Culture

Culture

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

Cosmo Lang, his part in Edward VIII’s downfall

In December 1936, following the Abdication of Edward VIII, a rhyme circulated about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang: ‘My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of Christian charity how scant you are! And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!’ Lang

Nick Cohen

Tyranny’s fellow travel writers (Part 3)

Earlier this year I noted a piece by Michael Moynihan in Foreign Policy. He looked at how the authors of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guide books were producing apologias for tyranny. I argued that the kind words for Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and the Khomeinist Iran, were a result of the capitalist leftism

Barack Obama’s best voice: Michael Grunwald

No Obama policy – not even ‘Obamacare’ – has been derided quite as much as his stimulus package and the $787 billion Recovery Act passed in February 2009. It became a byword for failed big-government liberalism, and the Republicans’ staunch opposition to it underpinned their 63-seat gain in the House of Representatives in 2010. Yet,

Heavenly hands

Arts feature

The Hepworth has been garnering plaudits right and left as a new museum to be welcomed to the fold, and my first visit to this monolithic structure with its feet in Wakefield’s River Calder exceeded all expectations. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the ten linked blocks that make up this new suite of galleries are

Imperialist ambitions

Exhibitions

In 1997, the Russian Academy of Sciences gave the names Hermitage 4758 and Piotrovsky 4869 to two small planets discovered 500 million kilometres from earth. The signal honour paid to the State Hermitage Museum and Boris and Mikhail Piotrovsky— its dynastic succession of directors — heralded a new era of post-Soviet expansionism for the former

The quiz biz

Music

Come December, I often find myself writing a lot of quizzes. Not that I’m complaining: I love writing quizzes, and I really love being paid for writing quizzes. There’s a definite skill in crafting a decent question, and therefore considerable satisfaction in getting it right, tempered only by the unceasing fear of getting it completely

Field Marks

More from Books

The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that

Selling secrecy

More from Arts

In the ‘psychotherapy ward’ of a secret venue somewhere in east London, watercolour portraits of troubled male faces line the wall. Nearby in the ‘court-room’ a sound installation broadcasts an ominous tick-tock into the airy acoustics of a large hall, while the ‘Warden’s Office’ below is furnished by quilts handmade by inmates. This is Secret

Sounds in silence

Radio

Two really scary programmes this week, and not a vampire or psychopath to be heard. Both gave personal accounts of catastrophic hearing loss. Not something you’d expect to work on radio, the aural medium. How can you explain what it’s like to stop hearing when there’s no pictures, no other way to explain the absence

James Delingpole

I love Michel Roux Jr

Television

For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’. No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a

Lloyd Evans

Battle of the sexes | 6 December 2012

Theatre

Tough play, The Taming of the Shrew. Uniquely among Shakespeare’s comedies, it moves audiences to pity and fear. It’s a video-nasty in the garb of a marital farce, an uncomfortable romance whose closing reconciliation scene invariably draws lusty hisses from female play-goers as Kate renounces her autonomy and bows to the will of her brutal

Grape expectations

Cinema

Five minutes into You Will Be My Son (or Tu seras mon fils in its original French), I expected a very different film from the one that eventually emerged. The first scene takes place in a crematorium, as a coffin and its occupant are cooked to ashes. A relative of the deceased picks at a

Fourth Floor

More from Books

I reason with the crown of the tree. Surely from this fourth floor window, we are equals now. I calculate the trajectory, whether it would catch me if I threw myself at it. I comb for clues from the uneasy rocking of the branches, the slow swimming of its fingers stirring the air. There must

Suzanne Collins, J.K. Rowling and the albatross of success

Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, has announced that her next book will be a picture book. Rather than writing a follow-up dystopian adventure for her teenage readers, she has decided to engage with four-year-olds in Year of the Jungle, a story about how her family coped when her father spent a year serving

A narrow escape

More from Books

C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court. But he has also written two successful novels with 20th-century political themes. The first, Winter in Madrid, is a compelling evocation of Spain in 1940. His latest, Dominion (Mantle, £18.99), is set in Britain in

Erratic historian of alternative pop

More from Books

Julian Cope, the well-read jester of English pop, was the founder member of the 1980s art-rock combo The Teardrop Explodes. With his antic appearance (Rommel overcoat, wild tawny hair), he falls into the erratic genius category. Drugs have played their part. By his own account, Cope has undertaken some dangerous chemical expeditions to the mind’s

The beating of heavenly wings

More from Books

How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular on greetings cards? It was surprising in the first place that their graven images should be set up at all, with eyes cast down and

Years of living dangerously

More from Books

The son of a fish-paste factory manager in London’s East End, Alan Root fell in love with ornithology as a Blitz evacuee when he first clapped eyes on the pea-sized egg of a goldcrest, England’s smallest bird. After the war his father got a job manufacturing bully-beef in Kenya, where Root discovered a much richer

Sublime port

More from Books

Ports can challenge national stereotypes: think of the difference between St Petersburg and Russia, or Naples and Italy. Since England is so small, and London so big, few English ports have generated their own identities. In France, however, despite the alleged stranglehold of Paris, ports such as Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille have remained remarkably different

The land of lost content

More from Books

Published at the author’s expense in 1896, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad did not at first attract many readers. It was only after it had been taken up by an ambitious young publisher called Grant Richards that it began to sell. The poems’ popularity increased further when English composers, deciding that they had found their

Safety in danger

More from Books

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb told us that the world is a much weirder place than we can bear to believe. It is full of occult forces and strange events. If we think we can control or predict these forces and events, we’re sorely mistaken. One minute, we think we’ve mastered the

A choice of stocking-fillers

More from Books

There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing

The plot thickens | 6 December 2012

More from Books

At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or … as a primer in

Tormented talent

More from Books

We know a great deal about Keith Vaughan both as a painter and as a man, from the journals he kept between 1939 until his death in 1977. They have been described as ‘one of the greatest pieces of confessional writing of the 20th century’, and provide a fascinating record of an artist’s thoughts and

Boxed and stalled

Lead book review

What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s

Boris unmasked

Theatre

It’s extraordinary how many works have been upstaged by the operas based upon them. Of none is this truer than those of Pushkin, whom the Russians regard as highly as we do Shakespeare or the Germans Goethe. Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades are known to most of us primarily from Tchaikovsky’s operas, and