The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
My fiancé has coined a word for Saturday recuperation which describes what much of the world does to allay its tension. From schoolchildren to the orthodox this is a time to reboot, rest, restore and relax, but none of these words quite suit in the way his term translates, acknowledging the week’s angst which the
It’s really hard to imagine now a world before 24-hour news, continually and constantly accessible in a never-ending stream of on-the-spot, up-to-the-minute reports. What, then, would it be like to have no news summaries on the quarter-hour, no ‘live’ bulletins, no way of knowing what’s going on at this very moment in Kathmandu, Kabul or
When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should doctors tell people not to smoke? These days, of course, the answer seems equally obvious — but at the time, medical opinion was divided. According to the highly distinguished Dr Erich Geiringer in a letter
Propaganda is said to work best when based upon a grain of truth. Ukip! The Musical assumes that most electors are suspicious of the movement and its leaders. And in Edinburgh that may well be the case. The show portrays Nigel Farage as a bewildered twerp with no charisma and little talent for oratory. His
When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought it was the nearest thing to operatic perfection I had witnessed. But this revival is even finer. Whereas I concluded last time that L’heure espagnole was fundamentally an old-time bore that goes on for far
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell tour is an astonishing moment. One flinches. An eclipse has happened and the light has just run away with her. All gone. Michael Hulls’s momentous lighting states Guillem’s intentions as clearly as Elias Benxon’s filmwork
The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The tomatoes hang green and heavy, like water bombs. Everywhere the boughs bend, the elder with its black beaded bunches, its little popping mice eyes. The crooked old pear across the street is having a stellar
I opened the envelope: it contained a ticket in my name from London St Pancras to Paris Nord, departing at 9.17 on the 12th of the 12th, a Friday; coach 3 seat 27, non-smoking; and another for returning the following day, at 13 minutes past two, in the afternoon – dans l’après- midi; and a
The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed with. K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese at Yale, confines himself to ‘Machado’ and has invented an adjective ‘Machadean’. Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in the very Machadean town of Petropolis, called him ‘the Dickens
It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when its hero entered the monastery at Wearmouth, Northumbria at the age of seven and, as far as we know, never left. Not that Bede was entirely parochial, distributing what was then an exotic luxury, pepper,
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old days’ of the publishing industry is palpable: a time when books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell …
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of his centenary, the obituaries — once they had expressed astonishment that this titan from the age of Attlee and empire had still been around —paid tribute to a polymath whose achievements could fill nine more
Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize and has become a bestseller in France — a promising start to a literary career, in other words. Wood’s new novel The Ecliptic is both an attempt
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left
Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As a conductor, he stands out in a profession increasingly given to the eclectic, and to performances of music outside the western canon. The practitioners of art music have almost all surrendered to the requirement to
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be the most daring. While the main gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy, commandeered as usual for Festival season by the National Galleries of Scotland, hosts a glittering exhibition of David Bailey photographs, the lower galleries
Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a jerk now and then and here and there? Were you inclined to take advantage of the weak, the vulnerable, the defenceless and lonely, to tease and wound and give not a single thought to the
By chance, my first night in Havana in 1987 was the night the clubs went dark to mark the death of Enrique Jorrin, the inventor of the cha-cha-cha, whose rhythmic brainstorm had gone global. My grandparents used to dance cha-cha-cha at Latin nights at the Grand Hotel in Leicester in the 1950s. Rubén Gonzalez, Jorrin’s
Chekhov so dominates 19th-century Russian drama that Turgenev doesn’t get much of a look-in. His best known play, A Month in the Country, was written before Chekhov was born but Patrick Marber’s adaptation, with its new nickname, feels like Chekhov scripted by a Chekhov app. Turgenev’s characters, his atmosphere and his scenarios feel entirely familiar
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham
One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a border (or equally considered clashes) and long, swooping vistas. It evokes soft sfumato smudges of pink and green, much as I imagine the interior of the late Queen Mother’s wardrobe must have looked. But it’s
It’s 70 years since the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet there has been no rush to commemorate this anniversary. It’s perhaps not surprising. Who would choose to recall the events of 6 August 1945 when the world first witnessed the effects of nuclear warfare? Yet the absence of date-setting, the annual
Zaha Hadid is the most famous woman architect in the world. Would women or, indeed, architecture, be better off without her pushily hard-won, global celebrity? She established her studio in London in 1980. For nearly 14 years Hadid, absurdly, became famous for not having built anything. Her reputation was boosted by a clique of fawning
I have been writing a book this summer, in the usual mad tearing hurry. (Much as I admire those who take four or five years to write one, I have to ask, how do you eat? This isn’t by any means a sensible way of making a living.) Intense workload, though, means music, and lots
On the green edge of Clifton Downs, high above the city, there is a sculpture that encapsulates the strange magic of Richard Long. ‘Boyhood Line’ is a long line of rough white stones, placed along the route of a faint, narrow footpath. When Long was a boy, this was where he used to play. There
Early August and not yet half past eight, but all along the dual carriageway more than half the cars have headlights showing in the air from which daylight moves away — the summer, not the hour, being late — the shapely boxes streaming and glowing under the sky that was brighter two weeks ago, and
‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad first published in 1951. It was a doubt he was grateful his friends and family had refrained from expressing in the long labour of translating the Greek. But he had a response for any who
In June 2009, the good people of South Carolina lost Mark Sanford, their governor. Per his instructions, his staff told the press that he was ‘hiking the Appalachian trail’. When he turned up six days later at an airport in Atlanta, Georgia, he said that he had scratched the hike in favour of something more
Michael Moorcock has put his name to more books, pamphlets and fanzines than, probably, even Michael Moorcock can count, but nothing ‘major’ over the past ten years. He’s now 75. But not, as this eruption witnesses, extinct. A cult has formed around him — Moorcockians who can discourse knowledgeably on the second aether and the