Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Slow Train to Switzerland, by Diccon Bewes – review

More from Books

In 1863, the pioneering travel agent Thomas Cook took a group of British tourists on the first package holiday to Switzerland. One of them, a jolly young woman called Jemima Morrell, kept a diary — and 150 years later, English émigré Diccon Bewes has followed in her footsteps. His Slow Train to Switzerland (Nicholas Brealey,

Steerpike

Political philosophy, Harry-style

Boy-band super-hero Harry Styles proclaimed on Twitter earlier today: ‘All social change comes from the passion of individuals.’ His shrieking fans were enthused by this insight. Some even asked if they could quote him in their exams. How sweet. Mr S is pleased to see little Harry channelling American anthropologist Margaret Mead. She is alleged to have said (although I can’t discover

How I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie

Arts feature

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin

Is Paul Klee really a great modern master?

Exhibitions

There is a school of thought that sees Paul Klee (1879–1940) as more of a Swiss watchmaker than an artist, his paintings and drawings too perfect, too contrived. Viewing this new exhibition at Tate Modern, one might add that they are also too mannered and precious. I had been looking forward to this show, but

Finding

Poems

(for Aidan Williams) After a difficult week at work, when I was trying too hard on a short fuse, I suddenly knew that all the hurt would have a certain way of being released, Googled stables in the centre of town and telephoned, but not to book a ride, just to have five minutes with

David Tennant plays Richard II like a casual hippie

Theatre

Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending to stage the complete Shakespearean canon over the next six years, ‘making every play an event’. What’s really good is that the plays will also be seen on tour, in London, online and ‘live on

How to conduct a Tallis motet in a cardboard cathedral

Music

To undertake a concert tour of New Zealand’s cathedrals at the moment is to be constantly reminded of the destructive power of nature and how dogged people can be when the chips are down. The list of buildings that the earthquake of February 2011 destroyed in the centre of Christ-church includes the Anglican cathedral, which,

Philomena is Dame Judi’s film

Cinema

Philomena is based on the true story of an Irish woman searching for the son stolen from her by the Catholic Church 50 years earlier, and although, as a cinematic experience, it could so easily have felt as if you were being repeatedly slapped round the head by a copy of Woman’s Own, it is,

Your life is not like a Detroit assembly line — it’s worse

Radio

This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question,  Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or perhaps presciently, as soon as I typed that last word ‘control’, the power went off in the midst of Monday’s storm. No word processor, no internet connection, no phone line, almost no radio (since the

‘I was an arrogant 18-year-old’: Daniel Harding on growing up

Music

‘Have a look at this,’ says Daniel Harding, goggle-eyed, between mouthfuls of salmon. The pictures on his smartphone show Claudio Abbado, one of his mentors, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Schumann’s Scenes from Faust, a work that gets closer to Harding’s musical personality than any other, which he has just recorded with the Bavarian Radio

The joy of cemeteries

Features

The idea of writing Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die first came to Ann Treneman when she was chatting with Tony Wright, formerly Labour MP for Cannock Chase. They started talking about Birmingham and she happened to remark: ‘Did you know the man who invented Cluedo came from Bromsgrove?’ His name,

The imitable Jeeves

More from Books

For as long as I can remember — I take neither pleasure nor pride in the admission — I have been one of those people who feels an irresistible curling of the lip at reviews of the ‘I laughed till I cried’ variety. Something about that hackneyed claim, invariably trumpeted in bold letters outside West

Carlos Acosta, the great dancer, should be a full-time novelist

More from Books

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in

Why did Penelope Fitzgerald start writing so late? 

More from Books

‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first draft of The Bookshop, published in 1978 when Penelope Fitzgerald was 62, didn’t survive in the finished version, but its author had found her voice, and, in a way, her subject. She had learnt how

Why Jeremy Paxman’s Great War deserves a place on your bookshelf

More from Books

The Great War involved the civilian population like no previous conflict. ‘Men, women and children, factory, workshop and army — are organised in one complete unity of social resistance, to defend themselves both by offence and by ordinary defence,’ said Ramsay MacDonald. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the popular army padre nicknamed ‘Woodbine Willie’, declared ‘There are

Village life can be gripping

More from Books

Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an amphitheatre, with the pit winding gear where a stage would be’. It is divided into Lower, Middle and Upper Terrace, the last-mentioned known by the locals as Paradise. If, like many bookshop browsers, you judge

How we beat Napoleon

Lead book review

It feels the height of ingratitude to blame Jane Austen for anything, but it probably is her fault that most people seem to think that the only impact that the Napoleonic War had on British life was to bring Mr Wickham and the militia into the lives of the Bennet girls. It is certainly true

Steerpike

Taking on the most dangerous job in journalism

Readers will recall the sad demise of Tatler Alan, the cute pooch who came to a sticky end in a tragic accident involving the doors of Vogue House, where the magazine is based. Well, I am the bearer of happier news this time: the girls in pearls have a new canine recruit, Geoffrey, a puppy

Rod Liddle

Educating Yorkshire was, for the most part, self-indulgent pap

I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary series, Educating Yorkshire, which has been as depressing as you might imagine from the title. Some of the teachers in the film were excellent, but the overall feeling one got was of inadequate individuals endlessly indulging their arrogant and stupid charges. As described here, rather brilliantly, in

Competition: Back to school

Spectator literary competition No. 2823 This week’s assignment offers an opportunity to put yourselves into the 8-year-old shoes of future heads of state or literary giants. You are invited to submit a school essay or poem written at the age of eight by any well-known person, living or dead, entitled ‘My Pet’. Please email entries,