Culture

Culture

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

At last Alfred Munnings is being taken seriously again

Exhibitions

Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) did himself a grave and lasting disservice when he publicly attacked modern art in a bibulous after-dinner speech at the Royal Academy in 1949. He had been president of the RA for five years, pipping Augustus John to the post, but the controversy he stirred up (he called Picasso and Matisse

Lloyd Evans

Henry Goodman interview: How to make Brecht fun

Theatre

The face is unlined. The tan is as deep as Brazilian hardwood. The thatch of grey hair looks like a gift from God rather than the achievement of surgical intervention. At 63, the actor Henry Goodman keeps himself in excellent trim. He exudes energy and concentration, and in the hour we spend together, he relates

Second city blues

Arts feature

Why are clever-clever people so rude about Birmingham? Bruce Chatwin dismissed his hometown as absolutely hideous, Kenneth Tynan called his birthplace a cemetery without walls. Britain’s second city has always been belittled, not least by those who’ve left it, and now the old slights have been revived in the current debate about HS2. Never mind

The whizz stirrer-up

Exhibitions

‘Professor’ Bruce Lacey (born 1927) is one of those figures who has existed effectively on the periphery of the art world for more than half a century. Part licensed jester, part society’s conscience, Lacey operates best on the fringes, stirring things up, provoking thought and challenging preconceptions, a lightning conductor for comment and criticism. Before

Tom Stoppard’s Pink Floyd play gives Radio 2 a dark side

Radio

How many listeners, I wonder, actually tuned in to Darkside as it went out on air on Radio 2, after dark, curtains closed against the pale moon waning? One listener for sure at 10 o’clock on Monday night was David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitar man and co-creator of the band’s mega-successful ‘concept album’ The Dark

Heaven

More from Books

Perhaps Heaven is like being foreign abroad where even the groceries appear exotic. All is before you exactly as it seems. Everything is as false and true as dreams. The language excludes you, familiar and strange, though all is apparently recognisable, all absent and correct in the world as it is. You are learning to

London life

More from Arts

Whoever coined the phrase ‘nothing is ever black and white’ had quite obviously never stepped over the threshold of Tate Britain this summer. Another London (until 16 September), a selection of photographs taken by some of the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn, is a two-tone world; a black and

Against the odds

Radio

Just in time for the Paralympics the veteran broadcaster and campaigner for disability rights, Peter White, has launched a special Paralympian series of his No Triumph, No Tragedy programme (Radio 4), the title of which should probably be reversed. On Sunday he talked to Margaret Maughan, the first Briton to win a gold medal at

Six hours with Stockhausen

Opera

Arriving for the world première of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), we were greeted by the sight of two Bactrian camels, delightful and patient creatures, standing almost immobile for at least an hour while many visitors inspected them, before leaving in Joseph’s Amazing Camels coach. The one we saw later on stage

Racking up the tension

Cinema

Berberian Sound Studio is a film about a man who can’t get his expenses repaid and hurts a lot of vegetables — don’t worry, the RSPCV is on to it — although I suspect there may be rather more to it than this. I suspect there are hidden meanings. I suspect there are references to

Money and the Flying Horses

More from Books

Intriguing, the oaten seethe of thoroughbred horses in single stalls across a twilit cabin. Intimate, under the engines’ gale, a stamped hoof, a loose-lip sigh, like dawn sounds at track work. Pilots wearing the bat wings of intercontinental night cargo come out singly, to chat with or warn the company vet at his manifests: four

Birds in the Blue Night

Poems

Not birds I know, dank-feathered, inky-eyed, spinning in a ring until one breaks free, flies in. And already I am out of bed and on the path to my father’s room, the whole house sleeping but for him, his old face stunned in the white light webbed on the wall and I say Dad, the

Chaplin & Company, by Mave Fellowes – review

More from Books

The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful name Odeline Milk. Utterly friendless, she dislikes both humans and animals, but she has one huge, far-reaching private passion. She wants to be a mime artist — like the great Marcel Marceau. To launch her

Francois Truffaut, by Anne Gillian – review

More from Books

Almost 30 years after his death, François Truffaut remains a vital presence in the cinema. Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson are among maverick directors who have acknowledged their debt to him, while Noah Baumbach’s recent Frances Ha is in part an hommage à Truffaut in a way the French director would have appreciated: for example,

The Rocks Don’t Lie, by David R. Montgomery – review

Lead book review

This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale. David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of

James Delingpole

The tao of Ayn Rand

Columns

I’m now half way through Atlas Shrugged and I’m loving almost every moment. But Ayn Rand isn’t someone you read for pleasure, I’m beginning to realise. She’s someone you read so you can underline sentences and scrawl in the margins ‘Yes’, ‘God that is so TRUE!’ and ‘YES!!!’ For example, at the heart of the

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer – review

More from Books

Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind —

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood – review

More from Books

The two opening volumes of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy have sold over a million copies. One of them managed to be shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in the nadir year that D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little won. Entitled Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), they depict planet Earth after humankind

There and Then: Personal Terms 6, by Frederic Raphael – review

More from Books

Frederic Raphael is forensic in his description of the failures of successful people. He is enviously superior and he is partial to the clever oxymoron: ‘predatory caution’, ‘reticent curiosity’, ‘intimidating reassurance’. It is as though he cannot see an abstract noun without qualifying it with a contradictory adjective. It is a kind of shorthand cleverness,

The Red Road by Denise Mina- review

More from Books

Denise Mina’s 11th crime novel, The Red Road (Orion, £12.99), is one of her best, which is saying a good deal. Set in Glasgow, it marks the return of Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, mother of twins, sister of a gangster and equipped with too many sharp edges to prosper in her career. She’s a key

Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright – review

More from Books

Justin Cartwright is famously a fan of John Updike — and here he seems to owe a definite debt to one of his hero’s lesser known novels. In Memories of the Ford Administration, Updike interwove the sexual adventures of a 1970s history professor with substantial chunks from the professor’s notes on President James Buchanan, a

A seamless whole

More from Books

This short memoir deserves a longer review than this, encompassing, as it does, migration, intellectual excellence, a successful professional life, two marriages, children and an honesty and contentment not usually found in close proximity. Miriam Gross (née May), with a Jewish legal background (both her parents, who left Nazi Germany in 1933, were lawyers), was

Another Restoration romp

More from Books

Robert Merivel made his first appearance in 1989, in Restoration, Rose Tremain’s popular and acclaimed Carolingian novel. The passage of time has left the Everyman doctor sadder and theoretically wiser, but still in thrall to his master, Charles II, still priapic, still governed by ‘uncontainable appetites’. He sits in his chilly library at Bidnold, his

The making of a president

More from Books

When presented with a title of this kind, many readers think they know what to expect: drugged-up child soldiers, wince-inducing brutality, ranting demagogues, rebels in women’s wigs. This, thankfully, is not that book. It is something more nuanced, elliptical and elegant. Ghana is in a different league from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, its traumatised

Theatre of the absurd

More from Books

Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove.