The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi will be with me for some time. Though wounded, he survived the Hiroshima atom bomb and returned to his home town, Nagasaki. Three days later, he survived another nuclear attack. He died in 2010, aged 93. This fat, complex, good-natured and intriguing book is full of such memorable material. Hanno
It is easy to assume that there is not much to be said about the history of the Atlantic before 12 October 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas. In 2005, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn published a little book entitled Atlantic History: Concept and Contours which said absolutely nothing about what happened before Columbus,
‘Vivien was barking mad from the word go,’ Laurence Olivier reflected in later life, and Lyndsy Spence’s biography would fully concur with the summing-up. At best, the actress was ‘suspended in a dream world’, unable to separate herself from the classic characters she played – Scarlett O’Hara, with her dark hair and flashing eyes, or
Imagine a society, a high-minded psychologist tells his curmudgeonly father, ‘in which people are like cars. They have to go in for inspection once a year’ in order to assess their emotional fitness for the shared highway of life. As for the ‘psychopathic percentage’ whose ‘moral disorders’ lead them to fail this spiritual MoT, never
In 1855, Paul Gauguin’s widowed mother Aline returned to her husband’s family in Orleans after seven years in Peru. She brought back her daughter Marie, eight-year-old son Paul and her collection of pre-Columbian artefacts. They had no commercial value but those strange objects, sprouting the heads of birds and animals, had a power that the
As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European guest orchestras. First up was the Czech Philharmonic playing Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Jakub Hrusa before moving on to Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass the following night. These grand, glittering monuments of Czech music were garnished with
The Real Thing at the Old Vic is a puzzling beast. And well worth seeing. Director Max Webster sets the action in a vast sitting room painted electric blue with a white sofa in the centre. A lovely use of empty space. But the preview trailer on the theatre’s website shows the actors seated in
A few years ago, my nephew informed me that he and his friend were planning to come up to London for the weekend for the Wireless Festival. Did they need somewhere to stay? He looked at me like I was a mad old man. No, of course not. They were going to camp. In Finsbury
‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City workspace in 1946. ‘The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.’ Carrington blended
Firebrand is a period drama about Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr. It is sumptuously photographed – it’s as if Hans Holbein were behind the camera – and magnificently costumed. And Jude Law is tremendous as the monstrous, ailing Henry but be warned: it doesn’t play fast and loose with the facts so
Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence.
Kaos is a new Netflix gods-and-monsters black-comedy blockbuster that will scorch your screen and fry your brain like a thunderbolt from Zeus. It’s sick, cynical, brutal and very, very dark but it’s so well acted, ingeniously plotted, moving, inventive, funny and addictive that I fear resistance may be futile. Playboy Poseidon hangs out on his
On 14 March 2020 I was at Leeds Grand Theatre for the première of Northern Ballet’s Geisha. The curtains swung open on fishermen flinging out their nets, geisha, samurai, 19th-century Japanese village folk, followed by the sudden appearance of American sailors. It was in essence a Japanese Giselle: the tale of a geisha, spurned by
Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking about the extent that modern life allows us to filter our intake of noise. This is big business. As sirens wail and Marvel blockbusters and rock concerts crash through legal decibel levels, controlling sound levels
The most angst-ridden sub-category of the very rich – admittedly a lucky bunch to start with – must surely contain those who have inherited a British country house, along with the exhortation to keep it up. Imagine the anxiety of knowing that one is custodian of a large, crumbling pile of distinguished architecture, stuffed with
Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve never conducted his music, but I once trod in some.’ It’s almost certainly apocryphal, but the implied verdict is widely shared. Stockhausen played up to the caricature of the self-obsessed ‘squeaky gate’ composer, though his
‘Boo!’ came a voice from the stalls. ‘Boo. Outrage!’ It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British opera audiences don’t tend to boo; we’re either too polite or too unengaged. But there we were in Act Three of Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of The Marriage of Figaro – just after the scene where
Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out of shoebox at midnight, lick road clean, eat a couple of bits of coal gravel’) relocated to mostly 20th-century Japan and Korea. There’s so much misery it makes Angela’s Ashes look like Pollyanna. And there’s
The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists: before art history became an academic discipline, artists were the leading authorities on art. Founded more as a teaching resource than a visitor attraction, until the mid-1940s the gallery was reserved for artists two days
The Terminator is James Cameron’s first film, made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is celebrating its 40th anniversary – there’s a 4K restoration out in cinemas – and I’ve never seen it. I’m not wholly ignorant of 1980s action films, it may surprise you to hear. I’ve seen Diehard. I know a single fella in
The most important thing to know about the filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras is that she was a total drunk. ‘I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink,’ she wrote, proudly. ‘And left everyone else behind.’ It’s not something any of the academics who’d been drafted in to introduce each film in
As the American superstar starts singing another slow, sad, rather beautiful song, my mind begins to drift. I’m thinking that our appreciation of music is so much about the who, the when and perhaps most crucially the where; the significance of place is an under-examined element in our relationship with what we’re hearing at any
Shifters has transferred to the West End from the Bush Theatre. It opens at a granny’s funeral attended by the grief-stricken Dre, aged 32. Dre was raised by his ‘Nana’ as he calls her – rhyming it with ‘spanner’ – and he weeps when he realises that his mother has failed to show up. A
What makes men and women climb high? Most commonly, according to Daniel Light, ‘the prosecution of science or the advancement of empire’. It might also be general flag-waving or just personal fulfilment, as in the case of ‘private traveller’ Godfrey Vigne, who opened his English eyes to the wonder of the Karakoram in the baleful
Joe Boyd’s masterly history of what some of us still defiantly call World Music – more on which later – takes its title from Paul Simon’s ‘Under African Skies’, but is really less about the roots of rhythm than its routes. A typical chapter will start with a song from a particular geography, then wind
Some books have good titles. Many books, sadly, have terrible titles. But a few rare books have the perfect title – the one that tells you briefly what the book is about, and also whether you want to own it. Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes is one such. If that title grabs you, you should
This is a magnificent book, regardless of whether the reader knows who it is about. I state this bluntly at the outset because I am keenly aware that many more people are ignorant of Lawrence’s career and achievements in the field of popular music than will be familiar with them; and that I will need
‘All political careers end in failure,’ said Enoch Powell. Maybe. But just occasionally our imperfect political system throws up someone whose impact on our way of life, for good or ill, outlives them. In a series of elegant essays, Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, examines the careers of six politicians –
For many years the academic sociologist Frank Furedi has been among the strongest conservative voices in the front line of the culture wars. The target of his latest book is the systematic campaign to discredit the history of the West in the interest of a modern political agenda. The vandalising of statues, the ‘decolonisation’ of