Culture

Culture

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

How China’s Bayeux Tapestry differs from ours

Exhibitions

The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, from the early 12th century, which, with its bright colours, shallow space and lack of setting, invites comparison with a western masterpiece of a similar date, the Bayeux Tapestry. The crowded urgencies and narrative drive

What my addiction to Chinese painting made me do

Exhibitions

My addiction to Chinese landscape painting began in 1965 at the V&A, in a travelling exhibition of the Crawford Collection from America. The catalogue entries were supplied by the doyen of Chinese art historians in Britain, Michael Sullivan, who died aged 97 just a month before the opening of this latest exhibition of Chinese painting

Lloyd Evans

British empire? What British empire?

Theatre

Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory of gardens, for the playwright, is that the characters can enter and leave without reason. The rites of welcome and valediction, the physical opening and shutting of doors, the declaration of motive are all abandoned.

Ryan Gosling couldn’t play Taki better than Taki

Cinema

Seduced and Abandoned is both a satire on film-making and a love letter to film-making and a joy. A documentary made by the director and writer James Toback, in cahoots with his friend the actor Alec Baldwin, it follows the two as they work their way round the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise financial

Freddy Gray

How we beat the Boche — at sidecar racing

More from Arts

There’s courage, there’s fearlessness, and then there’s the sort of sublime audacity you need to do something like sidecar racing. Stan Dibben, 87, has it in spades. He won the world sidecar championships in 1953, still whizzes around the racetrack today and is the subject of a beautiful short documentary film by Cabell Hopkins, No

The thrill of the (postmodern neo-Victorian) chase

More from Books

Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a million copies, while more or less inaugurating the genre of ‘neo-Victorian literature’, whose ornaments are still clogging up the bookshop shelves a quarter of a century later. There have been three other novels since, at

Portobello’s market mustn’t be allowed to close

More from Books

After reading Portobello Voices, I feel more strongly than ever that the unique Portobello market mustn’t be allowed to close. It gets over a million visitors a year and is one of London’s most frequented sites. Blanche Girouard interviewed a cross-section of people involved with the market and has written up their recorded interviews verbatim,

The abstract art full of ‘breasts and bottoms’

More from Books

Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the shapes and colours. Picasso’s cubist planes, as critics have noticed, usually disclose wine bottles, mandolins and bread baskets upon a table — icons of his Catholic childhood. The red and black slabs of Mark Rothko

The best funny books for Christmas

More from Books

Books do furnish a room, and quirky books for Christmas do furnish an enormous warehouse somewhere within easy reach of the M25. There are more of them than ever this year, some purportedly comic, some wilfully trivial, a few of them uncategorisable in their oddness, but all of them have one thing in common: they

Can virgins have babies?

More from Books

Mrs Christabel Russell, the heroine of Bevis Hillier’s sparkling book, was a very modern young woman. She had short blonde hair which she wore in two large curls on the side of her head, she was wildly social and she was a fearless horsewoman. In 1920 she set up a fashionable dress shop, Christabel Russell

How much can you tell about E.E. Cummings from this photo?

More from Books

Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A more demanding test: from their books can you predict how authors look? It sounds unlikely, yet, upon seeing a photograph of an author, we do find ourselves exclaiming: ‘That’s not how I thought he’d look!’

Bill Bryson’s ‘long extraordinary’ summer is too long

More from Books

Hands up Spectator readers who can remember the American celebrities Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the  adulteress and husband-killer Ruth Snyder  who all, in 1927, lit up what Bill Bryson calls ‘one hell of a summer’. Born in America only five years later, I knew about

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