The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is thrilling and brain-twisting. Its nickname derives from the fact that it was published as a sonata ‘for the hammer-action keyboard’, which just means a piano. But the notion of hammering suits this work. It’s his longest sonata — a late one, No. 29 in B flat, Op. 106 — and a
Henry V is the final show in Michael Grandage’s first West End season. The theatre was full to bursting on press night. Jude Law, in the title role, had attracted a crowd of autograph hunters, who shivered outside the stage door. One was a tall, chubby young man in loose grey clothes wearing a bobble
Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own remark to Cosima that in his last music drama he was trying to get ‘the effect of clouds merging and separating’. The scoring of the music, especially in the outer acts, is so extraordinary that
Albums of the year? What a good question. Some years we can answer it, some years we can’t. The essence of pop music is its newness, its absolute determination to upgrade itself and keep on upgrading itself, often beyond anyone’s interest in its upgrading itself. Accordingly, there are some years when the paid-up music obsessive
I meet Birgitte Hjort Sorensen in a plain office near the Donmar Warehouse in the West End. She’s warm, sharp and engaging, and her fast-flowing English is adorned with the odd Eurotrash platitude. Her American twang owes itself to the global language school of television. ‘I watched a lot of American and English TV growing
One of the big differences between Frank Lloyd Wright and me is that, when he was nine, his mother gave him a set of wooden building bricks. When I was the same age, I wanted Lego for Christmas, but my own mother thought it a mere toy, a puerile gift. So she put away childish
The most celebrated Christmas carol, ‘Silent Night’, belongs to Austria. Father Joseph Mohr, the priest at Oberndorf, a small village near Salzburg, wrote it in 1818. Set to music by Franz Xaver Gruber, it was sung on Christmas Eve at the church of St Nicholas: Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. It is the most celebrated carol
Listen to Susan Hill read The Boy on the Hillside: [audioboo url=”https://audioboo.fm/boos/1816403-susan-hill-reads-the-boy-on-the-hillside”][/audioboo] The boy, Seth, stirred in his sleep. ‘Cold…’ He had pushed the blanket off, with his tossing and turning about. ‘Here, here.’ The man seated on the ground nearest to him rearranged Seth’s covering, pulling it up and tucking it under him until
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In January 1976 New York’s late-lamented National Lampoon produced a bicentennial calendar as a contribution to the general rejoicing. For every day of that year a selection of disastrous news events was commemorated. Presidents of the United States were cut down, marine life was wiped out by oil spills, native Indian women and children were
For much of its history the Danube has been a disappointment. It looks so tempting on the map but, far from being a natural motorway for trade and ideas, its sheer awkwardness has thwarted generations of visionaries, engineers, soldiers and dictators. Freezing up, expanding into baffling flood-plains, racing through narrow defiles and randomly scattered with
This book begins with Simon Winchester becoming a US citizen two years ago: ‘I swore a solemn oath before a federal judge on the afterdeck of the warship USS Constitution in Boston Harbor.’ On several occasions during the 450-plus pages that follow, I wondered if becoming a US citizen had driven him a bit mad.
Writing about Napoleon is a risky business. It exposes the author to the brickbats of the blind worshippers for whom he is a numinous hero and the equally challenged detractors who see in him only the petty tyrant. By the same token, most historians find themselves negotiating a slippery path between approval and censure of
‘You have no idea,’ wrote the publisher Ralph Hodder-Williams in 1929 to one of his authors, what terrible offence Journey’s End has given — and terrible pain too, which is a great deal more important. I think you will agree that the chronic alcoholic was extraordinarily rare. He was referring to R.C. Sherriff’s controversial tragedy
Early on in this dazzling new biography, Martin Gayford compares Michelangelo, with his daunting artistic tasks, to Hercules, the subject of an early (and now lost) sculpture. A Michelangelo biographer is likewise faced with an intimidatingly Herculean task. ‘Few other human beings except the founders of religions,’ acknowledges Gayford, ‘have been more intensively studied and