The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It is 490 BC and it is raining. Themistocles, the Athenian general, is at Marathon, preparing to shoot an arrow at the great Persian King Darius I. Xerxes, Darius’ son, is there to witness the barb as it flies and strikes a blow that will be fatal and, presumably, deeply humiliating. The Persians prided themselves
Lapwing leans against the wind, First hint of changing season Come to turn the soil to stone And bring the blanket snow. Until the gentle snowdrops show In the hedgerows, And the fields grow green again, In the warm summer days.
Kate Colquhoun sets herself a number of significant challenges in her compelling new book, Did She Kill Him? Like Kate Summerscale before her, Colquhoun mines the rich seam of legal archives to give her readers the fascinating tale of a Victorian courtroom drama: that of Florence Maybrick, accused, in 1889, of murdering her husband. Colquhoun
The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search for the origin of the remark, sometimes attributed to George Eliot, that ‘it’s never too late to become the person you might have been’. To Mead this seemed at variance with the concentration in Middlemarch
In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably in Allen Ginsberg’s room at Columbia University — and it stayed lost until 2002, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Now it has been published, all 70 pages of it, together with some youthful sketches
Comedians always like to claim that they started making jokes after childhoods made harsh by poverty; that at a formative age they were tormented by appalling cruelty and neglect. Griff Rhys Jones had to leave Wales at the age of six days, for instance. Nevertheless, the Chaplin family could afford a maid in Kennington. The
Queen Victoria was the inventor of official royal biography. It was she who commissioned the monumental five-volume life of Prince Albert, a controversial and revealing work. She wrote most of the personal sections herself. She also published bestselling volumes, such as Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. She was a gifted
One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to reveal the brilliancies too fully would spoil their effect. My copy is splattered with exclamation marks. For example, on page 65 the author is working on a piece of delicate silver jewellery that will become
There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But Jonathon Green found one: compiling slang dictionaries. This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself. When a man loves reading
In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject of his 1998 narrative poem, ‘Bill of Rights’. D’Aguiar often examines brutal historical episodes from the perspective of a survivor or escapee. In Feeding the Ghosts (1997), the drowning of 140 slaves in 1798 so
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking, sixty-nining, cruising, blowjobs, fisting, rimming and three-ways. Of course, Proust-inspired poetic exaltations to homosexual love have long characterised White’s fiction, from A Boy’s Own Story
Historians have generally not been kind in their assessment of Britain’s first two Stuart kings. Their political skills are regarded as meagre; their objectives malign; their one undisputed talent an unerring ability to alienate their subjects — with rebellion and civil war as the result. To his credit, Tim Harris, in his formidably large and
Rana Dasgupta, who was born and brought up in Britain, moved to Delhi at the end of 2000, principally to pursue a love affair and to write his first novel. He soon found himself mixing in bohemian circles, spending his evenings in ‘small, bare and, in those days, cheap’ apartments, talking with ‘artists and intellectuals’.
So BBC3 will be online-only from next autumn. If the Beeb had presented this news as the channel being the first one to take the daring step of migrating to the internet, instead of it being booted out to save the likes of BBC4, perhaps BBC3 fans would be feeling less aggrieved. After all, as
The British Library isn’t the first place I associate with contemporary fiction. For me, it’s about the Tudor manuscripts: the support and expertise of the manuscript room staff is second to none, and to the academic mind, few thrills compare to finding Elizabeth I’s distinctive handwriting on an unexpected document, or deciphering treacherous correspondence in
FILM: Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer) Critics who saw it at the Venice Film Festival thought it either ‘laughably bad’ or a ‘masterpiece’. This week you get the chance to decide whether Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a kind of alien butcher on the hunt for human meat to
A week or two ago, author Philip Hoare wrote an article for the Independent, describing Derek Jarman as ‘a modern-day John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist’, ‘an Edwardian Andy Warhol, a Victorian Jean Cocteau’ (huh?), and, inevitably, ‘a national treasure’. It’s symptomatic of the way that artists, writers and celebrities of a certain age haven’t been
A play about the 2012 Delhi rape was never going to be easy viewing and unsurprisingly Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya is painful to watch. It’s easy to close a newspaper when details are too graphic or flick a TV channel when the news becomes unbearable. But this performance is painful because it confronts the most difficult of
Spectator literary competition No. 2840 You were excellent this week on the horrors of the reunion dinner. But these gatherings no longer have the allure they once enjoyed. While in days gone by, they offered the opportunity to see, and, more enjoyably, to assess, former classmates in their adult incarnations, in an age of social
The other day I got an invitation to a do called ‘For Now and Forever – a reception and photo exhibition celebrating the life of Hugo Chávez’, with speeches by various left-wing notables, including the one and only Len McCluskey. It’s been a year since Venezuela’s cuddly comandante passed away, and supporters of his Bolivarian
If Margaret Thatcher is remembered by many more as a caricature than as her actual self, then blame Spitting Image. The show, which ran from 1984 to 1996, portrayed her variously as a cross-dresser, a fascist and a bully but, to her credit, she never complained. Or, if she did, there’s no record of it.
It doesn’t take long for an international event of historic importance to fall off the news agenda. Ukraine is still there, making headlines, but soon it will be forgotten as the political drama in Kiev, Sebastopol, the Crimea is overtaken by an unfolding crisis elsewhere. We who live beyond and outwith the situation are encouraged
I’ve got this brilliant idea for a major new cop series. It’s called Chalk and Cheese and, though you won’t have guessed this from the title, it’s about these detective partners who couldn’t be more different. Why, they’re like two incredibly dissimilar things, one, maybe an edible, milk-based product, the other some manner of mineral
The Grand Budapest Hotel is the latest Wes Anderson film and it is beautiful to look at, scrumptious, luscious, such a delicious confection I would have marched up to the screen and licked it if only, at the screening I attended, Mark Kermode had not been occupying the seat in front, and it would have
Interesting times at Soho Theatre. One of its outstanding shows of last year, Fleabag, was an offbeat Gothic love story written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The director of Fleabag, Vicky Jones, has penned another offbeat Gothic love story. And it stars Waller-Bridge. The action plunges us into the weird, manipulative love life of beautiful
Exhibitions are made for two main reasons: education and entertainment. Although I recognise the importance of education I am, by nature, a devotee of pleasure and want people to enjoy what they see in museums — not just feel that they must learn from it. Great exhibitions marry the two impulses effortlessly, and on balance
Earworm: what a wonderful word. It describes, as nothing else quite can, the effect a really invasive melody can have on your consciousness. Hear the song once and you will hear it again and again, on a loop in your brain. At the pub quiz the other night, the answer to a question was Brotherhood
Paloma Faith is an unusual pop star. Her flamboyant, retro appearance is upholstered by a deep-thinking mind and she articulates herself in an uncut East London accent. She hangs out with the author Hanif Kureishi and you can expect to find her at an art opening. When we meet in London’s Soho House, she is
It was one of those weeks. On Monday, I was in four countries: I woke up at crack of dawn in Austria, took my first plane in Germany, my second in Switzerland, and was back in Blighty by lunch. The next day, I travelled up to Scotland to play the sodomitical Duke of Sandringham in