The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It starts with a brilliant joke. We’re in the Weimar Republic in 1929. Little Emil Tischbein is listening to his mother and a moaning neighbour, Mrs Wirth, lamenting Germany’s loss of moral fibre. Mrs Wirth cites a recent gangster film whose depravity shocked her to the core. ‘We saw it three times,’ she adds. Forewarned
I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike a positive, even cheerful note on the present and future of the art form, but honesty compels me to say that I don’t think it is in very good shape. Not, probably, that it has
Looking through the list of composers who celebrate some sort of anniversary in 2014 is a depressing business. I don’t think I have ever seen such an anonymous collection of small-time nobodies, and yet for them to appear on a list at all suggests that they did something of note, and that someone has heard
The mood is celebratory in East Anglia: the University (UEA) marks 50 years since it opened its doors in Norwich, and the Sainsbury Centre, its visual arts flagship, is back in business after refurbishment by Foster & Partners. The first public building designed by Norman Foster, it opened originally in 1978, a huge glass and
The Albek Duo are two astonishingly beautiful and talented Venetian musicians, Fiona and Ambra, who are identical twins. Hearing the sisters perform inspired Christopher Ondaatje to create this book. He tells a story — ‘Love Duet’ — in which he imagines what would happen if the twins both fell in love with the same man.
This utterly charming, totally bonkers short novel is something from another age. There are elements of A Handful of Dust (the young girl trapped reading Dickens), of Rebecca (the undervalued companion of a cantankerous employer), of fable and fairy tale and even of Restoration comedy. Victoria, young, pretty, big-bosomed, is the companion of a blind
Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns.
Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled herself on Morticia Addams, and where a lesser celebrity memoirist would go on to say that she eventually played Morticia in a film of The Addams Family, Huston is generous enough not to labour the
In calling their book Art as Therapy Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have taken the direct route. They’re not waiting for us to interpret their motive: their title tells us everything. Art, the theory goes, can help us improve our psychological state in a way that’s progressive and cumulative. It can assist our relationships,
In the autumn of 2012, Philip Roth told a French magazine that his latest book, Nemesis, would be his last. The storm of interest this created was surprising, given that he was 78. His creative spurt in his seventies (inexplicable, according to Roth: ‘my breakfast cereal stayed the same’) had given fans the illusion that,
So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay
The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard died yesterday at the age of 90. She is most famous for the series of 14 Cazelet novels; the last of which, All Change, was published last autumn. Here is a snippet from Nicola Shulman’s review of the book: ‘If there is anything in publishing to melt the realities of
As the new year beckons, James Mumford counts down the best albums of 2013. Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, and David Cameron’s favourite – Haim, all make the list. But Coffee House readers – what would be on your top ten? 10: Phoenix, Bankrupt! The revival of the 1980s is the clear theme of my top-ten. The
It’s rare to read a book about politics and be actually excited to get back to it, like you’re on holiday and lost in a novel; but that’s what I felt with How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters, Daniel Hannan’s account of the development of English law and politics. But then again, I am quite
Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust By Hans Kundnani The best political book I read in 2013 actually came out in 2009 – I am afraid my finger is a long way from the pulse of contemporary publishing. Hans Kudnani history of Germany’s 1968 generation tells an extraordinary story: the revolt of
This has become a Christmas tradition for me: watching this extraordinary four-minute film about 25 December 1940. Its narrated by an American – at the behest of the British government, who wished to persuade Americans that our fight against Hitler was worth joining. The script is beautiful, almost poetic. “For the first time in history,
Peter O’Toole has passed away today, aged 81. Amongst the many characters he played was the lead role in Keith Waterhouse’s Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on the Spectator’s Low Life column. O’Toole was easily Jeffrey’s favourite of the actors to play him – Tom Conti, he thought, seemed to disapprove of all the drinking but
Spectator literary competition No. 2830 This week you are invited to choose, from different authors, two characters who have the same job or position (e.g., Shakespeare’s Quince and Lewis Carroll’s Carpenter, Mr Collins and Mr Slope, Holmes and Philip Marlowe) and give an excerpt of not more than 150 words from their conversation on meeting.
Writing about Graham Sutherland in 1950, the critic Robert Melville observed: ‘When one looks at a picture one finds oneself over the frontier or one doesn’t. Criticism has no power of making converts to an experience which occurs without the intervention of reason … Criticism considers the sensitive flesh of the image and discovers its
Turner’s contemporaries regarded him primarily as a marine painter. This perception extended to his persona, with many who met him commenting on his nautical gait, manner of speaking and other salty characteristics. He frequented ports and coastal parts, relished sailing in storms, was immune to seasickness and famously had himself lashed to the mast to
Oh take a break at Bleeding-under-Wychwood Away from all the city noise and grime; Where the harvest moon shines bright and the knocking in the night Is the undertaker working overtime. You can dine quite cheaply at the Pig and Whistle On the roast beef of Olde England, rare and lean, But I don’t advise
He had not recognised me or I him. The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes Took each other in, and we didn’t realise… We stared, and we ruled each other out until After several glassy seconds I found the will And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music, recently wrote about the almost total ignorance of young people when it comes to classical music, but I think he was wrong when he worried that Mozart and Beethoven were becoming ‘the preserve of the better off’. The truth is that if there’s a lack
Try not to meet us in the flesh We’ll disappoint you if you do, Our dandruff and our garlic breath Are better tucked away from view. Try not to catch us off the cuff We’ll topple your romantic dreams Not concentrate or smile enough, You’ll see us parting at the seams. You hang our pictures,
His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might impress late shoppers on this final trading-night, persuading them to spend their all before indifferent time slammed shut the last shop door. He heard hyena voices and he saw splashed vomit on the pavement as
There is no finer city in which to hear music than Vienna. Or, to put it more felicitously, there is no finer city in which to listen to music for, as music-lovers know, there is a world of difference between hearing and listening. In the Imperial City, where most of the great composers in the
If, like me, you are allergic to pantomime (‘Oh, no you’re not!’; ‘Oh, yes I am!’) then help is at hand: the Gruffalo is in town and strutting his stuff, to the delight of legions of tiny fans, at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue until 12 January. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s much-loved verse fable tells
Is it time to scrap the licence fee? That’s a question we’re going to hear more and more about in the next couple of years. Why should the BBC retain its archaic monopoly over the airwaves? Why not abolish the royal charter that grants the BBC the right to collect the fee (worth £3.6 billion
So I’m looking at the seasonal TV schedules trying to find something — anything — to watch. Britain and the Sea? Probably very well done, but David Dimbleby is such a dangerously feline, OE-manqué, Flashmanesque, living-embodiment-of-the-BBC closet pinko that reviewing it would feel wrong, somehow, like chipping into a fund to buy Chris Huhne an