The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Do we really need a thumping new life of Queen Victoria? She seems to be one of our most familiar figures, the subject of countless books; but the surprising fact is that there hasn’t been a full, authoritative study since Elizabeth Longford’s life of 1974. A.N. Wilson has spent many years thinking and reading about
Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started this job I’d review one almost every fortnight. Always there’d be something worth watching: on the horrors of the Pacific or the Eastern Front, say; or castles; or Churchill; or medieval sword techniques. But now
A public appeal has been launched to save the Wedgwood Museum pottery collection, which is being sold to pay off the ceramics firm’s pension bill. The museum entered administration in 2010 after the firm collapsed and its £134m pension debts were transferred to the museum trust. The Art Fund said it had raised about £13m
When I first read Jane Austen I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to impress a girl who read her. I didn’t get the girl, but I got the novelist: persuading myself that I was the only 16 year-old boy in Newcastle who had read Jane Austen. Not yet subtle enough to appreciate the extent
Gaily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train… Near the end of the Metropolitan Line, where London dwindles into woods and meadows, stands a Tudor manor house, built within the moat of a motte-and-bailey castle. Now a quaint museum, charting the history of the farms that once surrounded it, this modest landmark shares its
What are the root causes of Britain’s housing crisis? The Philosophers’ Mail – which has copied the format of MailOnline but I suspect is not aiming at quite the same demographic – recently offered an alternative to the usual explanations. That most people are opposed not to building more houses, but to building ugly houses, and
Strange things happen to Werner Herzog — almost as strange as the things that happen in his haunting, hypnotic films. In 1971, while making a movie in Peru, he was bumped off a flight that subsequently crashed into the jungle. Years later, he made a moving film about that disaster’s sole survivor. In 2006, while
Titles can be misleading, and in case you have visions of microwave ovens running amok or washing machines crunching up the parquet, be reassured — or disappointed. Disobedient Objects, the new free display in the V&A’s Porter Gallery, is about objects as tools of social change. It’s a highly politicised exhibition and contains a great
I made the mistake of getting in touch with him twenty years after – invited him to stay. He was almost alcoholic, had lost his front teeth, told endless anecdotes and, worst of all, was allergic to my dog. You’d think that’d be a cure or antidote to all those years of unrequited love spent
The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was born in Germany in 1942 on a forced labour farm to which her parents had been transported by the Nazis. Her early memories are of a wooden world — of huts, fences, domestic utensils and
I’m willing to bet it’s only on the BBC’s Radio 3 that you’ll find yourself listening to a programme quite like Words and Music (Sunday evenings). You might want to disagree. Surely, it’s just a few bits of music stuck together with some poems and other readings on a random theme dreamt up by the
Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The tone of Wednesday’s episode was set immediately when the narrator introduced us to ‘one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the world’, where ‘no detail is too small or demand
Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963. Eddie is a swaggering, shaven-headed Marine and Rose is a shy, awkward waitress. Come to a party, he says. She refuses, prevaricates, reconsiders, accepts. They reach the venue; he ignores her. Furtive conversations in corners
Night Moves is a film by Kelly Reichardt, who also made the heart-wrenching Wendy and Lucy (2008), which may be one of my favourite films of all time. (If you don’t know it, go look it up; I’m old now, so no longer have the energy to educate you in these matters.) Her films, she
It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI
Perhaps I should come clean straightaway and admit that, despite the fact that OperaUpClose is about to celebrate its fifth birthday, I’d never been to see one of its shows before last week. This has not been a conscious decision; maybe, though, I’d been unconsciously put off by the company’s early braggadocio — by the
The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like a prayer he keeps his coat on, but he’s going nowhere the place is a circus of contradictions nurses anonymous as nuns push trays of benedictions in all colours and shapes; on the tongue they
So here comes another book about how to be happy, written by Professor Dolan, an ‘internationally renowned expert’ at the LSE. The key evidently lies in ‘pleasure and purpose’, derived from your ‘daily felt experiences’, an analysis hymned in the introduction by a Nobel prize-winner as a ‘bold and original move’. Really? Since Dolan asserts
The French Revolution ushered in not only a revolution of rolling heads but of talking ones too. ‘Speech-making was a new political instrument,’ writes Eric Hazan. ‘The King of France never gave speeches and neither did his ministers.’ Indeed Louis XVI’s lack of eloquence, or more specifically his egregious line of sentimental claptrap, had fatal
‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his new novel is a riff on Kafka’s The Castle. Kafka’s ‘K’ has become X, struggling for recognition by his lover, by his employer, by the world. The Situation is a residential block in Dubai (desert
What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds most appealing: the perfect recipe for a bohemian life, dreamed up by a supreme master in the art of having it both ways. To begin with at least, however, Picasso had to make do only
Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends meet in their genteel villa. Servantless, Mrs Wray keeps up appearances while her daughter Frances confronts the reality of hands-and-knees housework. Reluctantly, they advertise for ‘paying guests’, and are rewarded with Leonard and Lilian Barber,
An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel Adams mountainside of conifers on one side and a bare mountain on the other; concentric ripples on a lake in the foreground are mirrored in the sky above. It will, I fear, remind readers of
The early 1970s was a good time for heavyweight boxing. Indeed, it was probably the last truly great age for the sport. Flamboyant fighters contested brutal matches in exotic locations, from the Philippines to the Caribbean. The world watched open-mouthed. The marketing slogans attached to some of those fights remain instantly recognisable: who has not
Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private Godfrey’s genteel sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage for the feared Hitler invasion. ‘The Germans are coming, Miss Godfrey,’ Lance Corporal Jones warns. ‘Yes I know, so many people to tea,’ she chirrups,
Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a history that is as gender-balanced as possible it is absolutely necessary to include every woman painter ever heard of, some perfectly worthy of their place, some less so. How the art historian might envy the
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics expressed their doubts about the old boy. Levi leaned forward in his chair to say, with passionate intensity, ‘But Belloc is worth discussing… because he was… very nearly a poet.’ At the time, I thought
A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were plainly visible, I discovered a remarkable fact: if you wear a pink or even a crimson bra underneath a pale shirt, it doesn’t show. For several weeks I passed on this gem of truth to
Thuringia, a region of former East Germany, occupies a special place in the thoughts of Germans, who like to regard it as the origin of all their best virtues. It’s an alluring place, full of wonderfully untouched stretches of densely forested hills; the occasional small historic town seems hardly to have changed for decades, and
