The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any
It’s been a while, I have to say, but last week I saw a show that thrilled me to the core. Trelawny of the Wells, the Donmar’s latest offering, is a tribute to the theatre written by actor-turned-writer Arthur Wing Pinero. A simple set-up. Gorgeous young luvvie, Rose Trelawny, has forsaken the greasepaint to marry
There has been a lot of discussion recently, prompted by the start of President Obama’s second term, about the ‘Special Relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States. What seems to have been overlooked in the analysis of politics, economics and diplomatic relations is that the strongest and most culturally important link between the
I haven’t heard the David Bowie album yet, but the Amazon order is in and Postie has been alerted as to the importance of the delivery. How often these days do any of us feel so excited about an imminent release? The ten-year gap between Bowie albums might have something to do with it, but
We walked the cliff of Portnahaven listening to the grey seals sing on Orsay and Eilean Mhic Coinnich across the little harbour. Were they singing for the love of being here in this place, like us, far from griefs — and were they also singing, as we were, to each other?
The history of literature is replete with folly but the news that Sebastian Faulks is writing a novel featuring Reginald Jeeves and Bertram Wooster knocks all other blunders into a cocked-hat. We are not gruntled. Madness, not to put too fine a point on it, seems the only explanation for such a project. Perhaps, like
The first time you run out of space for your books is a rite of passage for booklovers. It’s the moment that you realise the extent of your addiction to these papery worlds. It’s also a time of anxiously wondering what on earth you’ll do with all the books you have yet to accumulate. Double
It’s the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. According to the quote on the cover of my Penguin edition, ‘Feminism … began with the work of a single person: Friedan.’ Quite something, then. In fact any mention of Betty Friedan brings out something like post-traumatic stress symptoms in
Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins. She seemed, recalled the writer Andrew Solomon, an impossible old lady who couldn’t let go of her control and who was making everyone’s lives miserable
James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He drew on his own Grub Street life for this discursive lexicon, from A.D. (‘a drink’) to Zulu Express (the nickname for a Great Western service),
Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these two cities cherish a rivalry and have followed different paths. Edinburgh, a royal capital until 1603 and a seat of parliament until 1707, and again
Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison finds himself prostrate on the icy sidewalk of Madison Avenue. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says a plump, sweaty-faced
Stripping down prose is not a risk-free undertaking. The excision of adverbs and the passive voice is sound practice in journalism. However, to make very bare writing a thing of beauty in fiction requires enormous skill. Hemingway’s short stories — those clean, well-lighted places — manage it. Despite its author’s fellow possession of a Nobel
It is 32 years since the first edition of this hefty book appeared in 1981. The original was based on the research materials amassed by Charles Handley-Read, the pioneer scholar and collector of Victorian decorative arts and one-time art master at Bryanston, who killed himself in 1971. Other people’s research notes are often not easy
Mick Jagger, the Danny La Rue of rock, impersonates a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls. Vaudeville performers in the Jagger mould love to put on lipstick and ‘false bubbies’ (as Neil McKenna calls them). Boy X-Factor contestants, with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings and nails lovingly manicured, present an
You might not expect Sara Wheeler, the intrepid literary traveller, to be anxious about passing the half-century point. Surely a person who can survive the mental and physical rigours of Antarctica, as she brilliantly documented in Terra Incognita, can cope with ageing and menopause? Wheeler herself was not so certain. In her restless, creative way,
A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed
Jane Dunn is something of a specialist on sisterhood. She has — we learn from the dedication — five sisters of her own; she has already written a book about the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and another about the cousins Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now the du Maurier sisters are
Peter Archer used to paint landscapes on the Cornish side of the Tamar river. Their most notable features were lovingly observed trees and the tall chimneys of abandoned tin mines. One might have expected that when he moved to a coalmining valley in South Wales, his landscapes would have become blacker and its main features
For a country often conceived of only in terms of its troubles with terrorism, extremists and bombs, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that, in Pakistan, all forms of cultural expression have long ceased. But, in the latest edition of Time, there’s an interesting piece by Omar Waraich about the cultural flipside of Pakistan
People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing is probably down to people naturally associating innovative, serious and challenging art with the marginal. This no doubt plays up to Iyer’s own theories about
It’s tempting to reduce the Roman Empire to a roll call of famous men and their infamous deeds. The Republic toppled with Caesar on the steps of the senate; freedom of speech was curtailed as brutally as Cicero’s tongue; democracy became an act on Octavian assuming his stage name. However Robert Knapp, Professor Emeritus at
from Delia When winter snows upon thy golden hairs, And frost of age hath nipped thy flowers near; When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, And all lies withered that was held so dear; Then take this picture which I here present thee, Limned with a pencil not all unworthy; Here see
Nick de Bois is the Conservative MP for Enfield North, and is part of the Tory Class of 2010. He talks spies, Eurovision and Machiavelli as he tells us about his favourite books. 1) Which book is on your bedside table at the moment? Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power 2) Which book would you read
In his latest book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond analyses the behavioral differences between human beings in tribal stateless-societies and those living in bureaucratic nation states. Diamond says that if states only came into existence 5,400 years ago, and agriculture in the last 11,000, human beings have been wandering nomads for most of history. Therefore,
David Inshaw will celebrate his 70th birthday on 21 March, around the time of the spring equinox. On the eve of this grand climacteric, which will be marked by an exhibition of new and old work at the Fine Art Society, I went down to Devizes to interview him. He has lived for much of
‘When Matisse dies,’ declared Picasso, ‘Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.’ Wandering around this splendid show you can see exactly what he meant. Chagall never used colour for cheap effect, but to convey meaning and emotion. The effect of seeing so many of his works together is almost
‘Dear Sir, I am the unfortunate woman that lies under sentens of Death in Newgatt…’ So begins a letter of 1757 addressed to the powers that be at the Foundling Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury. Written in a strong hand, it contains the poignant petition of a woman on death row, Margaret Larney, that her children,
Sad news has broken. If the online speculation is true, it appears that casting agents for the upcoming Guardian movie have overlooked Daniel Radcliffe for the part of Alan Rusbridger. Given that Harry Potter and AR are dopplegangers, Mr Steerpike reckons that the agents have missed a trick. For those who haven’t heard, the film will chart the
