The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of
The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful.
Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look the climate crisis in the eye. Quoting Amitav Ghosh’s observation about the ‘patterns of evasion’ that continue to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, he argued that writers must overcome the habits of mind that
For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid ‘salaryman’ business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth
Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations.
If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat them ‘as if they were ice cream or something’, in Damien Hirst’s phrase, then Martin Gayford’s latest book will be a banquet. In part, this is thanks to the illustrations – luscious close-ups of Van
‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is not about the title’s Mary Rose but about another six-year-old girl, Margaret Sutton, who has been abducted, raped and murdered in the Kent woods. The story is told from the perspective of Mary Rose’s father,
Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a poetic, guilt-stricken Afrikaner confessional published on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Two others of note were by Rhodesian/Zimbabwean writers: Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t
Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and,
It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and
They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called
The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of two ostensibly literary novels (both longlisted for the Booker prize), Burnet has also written a trilogy of self-declared thrillers. Yet the concluding volume, A Case of Matricide, demonstrates literary talent of the highest order. It
The Almeida wants to examine the ‘Angry Young Man’ phenomenon of the 1950s but the term ‘man’ seems to create difficulties so the phrase ‘Angry and Young’ is being used instead. It’s strange to encounter a theatre that’s scared of words. The opening play, Roots, by Arnold Wesker, looks at the conflict between town and
Pickled fish. Lemon tea. Cucumber. Doner kebab. Stewed beef noodles. Salted egg. Soft shell crab. Coney island mustard. Smoked gouda. Hamburger seasoning. Honey butter. Roasted garlic oyster. Spicy crayfish. Finger-licking braised pork. Sesame sauce hotpot. Rose petal. Numb and spicy hotpot. Roasted fish. Blueberry. The world of crisps has changed almost unrecognisably since the snack
In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick up a strange frequency. At first he thought it was just tuning in to a local channel, but then voices came through discussing some kind of nuclear war – and issuing bomb reports. Recalling the
For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by wounded Boer War officers, and since February 1900 a suite of rooms on the 5th had been taken over by a French painter, who was using one as a studio. The officers were nice enough,
There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and riddled with suburban self-consciousness – a kind of complicated awareness of his non-posh failings and resulting subtle superiority. He meets another young man – possibly gay – who is posh. An intricate dance ensues of
I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama is good it can be very, very good, as we saw with Spiral, Les Revenants, and, maybe the best series ever made about spies, Le Bureau. But La Maison is not in their league. This
When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country lauded for its conservation of natural resources that is rated freer and happier than the United States. He recalls feeling liberated and unfettered as he hiked in cloud forests with his brothers, seeing monkeys, sloths
Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to Joker (2019), and you have to admire Todd Phillips for returning with a jukebox musical, co-starring Lady Gaga, and not giving fans what they expected – or wanted. (There were quite a few walkouts where I saw it.) It feels like a film that hates its audience.
When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more
Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy,
Before each show on the recent The The tour – reviewed in these pages last week – the pre-recorded voice of singer Matt Johnson politely asked the audience to refrain from using mobile phones when the band was performing. In Edinburgh, while Johnson was speaking, the chap next to me was preoccupied filming an empty
Historians in Ireland occupy a public role – unlike in Britain, where those with an inclination towards the commentariat usually migrate to America. This is perhaps not surprising in a country where public intellectuals are exemplified by Stephen Fry and philosophers by Alain de Botton. Ireland presents a more demanding prospect, where, ever since the
Does Elon Musk have a good eye for the aesthetic? Earlier this month, the Tesla magnate took a break from his incessant political posting to praise something he described as a ‘work of art’ – the Las Vegas Sphere. He then treated his 200 million Twitter followers to a video of an awed crowd, desperately
The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags. He studied how rodents adapted to different environments and specifically
It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a collaboration between Virgil and Captain W.E. Johns, a fusion of the Aeneid and Biggles Pulls It Off, but that is how Boris Johnson’s memoir reads. Our intrepid hero travels round the world, wooing Gulf potentates, sticking it to Vladimir Putin, snatching submarine contracts from under Emmanuel Macron’s snooty
Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is
Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is ‘a darkly comic psychological thriller’ that plays like an inverted Beauty and the Beast. What happens when the handsome prince turns out to be not all that? The three central performances are magnificent, and there’s a wry absurdist humour at work but unless you’re a fan of body horror