The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s unfashionable, it’s only the Arts Council he has to please. When the world wants a piece of him, he has London’s Sadler’s Wells and the Roundhouse, Grenoble, Paris, Luxembourg, Montreal, Hong Kong, Taipei, Wolfsburg, Brighton,
Roller skating down the main road in the cycle lane, her easy, smooth and flowing scissor stride on booted castors, measured, steady and elongated, seamlessly pushing through yards and moments, as if traffic was merely imagination and grace impervious to danger.
If a clock can be a household’s totem then we remain hopeful ours will show us an accurate blue moon before too long. In the meantime, we’re quite used to people asking (ineptly) What’s with its arrythmia and beaten-tortoise air? The much-polished answer is: uncertain timekeeping is remarkably soothing for the under-twenties, disposed to fantastical
Old friends, we scarcely speak of death or dying. As ever, the displacements continue, just as when we used to fail to get round to speaking about love or confined ourselves to giving it a mention in letters — about which we didn’t speak. Until I knew better, I thought poets talked of such things,
The cafe was full of connoisseurs of the scones. As he bit into his flapjack a sinister uncoupling took place and he felt the crown of a tooth jerk free — to be rescued behind a discreet paper napkin. Now the geography of his mouth was unfamiliar, harsh and sharp. No wonder those Tudors in
When the Saqqara pyramids were opened in 1880, the chamber walls were found to be covered in hieroglyphic writings, and these texts have been a subject of discussion among Egyptologists ever since. What do they mean? What do they represent? What do they tell us about the religion or the cosmology or the worldview of
What a wretched lot the Stuarts were, the later ones especially, the males at least. James II fled England without a fight in 1688, and the battlefield of the Boyne in 1690 earning him the unaffectionate nickname Séamus an Chaca, ‘James the Shit’. During the Jacobite rising of 1715 on the death of Anne and
Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy, select the steadiest hands and the steadiest temperaments. Neurosurgery has an almost religious aura, an intellectual status approaching quantum physics and a work ethic of unforgiving precision. Most elusive of all, this elite should be
Not so long ago I stumbled into a little pop-up in Hoxton: a delightful tearoom hardly bigger than a walk-in wardrobe, all 1940s home-craft ‘boutique’ style. Nice table linen, a ‘make-do-and-mend’ tea service with artfully mix-matched china, victoria sponge slices, and the strains of some popular bygone tune in the background. I’m not sure I
For one week in July 2010, the aspiring spree killer Raoul Moat was the only news. ‘Aspiring’ because he didn’t actually achieve his violent ambitions: by the time he died, he’d only managed to shoot three people (four if you include himself) and murder one (two if you count PC David Rathband, who was blinded
The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was once the most famous man in Europe bar Napoleon. And if you judge a man by his friends (as you should), how about Goethe, Schiller, Simon Bolivar, Cuvier, Lamarck, Laplace, Guy-Lussac and Jefferson? And that is only the start of the supper list. So what happened? Why is
‘I was born in London,’ Ben Judah tells us early in this vivid portrait of Britain’s capital, ‘but I no longer recognise the city.’ London has become a building site where dirty money is converted into gleaming blocks of bullion. The smartest parts of town are lined with empty houses owned by foreign plutocrats, and
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown up with cut-outs and dead letter boxes. There’s little we don’t know about angst-ridden, morally fallible spooks in raincoats and sharp-suited, gun-toting agents in casinos. Mick Herron, however, takes a different approach from most other
Reading Daisy Dunn’s ambitious first book, a biography of the salty (in more ways than one) Roman poet Catullus, it struck me how lucky we are: only one copy of his collection of poems survived the ages, hidden under a bushel in Verona. Catullus might have gone the way of his contemporaries, such as Cinna,
One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk’, an image of philosophy as posthumous, able to explain things only after we have experienced them. Or an image of dusk as threshold, the blue hour when light transforms
David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25 October 2015. The book now appears without its author, a kind of huge mausoleum for an astonishing enterprise. Cesarani wants to change our view of the Holocaust and to close the yawning gap between popular
Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his mother’s first husband. So his elder half-brother, the respected writer Emanuel Litvinoff, informed Keiron Pim, adding that David was ‘an unfortunate character altogether’, prone to ‘inventing roles for himself that didn’t have any reality’. Yet
This is a very odd book that Jean Stein has compiled — about the evanescent splendour of Los Angeles, which only occasionally touches on the film industry. Its setting’s most memorable landmark appears to be the name of one of its districts, written in enormous white letters on a hillside. That, and various opulent houses,
Last September a photograph of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a beach near Bodrum made headlines around the world. The image had a significant effect on shifting public perception to the Syrian refugee crisis as well as sparking a debate around the ethics of the circulation of such images. Academics at the
‘Edvard Munch, I cannot abide,’ wrote Nikolai Astrup in a letter to his friend Arne Giverholt. ‘Everything that he does is supposed to be so brilliant that it doesn’t have to be more than merely sketched.’ Near contemporaries, Munch and Astrup were both innovative and admired painters but while Munch is today one of the
Philip Larkin once remarked that Art Tatum, a jazz musician given to ornate, multi-noted flourishes on the keyboard, reminded him of ‘a dressmaker, who having seen how pretty one frill looks, makes a dress bearing ninety-nine’. If you substitute paintings of flower-beds and dappled sunlight for chromatic keyboard runs, something similar is true of the
Has a new art installation opened up at the Capitoline museum? One might be forgiven for thinking so: nude sculptures were recently encased in white wooden boxes so that only their heads could be seen. So modern! So fresh! So radical! Except there was nothing radical about it. Instead, Italian authorities took the decision to cover
All the books stored above our heads, all the books there aren’t enough hours to read again, and still we hesitate to banish them complete. The second-hand life, charity shops, jumble sales, car boot fields: the slow long-term dance, temporary ownership, possession and loss. Charity shops can take anything unwanted, books and LPs, the unfashionable
The Accademia is one of the smallest of the world’s great art galleries, and picture for picture perhaps the most concentrated collection of masterpieces anywhere — though its rambling layout may surprise first-time visitors. But there are changes afoot as it expands into spaces once occupied by the Venice Fine Arts Academy. This means more
On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your life. Judging from my experience, though, its ten episodes will prove so overwhelmingly riveting that you’re going to need at least two more days to scour the internet in an obsessive quest for every scrap
The new season of the Serial podcast (produced by the same team who make This American Life) was launched last month, releasing one episode a week as the investigative reporter Sarah Koenig looks this time into the strange story of Bowe Bergdahl. He’s the US army soldier who walked out on his platoon in 2009
No one is consulted. No one is held to account. No one has the authority to turn it off. How is it that muzak has slipped through every legal control? The blame, I’d say, lies with those who are frightened of silence — with those who spend more money in shops that buzz to a
A beautiful crumbling theatre in Notting Hill is under threat. The Coronet, which bills itself as the Print Room, faces the menace of renovation. The lovely rambling building has the tumbledown air of an abandoned Romanian palace. The raised stage sits opposite the dress circle of a former cinema and the auditorium, steeply raked, is
Like The Revenant and The Big Short, Spotlight is yet another Oscar contender ‘based on true events’ — although it has now been suggested that The Revenant was 99.7 per cent made up. (Does this matter? Only, I suppose, in the sense that you should know what you’re watching.) But we’re on firm ground with