The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for it, went back to his time there as a political exile from 1912 to 1917. Even after the multitude of books published on the subject, these diaries throw new light from a fresh angle on
‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra
According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so, one wonders what Bacon made of Rome’s Julio-Claudian dynasty, the gore-spattered family that gave the empire its first five rulers, and the subject of Tom Holland’s latest popular history of the ancient world. Recounting one
In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a straight face ‘when I told her I’d written a book she’d known nothing about’. I doubt she kept it for long, because one of the many ways in which The Making of Zombie Wars differs
The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland, but it’s hard to say exactly where, or exactly when. There are telephones and cars, but the dress code is antiquated: hats, canes, pocket watches. This is ‘the new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought’: people
There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks writes in the grand tradition of realist fiction: a list of his themes might include the brutality and waste of war, France and, of course, romantic love. Self, meanwhile, has created dystopias in which to
Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became the Newest Testament among the happening people. One spring morning in 1953 the 58-year-old Englishman ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescalin in his Hollywood garden and waited for the visionary moment. When he opened
Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the
It was eerie the first time I watched The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin because it all felt so familiar. Suddenly my parents’ baffling banter made sense. When I thought they were speaking gibberish they were in fact quoting Perrin. My mother would say ‘great’ and my father would say ‘super’. My father would say things like
Shakespeare’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ will have no ethnic minority actors in the cast when the shows (two Henry VI plays and Richard III) open at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, later this month. A sprinkling of so-called BME (black and minority ethnic) actors in Shakespeare has been the norm for ages now. So
‘The eye is fatigued, perverted, shallow, its culture is degenerate, degraded and obsolete.’ Welcome to the Palpable Art Manifesto of Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu. Art must be accessible to all the senses, he argued, for ten fingers will explain more than two eyes and the tongue might tell yet more again. His Palpable Sculpture is
Sam Mendes once said there is no such thing as the history of British theatre, only the history of British press nights. That observation takes us closer to understanding the taboo that constrains journalists from reviewing the opening performance of a West End play. A dozen or so previews take place before the critics are
Late Night Woman’s Hour has created a Twitter storm with its twice-weekly (Thursdays and Fridays) doses of ‘mischievous and unbridled conversation’. The 11 p.m.–midnight slot is an ideal opportunity for cardigans to be unbuttoned and tongues unloosed, a chance to show that Radio 4’s venerable magazine programme for women can still shake up the station.
Australia, 1788. A transport ship arrives in Port Jackson (later Sydney harbour) carrying hundreds of convicts and a detachment of English officers under orders to guard the prisoners and to implant the roots of a well-ordered colony. These facts form the basis of Our Country’s Good, which was created in 1988 by Timberlake Wertenbaker in
London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which ditches its spoken dialogue entirely. Directed by Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade, and first seen a couple of years ago on Kosky’s adopted home turf at the Berlin Comic Opera, the production turns Mozart and
Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) A warm wall, heavy leaves, hard green grapes and a cluster of berries spun out of cobweb. They were packed with brown roe, or, later, an anarchy of hatchlings, scattering crawlers scarce larger than the
To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February 1990, when he chose a Tallis Scholars track for one of his desert island discs. This was a movement from a mass by Josquin des Prez, that he said (apparently impromptu) was music which ‘completely
For most of history, religion and war have been the most powerful social instincts of mankind and its chief collective activities. In the crusades, they combined to create a movement of great emotional power, which convulsed Europe in the 12th century and retained its appeal to the military classes until the end of the Middle
When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established, and perhaps even establishment. He had been the subject of retrospectives at the Tate and the Guggenheim, and the Marlborough Gallery had paid off several decades’ worth of gambling debts. No longer an authentically marginal
Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an intensely curious affair; thick with material detail from the outset, it announces itself as a novel of closely observed and relished realism. But before too long, one begins to suspect that its specificity — much
It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 bc, is right in the middle of Rome, in Largo di Torre Argentina. When I was there, the tourists were only interested in the feral
As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a dystopian vision of the 23rd century, scholarly espionage set in Cold War Oxford, and an Arts-and-Crafts pastoral called Anterwold, which involves swords and scholars and may or may not be the product of the imagination
History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which he worked on during one of his stints as a Hollywood hack, camping up the script to annoy Charlton Heston. Not only did he ride the Vehicle of History, but as its amanuensis and avatar,
‘July 1st 1916 was the most interesting day of my life,’ Philip Howe recalled, with characteristic English dryness, half a century after taking part in the most catastrophic 24 hours in the history of the British army. Howe had been a lieutenant in the 10th West Yorkshires, which had the grim distinction of losing more
At a time when so much of television is read from autocue, it’s a joy to come across complete professionals whose love for their subject is second only to their knowledge of it. Those who don’t have young children may not have come across Steve Backshall; those who do will know that he’s one of the best-informed and
The popular singer Chrissie Hynde has been reprimanded by feminist campaigners for speaking common sense. Hynde, who is somewhat more astute than most landfill rock slebs, has advanced the proposition that women should take a degree of precaution to ensure that they are not sexually attacked by men. Such as not wandering the streets, pissed
In a 2012 interview on Newsnight, foul-mouthed LA rapper Tyler, The Creator told a churlish Stephen Smith that the point of his music was to ‘piss old white people off like you’. Now, the old white people at the Home Office seem to have proved him right, by banning the rapper – real name Tyler
Somewhat magnificently, I made the notes for this article sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce travelling between London and Goodwood. It’s a journey that provides ample evidence of how the classical language of architecture, at least in Palladio’s version, has infiltrated our imaginations and informed our concept of grandeur. I find Palladio’s spirit in
