The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
True Story is based on the book True Story, which is itself based on a true story, so there is a lot of truth knocking about, I guess you could say, but absolutely none of it is at all interesting. It sounds as if it will be fascinating, as it’s about the disgraced New York
Lucas Debargue, a 24-year-old French pianist, came fourth in the finale of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow on 30 June, yet he’s the only competitor anyone is talking about. Why? The main reason is that they’re riveted by his backstory. Have you noticed how we all say ‘backstory’ these days, instead of boring old ‘background’?
What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe at the panto comedy; on the other hand, you do not want to see verismo child-abuse and uglies-baiting. So what’s left for modern eyes? Two things: the Prokofiev score — as magical a charmer as
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on a board, announcing the king had died, how life stalled for a moment. This evening I got the call I’d long dreaded, telling me you were dead. ‘We are not a grandchild,’ Thatcher might have
Wolves have powerful symbolic meanings for humans. They are part of the mythology that defines us: Little Red Riding Hood, Romulus and Remus, the wargs in Tolkien, Mother Wolf in The Jungle Book, Maugrim in The Chronicles of Narnia. Wolves have profound resonance for us all. Wolves intermittently break out in the stories we tell
Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test — shoot dead a man tied to a chair — then moved into a nice house in Texas. Soon he was earning $500 a week for stakeouts and odd jobs, but the big money came from
As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied to the nobility who ruled it for most of its history. And every schoolboy is wrong. The phrase was coined to describe the dominions of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (or Charles I of
Scholarship for its own sake has rather gone out of fashion, although I’m sure Spectator readers would be the last people to worry about that. But what of scholarship for barely any sake at all? A book like this, the result of enormously diligent library ferreting, doesn’t have any pressing reason to exist, but I
The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during which the nation was repeatedly destroyed and recreated. How is it that a heap of cobblestones, furniture and overturned vehicles — handcarts in 1848, 2CVs in 1968 — erected at particular points on the Left
Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June 1976 Air France Flight 139, travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens, was hijacked above the Gulf of Corinth by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway through his brother’s eulogy and brazenly strolls down to the front pew, ignoring the scandalised glances. He’s late, a whisper spreads, because he had a meeting with director James Toback. Wait. James Toback? Lame! The
The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator, who pilots his hi-tech camera without leaving his room, propped up against cushions. The corpulent Damilola Karpov lives in Byzantion, or Big Byz, an ‘offglobe’ hovering over what’s left of the old world after the
Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust people in pools.’ If he wanted to swim he should take a dip in the River Thames, which flowed through the grounds. But when his horse won the Oaks, Bill Astor built his long-desired pool,
This is an interesting document, and a pretty bad novel. I don’t know why anyone thought it would be otherwise. In 1960, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. It was an important statement, as well as a very good novel. Just as it took the southerner Lyndon B. Johnson to make the most significant
This is an interesting document, and a pretty bad novel. I don’t know why anyone thought it would be otherwise. In 1960, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. It was an important statement, as well as a very good novel. Just as it took the southerner Lyndon B. Johnson to make the most significant
Brace yourself, reader. This is an account of a conversation with the director of the yucky trailer-trash comedy Pink Flamingos. Perhaps you won’t recall the final scene in which the overweight transvestite Divine munches on an actual dog turd. No, it wasn’t faked — this was in 1972 and there was no budget for trickery.
Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made. After all, the cost of the pigment, oil and cloth that made up a Rembrandt was negligible. It’s what he did with them that counts. On the other hand, spectacular works of art can be
Popular culture is all about the shock factor, especially when it involves female popstars. The late Eighties set a precedent for women making statements in their music videos. In 1989 Madonna broke taboos with an interracial love story, complete with burning crosses and a crying saint. A year later Sinead O’Connor was the first woman
Of course the bride’s dog came to the wedding and was allotted a chair at the top table at which he sat with a gloomy expression and a chewed satin bow. The groom fed him morsels of pheasant — laughing rather theatrically when his finger was nipped and the blood dyed his table napkin a
This year the Proms are to stage 21 world premières and 11 European, UK or London premières. It is good to see the corporation continuing its mission to encourage new music, though some think they overdo it. I heard one of our leading keyboard players say that when he was asked to première a piece
Refugee crisis in the Mediterranean! Fear not. Anders Lustgarten and his trusty rescue ship are here to save mankind. Lampedusa consists of two monologues, one Italian, one English, which tackle the problem at home and abroad. We meet Stephano, a cartoon fisherman with a Zorba beard and a chunky woollen sweater who lives on Italy’s
It’s not surprising that politicians have such an on-off relationship with the broadcast media. One slip. One casual comment. One lapse of memory. Even the immaculate, armour-plated Nicola Sturgeon was caught out by Jane Garvey last Wednesday as the Woman’s Hour presenter congratulated her on her latest elevation. It had just been announced that Scotland’s
If heartwarming, against-the-odds, triumph-over-adversity, wrong-side-of-the-tracks films float your boat and you are in no way demanding then The Choir is your boat floated, pretty much, but otherwise it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, hundreds of times. This is one of those films that appears to have never watched any other films, or it surely wouldn’t
So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has gone. Your wife, your kids, your nephews and nieces, your friends, your customers: they’ve all been kidnapped and dragged off to a place so barbarically horrible that really they’d be better off dead. Your daughter,
When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by the current headline-grabbing William Tell at the Royal Opera House — and one that lies beneath the meticulous dramatic archaeology of Fiona Shaw’s The Rape of Lucretia. Unlike William Tell, however, there seems little chance
It’s rare that I see a piece about music that makes me want to cheer from the rafters and shake the perpetrator by the hand, but one such appeared in these pages last week on the subject of Ringo Starr, 75 this week. James Woodall, who may or may not be a Beatles tragic of
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped When told it was all in the future, and not in the past, And someone (who?) had forgotten to give him the script. He tried his damnedest, but there were other factors That made the
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp, the Athenian general Xenophon wrote a briefing paper designed to help his city negotiate the aftermath of a disastrous war. His proposals mixed supply-side reform with Keynesian stimulus. The regulatory powers of Athenian officials, so
The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid, holding a heart not a mirror. Not your average mermaid, then; but as the folklorist and playwright Sophia Kingshill delves further into their complex cultural history, it becomes clear there’s no such thing. Mermaids can