The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘The day I found out that Suzi Quatro wasn’t a dyke was the worst day of my life!’ a teenage Joan Jett once complained to a teenage me — and, substituting Chrissie H for Suzi Q, I knew well how she felt. Here I am popping up on page 150: Little teenagers out in the
One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla, to lunch. After eating enough food for ‘a dozen hungry people’ and sinking ‘one glass of wine after another’, all the while enchanting his guest with gossip and conjuring tricks, Welles downed his coffee and
1. Ill-met by moonlight (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2. Hope springs eternal in the human breast (Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’) 3. To be or not to be (Shakespeare’s Hamlet) 4. Into the mouth of Hell/ Rode the six hundred (Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’) 5. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop
During the first ten pages of this long work Paul Theroux, on a journey through the American South, meets two citizens of Alabama. The first, encountered in Tuscaloosa when he asked the way to the Cornerstone Full Gospel Baptist Church, was named Lucille, called him ‘Mr Paul’, said ‘Ain’t no strangers here, Baby’, took him
It started as a ‘shoke’ — the Anglo-Indian slang word for ‘hobby’. Bored and lonely in Kathmandu, the young Assistant Resident, Brian Hodgson, began studying the flora and fauna of the hills, about the only occupation he was allowed to pursue apart from shooting woodcock and snipe under the constraints imposed by the Raja. The
When The Waste Land first appeared, there were rumours that it was a hoax. It seemed so strange: 400 lines in many languages, and even the sections that were in English looked as if the author was only teasing. ‘Twit twit twit’ ran one line: ‘Jug jug jug jug jug jug.’ Eliot’s long poem was
Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs Badgery’, rarely seen since its first publication in Dickens’s Household Words magazine in September 1857, is an enchanting little chip off the block. Like a lot of British short stories, it is absurd, very funny, and in uproarious bad taste. British writers have often enjoyed stories of making a home, and also
My Book of the Year is Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a grammar memoir by Mary Norris, a copy editor at the New Yorker for 30 years (Norton, £15.99). Anyone who loves language will wallow in this book. Working with the greats (Roth to McPhee) and digressing on the foibles of
Within the first ten minutes of last night’s televised Turner Prize ceremony, someone had twice declared that the award was a ‘concept’. I must say, this was news to me: I’d always believed it was an award for contemporary art that existed to create a buzz around young artists who otherwise couldn’t get arrested. More
Two biographies that changed my mind. Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Ashgate, £80) vividly sketches the intellectual worlds of Oxford and Prague in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. They were not as cut off from each other as we might suppose. Campion, one of the men who connected the two, dominated
‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists. Here is mine. It’s for the ten best home video releases of 2015; which is to say, the ten best DVDs or Blu-rays released in Britain this year. I’m leaving out releases from abroad, even though that means leaving out some of my favourites, so as to spare your
The idea to ask for poems about HS2 came to me as I was listening on YouTube to W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, which he wrote to accompany a section of the terrific 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt (who described Auden as looking like
2015 has been a terrific year for women writers. I have especially enjoyed Mary Beard’s sceptical and subversive history of Rome, SPQR (Profile, £25); Alexandra Harris’s literary history of the English weather, Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, £24.95); and Antonia Fraser’s witty memoir of growing up, My History (Weidenfeld, £9.99).
Now that I’ve given up drugs, I find myself addicted to psychological thrillers written by women, featuring no gore and a great deal of malice aforethought. My favourites this year were (in order of preference) Disclaimer by Renée Knight (Doubleday, £12.99), You by Caroline Kepnes (Simon & Schuster, £7.99) and I Let You Go by
Though artfully plotted and well written, some of Rachel Billington’s early novels, starting with All Things Nice in 1969, had a tinge of Mills & Boon. Reviewing one of them, Auberon Waugh wrote: ‘The hero is described as “smooth and pink”. Good: I hate green, prickly heroes.’ By the time she wrote A Woman’s Age
Since retiring from coping with new books I have found it a pleasure not to have to glance at any of them. One, however, Anne Tyler’s 20th novel A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99), was pure pleasure. A quiet family drama over four generations, set in Baltimore as usual, it was never obvious which
In the basement of a busy café in Hockley, Nottingham, which may not have known exactly what it was letting itself in for, a young woman is loudly dissecting an unsatisfactory lunch: ‘Deep in my heart I know I love chips.’ In another basement a few hundred yards away, lit by a single floor lamp,
Painters and sculptors are highly averse to being labelled. So much so that it seems fairly certain that, if asked, Michelangelo would have indignantly repudiated the suggestion that he belonged to something called ‘the Renaissance’. Peter Blake is among the few I’ve met who owns up to being a member of a movement; he openly
Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little stout man, always on the corner of the street in a greasy waistcoat. You must know Mrs Kelly. Well, of course if you don’t, you don’t, but I thought you did, because I thought everybody
It was a stroke of genius to invite Glenda Jackson to make her return to acting as the star of Radio 4’s massive new series of dramas, Blood, Sex and Money, based on the novels of Émile Zola. Jackson plays Dide, the matriarch of the Rougon-Macquart families from Plassans in the depths of southern France.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is the best-remembered title of a short career. Born in 1901, he was dead by 1935. The novel hymned the rhythms of rural life in north-east Scotland in prose that to modern ears sounds as if it comes from a museum of Grampian folklore. At its heart is Chris Guthrie,
Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes place on a raised, thrusting stage surrounded by a steel canopy of scarlet rods like a boxing-ring. Ideal for a play about damaged men competing for a female trophy. Soutra Gilmour’s design is a model
For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent majority out there who daren’t speak for fear of the Twitter ordure that would fall on them. The box office and the empty seats attest to them. You’ll have not the smallest difficulty in booking
About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is
I am thinking about you Annie now that you are no longer a few miles of motorway and a couple of roundabouts from us here. I am remembering the meals, the easy chat and coffee; farewell coats and hugs in a doorway; that holiday we shared in Brixham, the fear of the foot noise on
Walking to the bus stop after a hospital visit, in an unfamiliar, dusty suburb, I pass a small park on the left with a stream which dives under the road, and here only a few feet away, by the water, is a heron — surely larger than life and with each feather accurately modelled. I
Knowing he was ill he offered a free choice of the books on his shelves, but for every one wanted said, ‘Couldn’t bear to let that go’, and died two weeks later. Seers That age when if out and about you rigorously avoid shop mirrors, or any reflective surface, not wanting to see who looks
Until Poland applied to join the EU in the 1990s, the biggest single influx of Poles into this country was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. Around 200,000 Poles who had fought for the Allies chose to seek refuge here, rather than return to their homeland and face life under Stalin. Many of
I wish I could pull off the Anthony Burgess stunt and recommend books of my own — Erotic Vagrancy, about Burton and Taylor, and Growing Up With Comedians, about, well, comedians. Both are doing well on Amazon and have garnered wonderful reviews. They are clearly my most successful and esteemed achievements. Unfortunately, neither title actually
