The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Ashmolean Museum has taken the radical step of embracing contemporary art, and is currently hosting (until 30 March 2014) a mini-retrospective of Malcolm Morley’s work, curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and borrowed entirely from the prestigious American-based Hall Art Foundation. Morley (born London 1931) was the first winner of the ever-controversial Turner Prize (apparently
Towards the end of his life, Georges Braque described his vision in the following terms: ‘No object can be tied down to any one sort of reality; a stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach… Everything is subject to metamorphoses.’ Since then, set
Perhaps the greatest irony of many in this first solo London show of Sarah Lucas is that it is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. ‘Symbolising French elegance and joie de vivre, the Maison LV has always collaborated with the best engineers, decorators and artists,’ it claims. Well, welcome to a new world. Soiled mattresses provocatively pierced
There are many pleasures in The Light Princess, a new musical by Tori Amos. George MacDonald’s fairy story introduces us to a beautiful red-haired royal, Althea (Rosalie Craig), who has a mysterious resistance to gravity. After various tribulations she abandons life on dry land and becomes a mermaid. The show meets these technical challenges with
Bold decisions are at the core of great artistic directorship. And Tamara Rojo, the ballet star leading English National Ballet, knows that well. Le Corsaire is not the usual ballet classic one craves to see. Yet it makes a splendid addition to the already vast and multifaceted repertoire of ENB. Created in 1856, this work
It’s taken 40 years, but I’ve finally developed a taste for the one type of classical music that I couldn’t stand. And last week I broke the news to the man responsible: Roger Hewland, owner of Gramex, the world’s finest second-hand classical CD and record shop, just behind Waterloo Station. ‘Roger, I’ve suddenly got into
When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and unventilated ‘heritage’ world-view, the word ‘developer’ is spat out with contempt. It is as though they are speaking of Satan and his diabolical agents, who used to appear in the horror novels of Dennis Wheatley
Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes is his least performed mature opera, even in its more familiar version as I vespri siciliani. So mounting it with a top-ranking cast and an interesting production is just what the Royal Opera should do in a so far seriously under-celebrated Verdi bicentenary year. What has actually happened is that we
The Selfish Giant is a British social-realism film in the tradition of all such films from Kes onwards, so it never feels particularly fresh, but it does feel real and true, is superbly performed, and it does pack quite an emotional punch. I had to gather myself afterwards, and I’m still gathering myself, and may
Will the women on ITV’s The X Factor (Saturday) stop perving? I suppose there are two ways to tackle the issue of gender equality — one is to dictate that nobody mention sexuality at all; the other is to make females slobber over the males the way men purportedly slobber over women all the time.
You’ve probably already read or heard somewhere that the inspiration for Grayson Perry’s current series of Reith Lectures on Radio 4 was none other than Lynda Snell. (I wonder if she knows.) What a coup for the establishment network, the home service, the epitome of right thinking and professional excellence. Here’s a cross-dressing potter from
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is an art show largely without art (at Manchester Art Gallery until 19 January 2014, then touring). No matter: Jeremy Deller, the curator, has found some surprising knick-knacks to illustrate how the Industrial Revolution has influenced popular culture. For instance, he plays rediscovered factory songs on a gloriously
Drinking in Corbières, a dingy basement bar just off St Ann’s Square, 30 years ago, you could bump into any number of groovy young Mancunians clustered round the jukebox, talking about the bands they were going to form. One night, as the jukey played ‘The Cutter’ by Echo & the Bunnymen, all evening long it
A delightful anecdote in Jonathan Aitken’s new biography of Margaret Thatcher, which is out today. Visiting the French estate of the late Jimmy Goldsmith in 1997, with Denis and Bill and Biddy Cash, Lady T posed for a photograph in front of the giant statue of Lenin that resides in the woodland of Montjeu. ‘I just
A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable and inexhaustible topic of Morrissey. We were discussing his gestures, in particular when he augments the percussive spondee that opens ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ with two magnificent jabs of his right elbow. So back we
There can be a strong strain of self-parody in even the greatest commentators. When Henry Blofeld describes the progress of a pigeon in his inimitably plummy tones, or greets a visiting Ocker to the commentary box with a jovial ‘My dear old thing!’, he is impersonating himself as surely as Rory Bremner has ever done.
This is an odd book: interesting, informative, intelligent, but still decidedly odd. It is a history of the Victorian era which almost entirely eschews wars and imperial adventures and concentrates instead on the social, political and intellectual climate of the times. This is still a vast spectrum. Simon Heffer concludes that he must decide which
‘I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through the initial German raids on London during the second world war. This woman’s ambivalent reaction to having a bomb rip through her bedroom typified the shocking reality of a different type of war to any
In 2012 a Taleban gunman, infuriated by Malala Yousafzai’s frequent television appearances insisting that girls had a right to education, shot her in the face. She survived and is now an inspirational symbol both of defiance and of the love of learning. As you might hope in a memoir by a 16- year-old, full acknowledgment
The Japanese are sometimes said to suffer from ‘outsider person shock’ (gaijin shokku) when travelling abroad. Recently in London we had a lodger from Hiroshima who wanted to practise his karate routines in our back garden. Concerned to see him chopping at our apple tree in full combat gear, a metropolitan police helicopter hovered in
One day there simply won’t be any strange byways of the English language left to write quirky little books about. Happily that day hasn’t arrived yet. Keith Houston’s Shady Characters (Particular Books, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £13.99, Tel: 08430 600033)) ventures into the previously untrodden territory of punctuation marks, and not the obvious ones either. Full
‘In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large had been bamboozled, somehow.’ So wrote Raymond Carver in the New York
‘S is for Spoof.’ There it is on page 86, a full-page reproduction of a Nat Tate drawing, sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for £6,500. A sum which, it is added, with all due respect to [William] Boyd’s ability as an artist, probably proves the point about promotion being more important than talent. It’s always
This is the most sensible and systematic interpretation of George Orwell’s books that I have ever read. It generously acknowledges the true stature of the great works — most notably, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. It rightly sees the second world war as having brought
One sometimes forgets when looking at French 19th-century art that the painting revolution that produced Impressionism coincided with a political one. This is because most French painters, Delacroix and Manet excepted, chose to ignore it — none more completely than Camille Corot, who, as a travelling view painter, had every excuse to get out of
Like almost everyone else in the insane world of musical theatre, I don’t know how to create a hit. This hasn’t prevented me from contributing to, even originating, some. Most of these successes have come about by happy accident and could so easily have been disasters or stillborn but for matters or events beyond my
Emilio Greco (1913–95) is considered to be one of Italy’s most important modern sculptors, and certainly he was a successful one, enjoying considerable popularity and renown with his deliberately mannered re-interpretations of classical subjects. A figurative sculptor, Greco went in for elongated limbs and awkward yet dynamic poses that often have a surprising elegance and
In Economy’s cramped haul it’s all I ever watch. Our course is laid on screen before me, a dotted line miles wide, plotting the next ten dry-eyed hours. This kind of travel is the loneliest of procedures: solo-piloting a pale track above computer-graphic continents. Across the aisle a blindfold man dreams, ears cupped to rattling
Among the criticisms rightly levelled at the BBC are that its commissioning editors are overcautious, unimaginative, unadventurous and over-reliant on star names and proven formulae. So I really didn’t have much hope for The Wrong Mans (BBC2, Tuesday), the latest vehicle for the painfully ubiquitous James Corden. Since Gavin & Stacey — which I know
