The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In New York, in the 1960s, in a sleek, silvery elevator, I rose from the marble halls of Helena Rubinstein’s gleaming emporium up towards the top floor office of a new friend who worked for that legendary beautician. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the lift stopped, the doors slid open and a tiny, squat figure with oily, inky
Where else would you possibly find George Painter, Jackie Pallo and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in immediate successive proximity? The incunabulist of the British Museum who emerged from scholarly obscurity with his biography of Proust, the curly-blond wrestler in kinky trunks, and the son of an Edinburgh-Italian confectioner who became an avant-garde sculptor, have nothing whatever
Greg Bellow, a retired child psychotherapist in his late sixties, is the eldest of the novelist Saul Bellow’s offspring. Bellow Sr (pictured above in 1984), as we already knew from his part-autobiographical fictions and a readable, well-sourced critical biography by James Atlas published in 2000, was a fairly dutiful, not unaffectionate father but didn’t see
Below the title of this book, engendering immediate distrust, lies the legend ‘Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature.’ ‘Story’ is such a weasel word, implying a tale as much as truth; a fiction that when turned into a narrative develops into the fact that every schoolboy knows; or a real event embroidered with
Fobbit, by David Abrams, is an attempt at describing a wartime tour from different perspectives, including soldiers and support personnel. Chapter by chapter our viewpoint rotates within this cast of characters. Indeed, for every three infantrymen, five soldiers are required in forward deployed locations to cook, care for wounded, file paperwork, et cetera. Abrams himself
The Exiles Return has been published as a beautiful Persephone Book, with smart dove-grey covers and a riotously colourful endpaper. Before this glorious incarnation, it existed for many years as a ‘yellowing typescript with some tippexed corrections’, one of the few things that Elisabeth de Waal held on to during her ‘life in transit between
There is a poignant passage in Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs during which she contemplates her failure in Scotland. She seemed puzzled by this, noting that, in her view, many of her ideas and principles had at least some Caledonian ancestry. And yet, despite her admiration for David Hume and, especially, Adam Smith, there was no Tartan
While Ian McEwan’s recent piece in the Guardian is not expressly termed a treatise on the value of art, it is hard to see it otherwise. What is the use of fiction, what can a novelist tell us of, ‘why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles…?’ he
Newt Gingrich has a new love. ‘It’s a great study of plot,’ the failed Presidential runner and former Speaker of the House told Slate magazine. He was not referring to a ’90s sleaze inquiry, or the reasons why he lost to Mitt Romney. The object of his obsession is our very own Downton Abbey. In
Kevin Maher’s debut novel The Fields is set in the suburban streets of south Dublin in 1984. The story is narrated by Jim Finnegan: an innocent 13-year-old boy who lives in a carefree world that consists of hanging out in the local park and going on nightly bike rides with his geeky friend Gary. But
‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years
The American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) is best known for his boxing paintings, but as this surprising exhibition reveals, that was only the half of it. We don’t really know his work in this country, apart from the odd picture in a mixed show, but here is indisputable evidence that we have been missing out.
There was something vaguely disappointing about seeing Abel Tesfaye appear on stage at London’s Electric Ballroom. A wide-eyed, puffa-jacket-clad figure isn’t what you expect from his enigmatic alter-ego ‘The Weeknd’ — it seemed incongruous that we should watch this self-styled introvert performing to an audience. At 23 years old, Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) has released
You could say that Neil MacGregor revolutionised radio with his mega-series A History of the World in 100 Objects. In each of those 100 programmes he took us on an extraordinary journey of the mind, to show us what we’ve been up to since the first ‘primitive’ reindeer carvings of the Ice Age. He did
Everyone’s loving BBC1’s new, Sunday-night period mega-drama The Village (32 episodes long if writer Peter Moffat has his way). It’s taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics, which I think are all euphemisms for ‘not like Downton Abbey’. And it definitely isn’t like Downton Abbey. There’s a lot more brooding,
Why the sudden spate of movies about classical music quartets and impending death? Early this year, we had Quartet, about four senior singers in a retirement home. Now we have A Late Quartet, about a string ensemble facing the loss of one of its members. The film industry couldn’t possibly be subliminally associating classical music
To hear Christian Thielemann conduct the Dresden Staatskapelle in Wagner’s ‘stage consecration play’, in Salzburg at Easter, proved a musical experience that could only deepen anybody’s love of this extraordinary opera. To see it was another matter, as it often is. But let us first praise the musicians who, guided by their conductor, gave it
Yes, well…aphorisms are never easy to deal with, they are a naturally intimidating form of utterance. If you admit that you don’t understand them, you may well be thought thick. If you reject a request for an explanation of one, on the grounds that what it says can’t be put any other way, you may
In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The
Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter
What sort of room do you prefer to hear classical concerts in? We have all got used to industrial-strength symphony halls and opera houses, capable of holding 3,000 people, with dry acoustics and omni-look interiors. As with art galleries around the world, once inside you could be anywhere: there is little to tell you which
The leaves hardly breathe and snakes loop round the branches, soaking up heat from cars parked nose to tail outside the seafood kiosk by this savage southern beach where the leaves hardly breathe and snakes loop round the branches, soaking up heat from cars parked nose to tail outside the seafood kiosk by this savage
Precocious genius will never fail to impress. But it is also very hard to relate to. Aged 14, Anthony Van Dyck painted a Portrait of a Seventy-Year-Old man that looked like a portrait by a seventy-year-old man, signed it, and marked it with his age, the idea being that the younger you are, the more
Snails are supposed to hate eggshells. Not the ones in Ruth Brooks’s garden. They clamber over the barrier as though it’s ‘a new extreme sport’. Ditto hair. And grit. She tries beer, but her young son drinks it. As for coffee grounds (normally a failsafe), the pests just eat them, then attack the flowers with
B.S. Johnson railed intemperately at life, but in his fiction at least he found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in a bath while drunk. Today, in spite of his former high reputation as Britain’s ‘most subversive novelist’, Johnson is pretty well forgotten. On
When, more than half a century ago, I was a student, deriving much of my education from the Third Programme, I was given, between 1955 and 1971, a crash course on opera by Hans Hammelmann and Michael Rose. The two of them were major opera historians and both were natural broadcasters, able to pass their
In the classic rags-to-riches narrative, a boy born into poverty attains respectability by dint of hard work, clean living and moral courage. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel — his eagerly awaited follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — updates the genre for the 21st century, transplanting it to ‘rising Asia’ but stripping it of all sense of
Manil Suri’s novel is like a ‘masala movie’ — a Bombay mix of genres, spicy, often subtle, often corny, and distinctly addictive. It is difficult to pin down its overriding flavour. A reviewer on the back cover notes that ‘Manil Suri has been likened to Narayan, Coetzee, Chekhov and Flaubert’; but there are twinkly sprinklings
You don’t have to live in London to be faintly obsessed by the Tube, but it probably helps. At this point I should state my bona fides: born in Great Ormond Street Hospital (nearest station: Russell Square), babyhood in Marylebone (Bakerloo line, originally to be called ‘Lisson Grove’), grew up in Hampstead (deepest station on