The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Paul McCartney says he can remember the exact moment he knew the Beatles had made it. Early one morning, getting home from a night on the tiles, he heard the milkman whistling ‘From Me to You’. This incident isn’t recounted in A Brief History of Whistling. The record in question was a huge pop hit,
In any list of the-best-prime-ministers-we never-had, the name of Roy Jenkins is likely to be prominent. He was intelligent, moderate, courteous, thoughtful: he was exactly the sort of man whom any civil servant would wish to see installed in No.10. That, no doubt, is why he never got there. John Campbell makes no bones about
A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Having recently learnt of his father’s beheading, the adolescent — dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the north — vows to avenge him. Despite his youth, he has already won in the field and commands the loyalty of many of the
Ray Cooney, the master of farce, is back. These days he’s in the modest Menier rather than the wonderful West End. His 1984 caper, Two Into One, opens with Richard, a starchy Tory minister, plotting an affair with a sexy blonde researcher, Jennifer. Richard decides to attempt a daring double bluff by booking Jennifer into
The world’s big national museums are deeply glamorous places. We keep quiet in their hallowed halls, we wander the galleries in reverence, we look at a caption here and there, but, sometimes, if we’re honest, deep in our hearts, we may be asking ourselves what we’re doing there. Art enjoys unparalleled prestige in the modern
You were on stellar form this week on the darker side of spring: the entry was full of wit and invention. There were references to Larkin, who could always be relied on to see the bleaker side of things (‘their greenness is a kind of grief’), as well as to Eliot and Thomas Edward Brown.
Today’s top public schools are plush country clubs with superb facilities, lovely food, first-class teaching, no fagging, no beating and, one imagines, minimal sexual interference from the staff. Most even have things called girls. While excellent at turning out world-class actors, the public schools these days are far too nice and unbrutal to be of
It’s German Season in London, and revealingly the best of three new shows is the one dealing with the most modern period: the post-second world war era of East and West Germany and the potent art that came out of that split nation. In Room 90 is another immaculately presented British Museum show of prints
In 1914 Fernand Léger gave a lecture about modern art. By then recognised as a leading Cubist artist, he had the year before signed up with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who already represented Picasso and Braque. ‘If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has necessitated it,’ Léger argued. ‘The existence of modern
I was in love for a whole week after Episode One: Your voice so tender, so knowledgeable, your slender hands and feet. In Episode Two, doubts crept in. Were you hogging the camera or was it just that the camera loved your profile, your man-of-the-people T shirts, your breeze-ruffled hair? Episode Three opens with you
It’s such a simple idea. Take a tape recorder. Hang around at the entrance to a railway station or in the departure lounge of an airport. Look for an intriguing face, an unusual couple, a dashing outfit. Rush up to them (having remembered to switch on the recorder) and ask, ‘Where are you going?’ As
One of the stranger things about Eton is its near-total lack of class snobbery. Yes, all right, you still get the occasional away match where their supporters will chant at the opposition ‘You’ll be working for our Dads’ but that’s just badinage, not animus. I doubt it was always thus. Probably there was a time
A Long Way Down is about four would-be suicides who meet for the first time on the top of a tall London building, intending to jump, but instead of jumping they decide to hang around and annoy the hell out of us for the next 90 minutes. Had I known what I know now, and
Here’s a great idea for a play. Turn the polygamy principle upside-down and you get a female egoist presiding over a harem of warring husbands. Sharmila Chauhan’s drama, The Husbands, introduces us to a pioneering sex maniac, Aya, who founds a commune in India where women take as many spouses as they fancy. Aya herself
It all started in 1971, when a group of physically and artistically talented youngsters decided to create a dance company and call it Pilobolus, after a fungus. Not unlike this barnyard micro-organism, which ‘propels its spores with extraordinary speed and accuracy’, the company was soon propelled to international success. But it was not an easy
If ever an opera was weighed down by its creators’ joint ambition, it is Die Frau ohne Schatten. Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal quickly began to imagine their third true collaboration, produced during the 1910s but not premièred until 1919, as their masterpiece. But it turned into a complex and unwieldy embarrassment
‘The truth is,’ says Gordon Back, lowering his voice, ‘that if the violin finalists from the BBC Young Musician of the Year were to enter the Menuhin Competition, they wouldn’t make it to the first round.’ Not through the first round, note, but to the first round: they wouldn’t be good enough to compete. Back
Are there enough black and minority ethnic people on our television screens? The comedian Lenny Henry thinks not and has proposed targets to ensure better representation. Lenny means stuff like Midsomer Murders, I think, which famously avoided using people of colour for a very long time in its absurd but strangely comforting dramas. I think
Småland’s wooden cottages with sunflowers lack nothing. Brightly-painted, small in the distance like stories, they call the eye on and on. Their painted wood is clean as thought, as the clean-cut hearts let into their shutters.
It’s a misleading title, because there is nothing unexpected about Professor Carey, in any sense. He doesn’t turn up to parties uninvited, like some of his less organised colleagues. As for his appointment, he was tailor-made for the job. Right class (middle); right school (grammar); right military service (guarding sand); right religion (books). An unsullied
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s nowhere near as punishing as the opening pages might suggest. In the ‘editor’s introduction’ we’re told that what follows is an anthology of writings by and about the late artist Harriet Burden — known to
If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it. ‘Past interest in the genre,’ James Hall tells us in his introduction to this cultural history, ‘is overshadowed by the obsession with self-portraiture during the last 40 years.’ What he could not have foreseen was that self-portraiture would feature
Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged 13, because of his father’s higher-grade teaching appointment on the mainland. As they drove over the bridge linking the island with the southern Norwegian port of Arendal, ‘it struck me with a huge sense of
In the first sentence of the first chapter of this book, Henry Marsh, a consultant brain surgeon, says, ‘I often cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing.’ What a compelling start! Marsh takes us through an operation. First, he looks at a scan. A middle-aged man has a tumour of the
The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via crack pipe — but arranged in a biography their impact is renewed. So grotesque was his upbringing that an early encounter with a dead baby in a shoebox warrants but a single sentence in David
Here’s a book co-authored by one dead woman and one living one. Sarah Raven is the second wife of Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West. In 1930 Vita bought Sissinghurst, the ruins of a great 16th-century house, and with her husband Harold Nicolson created the world-famous garden. Tell me the old, old story. Vita died
In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’, and did her best to live up to it. She held her own with the drinkers at El Vino’s, gave new meaning to the phrase ‘talking about Uganda’ when discovered in flagrante with an African
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million of us readers — knew the writings of Chapman Pincher. His frequent scoops, mostly defence- or intelligence-related, sometimes political, scientific or medical, were unusually well-sourced and headline-grabbing. Now, aged 100, he has written his autobiography.
‘In ancient times … hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people … the Druids. No one knows who they were … or what they were doing. But their legacy remains … hewn into the living rock … of Stonehenge.’ The unforgettable opening of Spinal Tap’s song ‘Stonehenge’ was
