The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he called Damian McBride to try to get to the bottom of the story. The latter recounts the conversation verbatim in Power Trip, his tell-all book dedicated ‘to Gordon, the greatest man I ever met’. Brown
The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two books that situate the horrors of trench warfare within a much larger perspective. One argues that the war had a forgotten ‘human face’. The other that it might all have had a very different outcome.
The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial interest. It raises questions of national identity, political morality and personal integrity that are still relevant today with immigration, Euroscepticism and dodgy dossiers. It is also, as Emile Zola recognised, a gripping story: ‘What a
Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction book The Lost Art of Walking, and it’s there in the latter’s successor, Walking in Ruins (Harbour Books, £12.50). He savours the comfort to be gained from accepting decay as an inevitable part of life.
I couldn’t decide on starting England’s 100 Best Views whether it was a batty idea for a book or a perfectly sensible one. Why write about something that begs to be seen? Would this not be better as a collection of photographs, with helpful accompanying maps and perhaps a checklist that, once filled in, entitled
It’s been a sensational week for opera in London, with a sensationally good performance of Strauss’s Elektra at the Royal Opera, and a sensationally terrible production of Fidelio at English National Opera. Charles Edwards’s production of Elektra is revived for the second time, but this is quite the finest account of it, thanks above all
Film fans look away now. Last night the latest author to add to the Bond legacy said that he did not think his version could work on the silver screen. Speaking at the Southbank Centre, William Boyd told fans that if he had wanted Solo to be made into a film he would have written
Chris Ingram is a silver-haired, incisive man, with an air of quiet authority and decided opinions about the art he so passionately collects. A media entrepreneur who started work at 16 as a messenger boy in an advertising agency, Ingram has the strength of his convictions. Over the past dozen years he has built up
The contrast could not have been more acute. It came the day after a press release from Christie’s New York pinged into my inbox announcing the forthcoming sale of Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog (Orange)’ on 12 November. Even by current auction-house standards, the hype was of heroic immoderation but it was the novel brazen pandering
In the Musée du Cinquantenaire, a grand gallery on the green edge of Brussels, those bureaucratic Belgians are welcoming home a prodigal son. Henry van de Velde — Passion, Function, Beauty is a celebration of the 150th birthday of Belgium’s most prolific polymath, yet a lot of people here in Brussels scarcely seem to know
Think of an art at which the English have excelled and I doubt you would come up with the word ‘embroidery’. As I muttered when my agent asked whether I should like to make a film for BBC4 about the golden age of this forgotten but brilliant native art form: ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But
As his father lay dying some six years ago, Julian Broke-Evans promised him that he would ‘keep telling the story’, the story being that of Scott’s ill-fated but heroic 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Julian’s grandfather was Teddy Evans (later Admiral Lord Mountevans), Scott’s second-in-command, who was to win fame in 1917
In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared in Los Angeles, Venice, Doha and Beijing. Even Camden has seen a burst of activity — the Dairy Art Centre opened in April of this year, spread over the 12,500 sq ft of a former
Take, for instance, the curious case of Sir David Attenborough. The poor booby is another neo-Malthusian. Which is another reminder that expertise in one area is no guarantee of good sense in another. As I wrote in The Scotsman this week: Attenborough is a supporter of Population Matters, a creepy outfit who have previously suggested Britain’s optimum
Britain is still an essentially Victorian country (see Daily Mail for details). So it’s no surprise that we keep returning to the period for inspiration. Victoriana: The Art of Revival at the Guildhall Art Gallery (until 8 December) is a collection of modern pieces channelling the age when corsets were tighter than George Osborne’s purse
Are you following the world’s most watched aristocratic family? If you recall, they recently took into their ranks a member of the middle classes. The family, headed by a matriarch, is as dysfunctional as any other. But they do live in a palatial home and have a coterie of servants. Their sense of fashion is
How many battles have been fought over sacred music throughout history? The noise you make when you worship is a big deal: those who control it can shape everything from clerical hierarchy to intimate spirituality. And there are patterns. Deep suspicion of music is the mark of the puritan. Fundamentalist Sunni Muslims teach that all
Why would anyone want to adapt Berg’s Lulu, a masterpiece even if a problematic one? According to John Fulljames, who is the producer of the version of Lulu that Olga Neuwirth has come up with, ‘the Lulu plays now stand neutered within the familiar history of male authored texts which define women from a male
How appropriate. Barking in Essex, a farce about gangsters, has been dishonestly billed as ‘a new comedy’. The script was written in 2005 by Clive Exton (1930–2007), who pre-dates Woody Allen by half a decade. The storyline — thieves quarrel over stolen loot — is a trusty antique featured in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and in
Blue Jasmine is the latest film from Woody Allen who, at various stages of his career, has been declared on-form, off-form, sliding-from-form, returning-to-form and, for all I know, as I don’t follow these matters closely, wearing form like a carnival hat with tinkling bells, but there is no need to bother with any of that.
What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner has brought science to bear on the perennial question. And the answer from this book is that what women want is not just sex but sex outside the confines of monogamy. You know the received
Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know what she means. It’s strange how he has always been singled out for prizes and high honours — why not Ronald Pickup, Charles Kay, Edward Petherbridge, Frank Finlay or the late Jeremy Brett? Ian Richardson
Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about it, and was inspired to write a book by the wealth and quality of eyewitness accounts from both sides. The result is superb. When Britain Burned the White House is an exemplary work of history
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany — probably the high point of Stalinism. Two teenagers, dressed in 19th- century costume and members of a secret literary club called, aptly as it turns out, the Fatal
Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure in life’. In fact there’s no evidence Thatcher ever said it — the most likely culprit is the Duchess of Westminster. Mark Mason loves buses, and doesn’t much
Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long, funny poem describing the incestuous peccadilloes of contemporary poetry’s social purlieus deserves to be read, and almost certainly will be read — and purchased — by far more readers than all but a few collections
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant. Indeed, he is at times too nasty. If this otherwise compulsively readable novel about betrayal in Nazi-occupied France has a flaw, it lies in Husson’s irredeemable villainy, as if to make such a man
When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he was writing about George Herbert, Fenton replied with gnomic brio ‘The poet!’ adding ‘Both in intention and execution.’ Herbert’s authentic lightness and strength, pathos and wit, alertness and sympathy have long been as precious to
Monstrous innocence’ was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingénue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle époque, scandalous lesbian, risqué music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious