Culture

Culture

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

Edmund Burke – a writer one should always read

I thought readers might be interested in this piece in the current print edition of the magazine. It is my review of a very interesting new book on Edmund Burke, Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet by the MP Jesse Norman. I much recommend it. Those who haven’t read Burke before will, I am sure, be

Fraser Nelson

Scotland’s 2013 Eurovision triumph

Last night’s Eurovision was, as always, a collision of music, culture and politics. As always, the official British entry was dire – but, as always, the invisible hand of Britain’s world-class musicians lay behind many acts that did well. So it was with Denmark’s winner, Emmelie de Forest, whose song Only Teardrops won by quite

God, guns and America

While training as a playwright, I was taught that any gun brought onstage must go off. Anton Chekhov said, ‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’ But thinking of firing is not enough. The gun foreshadows the action that will – that must – occur.

Julian Trevelyan, a Jekyll and Hyde painter, at the Bohun Gallery

Exhibitions

Between 1917 and 1923, Julian Trevelyan produced a map and an illustrated guide to Hurtenham, an industrial town on the Tees between Stockton and Darlington. You’ll search in vain for the place in an atlas today, as the entire town, with its warren of streets, railways, parks, public buildings and monuments to local luminaries, was

Desert Island Discs: is there nothing behind Damien Hirst’s dead cows, sharks and dots? Jan Morris: Travels Round My House — the scoop to outscoop all others

Radio

What was shocking about Damien Hirst’s appearance on Desert Island Discs on Sunday was not his admission on air that he lost his £20,000 Turner Prize cheque, and then discovered he had spent it all in the Groucho Club bar. Or his account of his early teens drinking cider beneath the pylons, shoplifting, burgling, always

James Delingpole

The Fall, Culture Show Special — Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths

Television

The serial killer on The Fall (BBC1, Monday) is no ordinary serial killer. He has a unique and terrifying modus operandi — or ‘signature’, as we serial-killer experts call it. What this serial killer does is to predate ruthlessly and single-mindedly on those young, attractive women unfortunate enough to be in the precise target-audience demographic

The Great Gatsby dazzles Deborah Ross

Cinema

OK, old sports, Baz Luhrmann’s version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as produced by Jay-Z, and with Kanye West on the soundtrack, has already riled the purists, who are grumbling and railing and basically queuing up to say it sucks, it’s a travesty, nothing like the book, doesn’t even come close, but you

Dance: Hansel and Gretel

More from Arts

As far as memory serves, in my 46 years of being both in and at the ballet I have encountered only seven ballet adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ Hansel and Gretel. Alas, each was less memorable than the one before. Happily, the new version by the Royal Ballet’s first artist-in-residence, Liam Scarlett, which had its

Opera: Wozzeck, Die Zauberflöte

Opera

At the close of the first night of Wozzeck at the Coliseum there was a longer dead silence than I can remember after any operatic performance I have been to, and when applause began it sounded reluctant. Everyone was stunned by the intensity and involvingness of the preceding 100 minutes, the work having been performed

The first Division – Peter Hook’s Unknown Pleasures

A good book about popular music will always give you a new appreciation of the records. Joy Division bassist Peter Hook’s Unknown Pleasures, just published in paperback by Simon & Schuster, might do just that, though perhaps not in the way the author intended: Joy Division’s music, never an easy listen, becomes almost unbearably intense once

Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver – review

More from Books

‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the big brother of the title, the handsome, free-wheeling, jive-talking Edison, a jazz pianist. The siblings grew up in LA, their dysfunctional family life paralleled, almost

Here and Now, by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee – review

More from Books

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. So too in the luckless genre of letters artificially exchanged for the purposes of publication. There’s been a little spate of these lately, the most interesting and unbalanced having been Public Enemies, in which Michel Houellebecq brilliantly began the exchange by

Folly de Grandeur, by Nicky Haslam- review

More from Books

Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the sometimes directionless rich, a brighter star than most of his astronomically stellar client list. Considering a joint project, I asked him over lunch to tell me all the amazing people he had met. He demurred,

The Society of Timid Souls, by Polly Morland – review

More from Books

In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She interviews a man who fixes the upper sections of skyscrapers, and is afraid of heights. She meets people who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases.

Crime fiction reviewed by Andrew Taylor

More from Books

An epigraph taken from Goebbels’s only published novel certainly makes a book stand out from the crowd. A Man Without Breath (Quercus, £18.99) is the ninth instalment in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, which examines the rise, fall and aftermath of Nazi Germany through the eyes of a disillusioned Berlin detective. By 1943, the tide

Lloyd Evans

5 Days in May, by Andrew Adonis – review

More from Books

Andrew Adonis enjoyed a week of glory in 2010. The former Lib Dem activist was asked to join Labour’s negotiating team as they tried to forge a coalition with Nick Clegg in the aftermath of 6 May general election. Adonis admits that his account of those five days is ‘vivid, partisan and angry’. And it

Complete Poems, by C.P. Cavafy – review

More from Books

Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence

Lloyd Evans

Passion Play; The Match Box

Theatre

How fashions change. Peter Nichols’s adultery drama, Passion Play, will seem tame and rather conventional to modern audiences. It was written in 1981 at a time when the rites and idioms of therapy hadn’t penetrated every level of our culture. Back then the candid scrutiny of one’s emotions, supervised by a ruminating analyst, was a

Taking revenge on wicked Lord Byron

This is the second article in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the first instalment here. By 1814, two years after he awoke to find himself famous, everyone wanted a piece of Byron. Some got jewellery, several got hair and a fair few got

Cult fiction – Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley

There’s an attraction, certainly, in joining a cult. Not a Sheryl Sandberg working women type cult but a good old fashioned we’re all in it together wearing hemp skirts type cult. No need to chivvy the nanny, check the Blackberry or prepare for 8am meetings. Simply pack the children off to daycare (the yard) and