The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing. But its lustre and mission have now been largely eclipsed by the viral spread of its anarchic bastard offspring, the Fringe. In competition with the latter’s potty-mouthed stand-ups and numberless student hopefuls, the dignified old
The village of Brigadoon rises from the Scotch mists once every 100 years, and revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical are only slightly more frequent. The last major London production closed in 1989; and if you know Brigadoon at all it’s probably through the lush 1954 movie. The new staging at Regent’s Park takes a
‘Is it any good?’ a friend asked when he saw I was reading this book. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s full of wankers.’ By that stage I was only up to page 24, but the remaining 184 pages did nothing to fundamentally alter my view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The works of,
C.P. Cavafy, who had a very high opinion of his own work, would no doubt be gratified to learn that he is now one of the most admired poets of the 20th century. This is all the more remarkable because during his lifetime (1863-1933) he did not allow a single volume of his poetry to
To read something by the Cumbria-born Sarah Hall is to enter a dizzying, earthy and often dystopian world where the elements rule and nature is blood red. Her nine previous short story collections and novels straddle life’s peripheries, often scratching at the limits of what it means to be human. ‘Mrs Fox’, one of her
Against Morality is not against morality. But it is against moralising. Which is a start. Anti-cancel culture, anti-identity politics, Rosanna McLaughlin’s small book of essays is the first insider-artworld publication to condemn the Savonarolan turn within culture. A cause for celebration, you might think. Her argument is perfectly sound. ‘Morality has become the central pillar,
I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow. In 1914, a decade after the signing of the Entente Cordiale, the War Office fell hook, line and sinker for the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre’s doctrine of Attaque
‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more
After Jane Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra destroyed the majority of her letters. This act, often interpreted as an attempt to preserve Jane’s reputation, has had the opposite effect of fuelling fervent – at times prurient – speculation about what the letters contained. While Cassandra may simply have wished to shield her relatives from the
Food memoirs, as distinct from cookery books, and from the relatively new genre of ‘biographies’ of ingredients, used to fall into three rough groups: foraging, hunting or gathering food; producing or cooking food; and eating. Like the restaurateur Keith McNally’s recent I Regret Almost Everything, Michael Finnerty’s The Cheese Cure adds a fourth category, memoirs
‘I can’t write books drinking all day and going to every soiree in Manhattan,’ Truman Capote complained. In order to write In Cold Blood, his ‘non-fiction novel’ about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, Capote and his partner Jack Dunphy therefore went to Palamos, a fishing town on the Costa Brava. Leaving
Few among Muriel Spark’s circle of friends would have disputed the judgment of Storm Jameson when recommending Spark to the publisher Blanche Knopf in 1963: ‘I warn you, or remind you, that you are taking on a tartar. She has worn out two Macmillan directors already.’ Even tartars are forgiven, however, when they exhibit a
Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny
Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the roadways haven’t materialised. There’s a sharp chill in the air too. Anoraks and hats are worn all day, and anyone eating outdoors in the evening is dressed for base camp. Perhaps tourists don’t want to
The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they’re missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it’s a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end,
Celine Song’s first film, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists. Perhaps way too high. And, yes, it’s a letdown. It feels like an early Woody Allen but blunter, shallower, with no zingers, and a lead character that’s hard to care about. Dakota Johnson is our
Our relationships with bands are often very like our relationships with people. Some are pure and lasting love. Some start promisingly but spoil. Some are quick, thrilling flings, others a more meaningful yet distant connection. Elbow are the kind of band you enjoy having a pint with every few months. Not always the most exciting
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ, so a cottage industry has developed among conductors and composers, retrofitting Bach for full orchestra. From Elgar and Mahler to showman-maestros like Stokowski and Henry Wood, orchestral Bach transcriptions have tended towards the spectacular, and
Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals to the contemporary English preference for the unassuming, the humble, the unpretentious. Take ‘The Wood Sawyers’ (oil on canvas, 1850-2). Two figures are sawing a tree trunk with a long two-man bucking saw. Two thick
No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. ‘We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.’
There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as
‘Full of strokes and blows/ broken, pitifully wounded’, the man, naked, or almost so, stands full frontal, legs and arms parted, one limb sometimes slightly bent to signal the beginning of a movement. His body is punctured by lesions and wounds, with small depictions of their material causes attached almost as adornment – knives or
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them,
Nicola Sturgeon has all the usual things she wants to achieve in her memoir: rumours to scotch, a legacy to spell out, and so on. But the most important thing to the former first minister seems to be telling her readers that she is in fact not Nicola Sturgeon. The ‘seemingly confident, combative woman who
We all know that life is full of people who try to con us, often starting with a voice on the phone. ‘I’m speaking from the fraud department of your bank.’ ‘I’m your local BT engineer.’ No, you’re not from either my bank or BT. In all likelihood you are speaking from a scam farm
What is your p(doom)? This is the pseudo-scientific manner in which some people express the strength of their belief that an artificial superintelligence running on computers will, in the coming decades, kill all humans. If your p(doom) is 0.1, you think it 10 per cent likely. If your p(doom) is 0.9, you’re very confident it
There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her
‘Something strange is happening in the world of children’s and YA [young adult] literature,’ writes Adam Szetela, and his horrifyingly compelling book certainly bears that out. It offers a sobering report from the front lines of how identity politics and online pile-ons against anyone who sins against the latest pieties actually play out in the
When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done.