The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres over the last half-century or so. Gavin Stamp is wonderfully, amusingly, movingly angry. And he has been ever since the early 1960s when, as a boy at Dulwich College, he saw workmen hack off the
Ten years ago, a determined historian transformed our picture of John F. Kennedy. Robert Dallek had finally got his hands on the president’s medical records and discovered just how big a part JFK’s constant health problems played in his life. Instead of a young, fit, athletic leader, Dallek revealed a man racked with pain, suffering
Byron Rogers Rhys Davies by Meic Stephens (Parthian, £20). This is the first full-length biography of the grocer’s son from the Valleys who, in the course of a long and industrious life spent mainly in London (where guardsmen were), wrote over 100 short stories and 20 novels and was hailed as the Welsh Chekhov. Helpfully,
Big Country’s song ‘One Great Thing’ is an anthem for the Scottish Yes campaign: it was soaring in the background during an item recorded at a ‘Yes’ rally on the Today programme the other day. And since Big Country’s bagpipe-sounding guitars were one of the joys of my adolescence and I’ve been partial to a
Earlier this year a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicting two figures stoned on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, was offered for sale at Christie’s in New York. ‘Dustheads’ was given an estimated sales tag of $25–35 million. In the end, the hammer came down at $48.8 million, a sum that easily broke the previous record for
The famous court case in which Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ continues to rumble through the public response to art in this country. The man in the street, the man on the Clapham Omnibus and most of the men who drive black cabs all like their art
If ever there was reason to believe that feminism has lost its way, then it is found in the current debate about bottoms. It all began with twerking – the sexualized dance that no one had heard of until popstar Miley Cyrus squeezed into some PVC underwear, and twerked to Robin Thicke’s song Blurred Lines.
Like the machine the day had churned in dark circles, But when at last I came back the whole contraption Had stopped too soon, all its baggage had halted In a stubborn wish to stay there and nowhere else. I wouldn’t know when this had happened, Maybe some time in the first half-hour while I
‘I am walking in some mountains’. That’s the out-of-office that pops up when I email Johnny Flynn to request an interview. The folk star and West End actor is on holiday. But he’s not doing the Three Peaks Challenge. No, he’s tracing St Paul’s third missionary journey across southern Turkey, a 30th birthday present from
The Butler tells the story of an African–American butler at the White House who served eight American presidents over three decades and it plays as a ‘greatest hits’ of the civil rights movement, along with whatever else they decided to throw in, like Vietnam, apartheid, and Lyndon B. Johnson on the can. (Actually, Lyndon B.
It’s an unlovely venue, for sure. Charing Cross Theatre, underneath the arches, likes to welcome vagrant plays that can’t find a home elsewhere. The dripping exterior, opposite a gay love-hub named Heaven, feels as if it’s paved with tears. The foyer is scented with mildewed chip fat and the ink-black auditorium looks like a closed-down
A new production of The Magic Flute is something to look forward to, if with apprehension. How many aspects of this protean masterpiece will it encompass, and how many will be neglected or distorted? The answer, in the case of Simon McBurney’s effort at the Coliseum, is that almost everything that contributes to the work’s
There was a time when the term ‘world première’ was not as fashionable as it is these days. Great works simply ‘premièred’, and their artistic status was not diminished by the fact that the opening had not been advertised as a globally significant event. Which is what ‘world première’ implies, even though it is seldom
Gosh it isn’t half irksome when someone who went to the same school as you but is considerably younger than you ends up doing dramatically better than you. But hats off to Dominic Sandbrook: his new series Cold War Britain (BBC2, Tuesday) is an absolute delight. Sandbrook has that rare gift of making things you
Best line of the week came on Monday from the composer John Tavener, and was given added poignancy by the announcement the following day that Tavener had died. He told us, ‘Life is a creeping tragedy; that’s why I must be cheerful.’ It’s a sankalpa, or inner resolution, he held on to especially in his
If you want to buy a picture or a piece of sculpture and have lots of money or not very much, or if you just want to look at more than 450 contemporary works, then the Mall Galleries is the place to go. For some 20 years the Discerning Eye charity has held an annual
Autumn in Paris has been immortalised in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most poignant poems. Having left his wife in Berlin, Rilke moved to Paris in 1902 where he wrote ‘Herbsttag’ (Autumn Day). ‘Whoever is alone now, will remain so for long. He will stay up late, write long letters and wander restlessly in the
‘Is he a good writer? Is he pro-regime?’ an Iranian journalist in London once asked me of Hooman Majd. Majd is an Iranian-American journalist who was born in Tehran in 1957, but is better known in America. His father was a well-travelled Pahlavi-era diplomat, and his grandfather was an ayatollah. His cousin is married to
Fans of Count Arthur Strong (and yes I know he’s so Marmite you could spread him on a cheese sandwich) love the failed performer because he does what we all dream of: ranting at others to cover our own mistakes. At the same time he reminds us what a fool this makes one look, so
Numbers, as every mathematician knows, do odd things. But they’re never odder than in the human context. Ever since we crept out of the swamps, we’ve been making numbers lucky, fearsome, ominous and even sacred. Across the cultures, we’re nuts about numbers, with little thought for logic. Take 23, for example. In 1960, William Burroughs
I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln, £40, Spectator Bookshop, £30), are friends of mine — no very unusual circumstance in the small world of garden writing. Moreover, I wrote this book’s forerunner, The English Garden, also in collaboration with Andrew
We constantly need to be reminded that the consequence of war is death. In the case of the first world war it led to death and destruction on an inconceivably vast scale. To convey the enormity of what the industrialised slaughter that supposedly civilised governments unleashed between 1914 and 1918, film-makers like to pan the
Around 200 Englishwomen lived through the German Occupation of Paris. Nicholas Shakespeare’s aunt Priscilla was one. Men in the street stopped to gaze at this blonde with the careless allure and raw beauty of Grace Kelly. Some fell instantly in love. Her second mother-in-law thought her face showed truth and sincerity, and the reader shares
Cig 1 Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy, corruption . . . DS Rebus awoke with a start, his hand still clutching a can of lager. He’d been asleep in his chair, as usual. He rarely went to bed. Bed was for sober
It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately relaying the disasters of the latter is a challenge few writers can well meet. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have been extensively studied before. Harry Thompson published his excellent biography of Cook in 1997, Barbara
Nigel Simeone’s title for his edition of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence rings compellingly, novellistically, through the force of the definite article, as in The Aspern Papers, or The Scarlet Letter. The reality, though, is more diffuse. Bernstein was a man of enormous endowments. One correspondent, after listing his talents as a composer, orchestrator, pianist, conductor, lecturer
Everyone loves an anniversary and the crossword world — if there is such a thing — has been waiting a long time for this one. December is the 100th anniversary of the publication of what is generally recognised as the first crossword — although back then it was called a ‘word cross’. It was set
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island Story and A Brief History of Time and, in content, Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Other notable precursors are How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland, How
It is perhaps the most celebrated house-party in the history of literary tittle-tattle: a two-house-party to be precise. Byron and his doctor/companion/whipping-boy John Polidori in the grand Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva. The Shelleys (Percy and Mary) and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont a short walk away in the modest Maison Chapuis. The cat’s cradle of