Culture

Culture

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

Dear Simon Jenkins, please stop moaning about developers

More from Arts

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

Will the women of The X Factor stop perving?

Television

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.

Jeremy Deller curates a fascinating and funny exhibition in Manchester

More from Arts

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

The Morrissey myth

Features

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

Steerpike

The Lady on Lenin

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

‘If I can barely speak, then I shall surely sing’

More from Books

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

My dear old thing! Forget the nasty bits

More from Books

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.

Clash of the titans

More from Books

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

Hitler didn’t start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did 

More from Books

‘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

#Onyourmarks! What is the formal name for the hashtag? 

More from Books

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

Does the world need 17 volumes of Hemingway’s letters?

More from Books

‘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

A is for Artist, D is for Dealers

More from Books

‘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

George Orwell’s doublethink

Lead book review

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

The master of living, breathing landscapes

Exhibitions

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

Tim Rice: How to get ahead in musicals

Arts feature

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

Andrew Lambirth: Emilio Greco’s early work is undeniably his best

Exhibitions

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

Skymap Says We’re Nowhere Near Home

Poems

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

Dreaming in the Renaissance

More from Arts

The exhibition The Renaissance and Dream at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris (until 26 January 2014) explores how artists have wrestled with the furthest limits of the imagination, in forms ranging from the muscular elegance of Michelangelo to the luminous naivety of Lorenzo Lotto. In tackling a subject as inexhaustibly popular as dreams, the

Movement

Poems

Ten minutes — or less — before we step down at one of the ‘London Terminals’, ploughed land restarts and the newest cow-parsley spreads by the side of fields that held on through the April drought. The immediate foreground is dashing on past a stationary middle-distance while a forest on the horizon, darkly capped by