monday morning’s introduction to the Italian writer Primo Levi on Radio 4 lasted for only 15 minutes. It was so rich, multi-layered, filled with meaning. Presented by Janet Suzman, it was intended as a fanfare for the 11-part adaptation of Levi’s most original book, The Periodic Table, in which
Before I set about reviewing Ross Kemp: The Fight Against Isis (Sky 1), I thought I’d have a glance to see whether other critics had been as impressed as I was. Clearly the flip groovester from the Guardian — who opened, inevitably, with a jaunty quip about Grant from EastEnders — had seen a very
Nobody who witnessed it can have forgotten Mark Rylance summoning giants to his aid in Jerusalem. As Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, drug-dealing roustabout threatened with expulsion from his little patch of Eden, Rylance roared and drummed until the theatre shuddered with the sound of gigantic stomps approaching. That colossal performance brought him to international — as
Fracking is a British tradition. Since 1969 more than 200 sites have used hydraulic fracturing ‘without environmental catastrophes’ according to Dick Selley, an emeritus professor of geology, writing in the programme notes to Fracked! by Alistair Beaton. The satire takes the opposite view and regards fracking as a wicked novelty inflicted on rustic innocents by
What’s the best first opera for a sceptical adult first timer? It’s a favourite topic among opera buffs, and once you get past the assumption that novices need to be spoon-fed familiar tunes, the consensus — slightly surprisingly — often settles on Jenufa. Surprisingly? Well, yes: Janacek still isn’t guaranteed box office (maybe people conflate
Mark Morris, the most musically communicative and naturally lyrical of choreographers of the past 30 years (and an absentee from London theatres for too long), made L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, a dance masterpiece of a Handel oratorio using John Milton’s words. It was a miracle of pastoral sweetness, in rustic, human, amorous dancing,
Laid out flat, running the length of the exhibition, the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road forms the spine of the large Beat Generation show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Even for those familiar with the published version of the manuscript seeing this holy relic — the founding document for all sects
How’s this for a heartwarming set-up? Forty-something recovering alcoholic and aspiring artist Ginger copes with the disappointment of being unable to have children of her own by signing up to an organisation that sends underprivileged inner-city kids to the homes of middle-class couples in the countryside. When she is introduced to 11-year-old Dominican girl Velvet,
In a Johannesburg mall, a listless and lonely IT worker chats with his dad about the bitter fruits of upward mobility in South Africa. ‘Do you remember when you scored 139 for that IQ test?’ Pa asks, in Masande Ntshanga’s story ‘Space II’. ‘I thought it meant my life would be different, I tell him,
When I first visited the complex of Buddhist cave grottoes, dating from the fifth to the 14th century, at Bezekilk in Xinjiang province, China, I was struck by the destruction wreaked on them by Muslims whose religion proscribes figurative images of human beings. Eyes had been gouged out and figures lacerated with knives. When and
With the current political saga running in our heads, trumping all other stories, it has been hard to concentrate on the bedside book over the last few weeks. When, in this true Victorian murder mystery, I came to the sentence, ‘Ebeneezer Pook, however, had no intention of succumbing to the crowd’s pressure’, all I could
It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts. Last year I performed full-body dissection as part of my training to become a doctor. After timid first incisions to the arm, we students were entrusted with opening the chest cavity. Two obstacles blocked the way. I looked in
One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his memories, the afternoon has the quality of a dream. The ground was deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees. The boundary line was erratic and the sightscreens weathered. The match was won beneath a ‘perfect
Ted ‘Grocer’ Heath, as he will always be for me, was chosen by his fellow MPs to be their leader in 1965 as the Tory answer to Harold Wilson. After two Old Etonian patricians, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, the Grocer was a grammar-school boy, a meritocrat who would spearhead a new-look, classless Conservative party. He was
Almost as soon as Siberia was first colonised by Cossack conquistadors in the 17th century, it became a place of banishment and punishment. As early as the 1690s the Russian state began to use Siberia as a dumping ground for its criminals, as though its vastness could quarantine evil. Katorga — from the Greek word