The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When Bee Wilson’s husband abruptly called time on their 23-year marriage, she was left with a house full of memories embedded in the everyday objects around her. Two months after his departure, the heart-shaped tin of the title – in which she’d baked their wedding cake – clattered to the floor for no apparent reason.
Even the greatest have setbacks. It is how they respond that makes them great. Take your chances, forget the lapses. The triumvirate who ruled men’s tennis this century – Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer – each won just 54 per cent of the points they played. It was about turning it on when
This exhibition is awash with luscious brushstrokes, but then that’s to be expected: it’s full of Scottish painting. Before the barren era of conceptual art, which most hope is over, people often observed that the Scots could paint while the English could draw. Why is a bit of mystery, but it was true right through
So, in the end, it was long but not that long. Twelve hours, compared to the 20 hours-plus many of us had been anticipating. The fastest on record? Very possibly. Igor Levit had started Satie’s Vexations just after 10am on Thursday 24 April, and completed repeat number 840 of this niggly little bastard of a
The recent announcement that the National Portrait Gallery has purchased two works by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke for its collection came as something of a shock. The surprise? The art was actually good. Boyce’s quarterised collage ‘From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To
In 1921, the sternly abstract cubist Albert Gleizes opened the door of his Parisian apartment to two young women in their twenties, the Irish artists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. They explained that they wanted him to teach them his method of ‘extreme cubism’. He wasn’t sure that he had a method, nor whether it
If your stomach turns when you walk past a Japanese restaurant with moulded plastic replicas of sushi on display, prepare to feel even more nauseous in the School Dinners exhibition at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Here, moulded in that same plastic, in (if anything) even more garish colours, you’ll see a sample two-course
Grade: B+ This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to
Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the
Slade in Flame was glam-rock band Slade’s first foray into film – and also their last. It was a flop on its release in 1975 and that would have been that, end of story, gone and forgotten, except it has been rediscovered in recent years, with critic Mark Kermode even hailing it as ‘the Citizen
My Master Builder is a new version of Ibsen’s classic with a tweaked title and a transformed storyline. Henry and Elena Solness are a British power couple living in the Hamptons whose relationship is in meltdown after the accidental death of their son. Elena has scrambled to reach the top of the publishing world but
In 1978, I gave a poetry reading at Hull University. Philip Larkin was glumly, politely, in attendance. I was duly appreciative, knowing what it must have cost him. He was deaf as well as disaffected. Perhaps the deafness helped. The next day, we had a lunchtime drink at the University bar. We talked about Kingsley’s
How did a myth about the consequences of poor judgment become a parable for aspiration? The question is posed by the Greek writer-actor Alex Andreou in his fabulously entertaining new podcast. His topic is the ancient myth of Midas, king of Phrygia, who was granted his wish to have everything he touched turn to gold.
The most compelling character in the newish documentary One to One: John & Yoko isn’t either John or Yoko. It’s one A.J. Weberman, inventor of ‘Dylanology’ and ‘garbology’. He’s shown practising both in the film, rummaging through Bob Dylan’s bins for clues to the thought process of genius. Fifty years on, two things struck me.
‘Tawny owls,’ I tell friends and family, ‘can’t see in the dark any better than we can. So they memorise the whole wood! But they may be able to see sound,’ I burble. ‘And the Latin name for a blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus obscurus: Heavenly hidden blue one!’ In Bird School, Adam Nicolson rejoices
You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that
‘In science, truth always wins,’ said the molecular biologist Max Perutz. In 2022, Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science, published an article posing a new set of obstacles to Perutz’s truism. He revealed cases of fabricated data in the area of Alzheimer’s research, setting off a cascading set of consequences for the researchers involved
What happened to the condolence books? They swiftly multiplied, that mad week in September 1997. The original four at St James’s Palace had to be increased to more than 40. People queued for hours and often spent many minutes composing their contributions. That’s not even to mention the thousands of similar books organised by councils,
It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’s beautiful, almost half her age, and she’s aware of how that must look to the
When you picture Atlantis, what do you see? For most people, this mythic city is a classical arcadia sunk beneath the sea – fallen columns, shattered arches and perhaps even an aqueduct. But that is not the place described by Plato, the original source of the Atlantis myth. His version consists of an immense Atlantic
In June 2022, Vladimir Putin tipped up at a party at the headquarters of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. This was to mark, of all things, the centenary of the country’s programme of deep-cover spies, who live for years abroad under elaborate false identities while passing secrets back to their masters at home. The
In Rachel Seiffert’s searingly beautiful fifth novel, the author returns to Germany, 1945 – ground she previously explored in The Dark Room, her Man Booker-shortlisted debut. Once the Deed is Done opens with a boy, Benno, looking out of his window at night, having been woken by sirens from the munition works. Elsewhere in the
The visionary artist Anselm Kiefer has restlessly challenged and redefined recent German history and cultural shibboleths in an extraordinary body of work that spans more than six decades. Two months ago he turned 80, an anniversary marked by the staging of exhibitions from Amsterdam to the Ashmolean and the publication of this impressive study devoted
In our age of cosmetic fantasy, a dramatic love story between two bespectacled art historians sounds implausible. But add in the Montague-Capulet effect of the Iron Curtain, along with a fearless Russian heroine who proved that love can conquer every barrier, and you have an enchanting tale: a completely true one, beautifully written by the
A few years ago I had a panic-stricken phone call from a female friend. ‘Help!’ she wailed. ‘Remind me what classical music I like. I think I’m going to be a guest on Private Passions.’ I could understand her anxiety. The programme, which celebrated its 30th birthday this month, is BBC Radio 3’s lofty version
The Friend is an adaptation of the novel by Sigrid Nunez starring a harlequin Great Dane. If I remember rightly, Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are also in the mix somewhere but I can’t be sure. Who could notice anything but Apollo in all his noble, giant, majesty? Watts and Murray are fine – if
I’m about to give away the opening scene of the latest gangsters-are-cool drama MobLand. Don’t worry. It won’t spoil anything. By the end of this review you won’t want to watch even a moment of this dog’s breakfast of an atrocity of charmless, witless, misbegotten, amoral tripe anyway. So we’re in a basement with Tom
One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems more needily co-dependent than most. Given that a typical sound bed is a blank canvas of amniotic electronica, much depends on the interpretation of whatever is laid over it: the drip and the drift; the
Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure