The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Tapestry, papal and princely, never quite went away. Today it satisfies a need for conspicuous displays of skill of the kind celebrated in the V&A’s recent show Power of Making. The surprise hit of last year’s Venice Biennale was Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images, an exhibition of weavings and tapestries old and new, while
It’s amazing what can be squeezed into an hour of The Hour (Wednesday, BBC2): smutty photos, gang violence, bent coppers, illegal gambling, fascism, racism, a political cover-up, a media exposé, leaked documents, seduction, abuse, neglect, the corrupting temptations of celebrity, the corrupting temptations of complicated dessert recipes, a dog in space, the threat to the
By some strange, freakish coincidence, just as the biggest story to hit the BBC in recent years was about to cut through the airwaves on Saturday night, Radio 4 was discussing the question, Who’s Reithian Now? It was as if, by some act of God, Lord Reith, the corporation’s creator, was speaking to us direct
Michael Haneke’s Amour is about love as we near the end of life and is so painful it isn’t a film to ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ but is one you do have to see. It’s amazing. It is, effectively, two hours and seven minutes of watching someone die, but it is riveting, and I’m still jangling
As usual on the rare occasions when Vaughan Williams’s last and largest opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is performed, the new production at English National Opera has been greeted antiphonally, with cries of ecstasy mingled with indignation that it is so little performed from one side, and moans of boredom and weariness from the other. Though
Where have you been all my life, Orphan of Zhao? Come to think of it, where has any Chinese theatre been? Bang up to the minute, the RSC’s new artistic director, Gregory Doran, launched his regime with the so-called (actually, badly called) ‘Chinese Hamlet’ on the very day that President Hu Jintao, dwarfed by a
An orgy of navel-gazing on the South Bank where a national treasure is satirising the National Trust at the National Theatre. Alan Bennett sets his latest comedy in the drawing room of a crumbling Georgian mansion in South Yorkshire. Greedy speculators are queuing up to seize the house from its plucky owner, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole,
Buttons like liquorice Catherine wheels on the cape coat I always loved you in. No longer flush, the top one dangles by two last threads, face down. A couple of minutes, why not sort it? For God’s sake, you say, turning back the lapel. You’re obsessed. Flip through the pages of your Grazia. Mum’ll fix
Could you write a novel in a month? Plenty of people around the world are trying to do just that right at the moment. November, you see, is National Novel Writing Month. Organised by a Californian outfit called the Office of Letters and Light (I know – please stick with me), the event has been
Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example of ‘nostalgic intertextuality’, which is a grand way of saying that it is a bit of this and a bit of that. The this is the part cars have played in his family’s history and
Simon Hoggart has spent 20 years going to Westminster to annoy people. He entertains no high-minded delusions about politics and he writes his Guardian sketches in a state of amused bewilderment by the sheer barminess and abnormality of most parliamentarians. This collection reads like the diary of an intelligent, mild-mannered child whose parents happen to
Any fair-minded person who has looked into the matter knows that Conrad Black was wrongly convicted. Indeed under English law he would not have been prosecuted at all, I believe, and had he been so, the judge would have thrown the case out on the first day on the grounds that the pre-trial publicity had
Christmas is one of the few remaining occasions when the English feel obliged to cook a proper meal at home. To help them, in the autumn, kind publishers bring out lots of huge, glossy books. The idea, or collusive polite fiction, is that the cooks read the books carefully, plan their meals, buy ingredients and
Historians have long been more interested in the Roundheads than in the Cavaliers. It was the parliamentarians who achieved England’s revolution, or the nearest thing the country has come to one. It was they who overthrew the monarchy, the House of Lords and the bishops, they whose insistence on parliamentary rights, and whose attainment of
The Duke of Edinburgh, a New Zealand typist claimed in 1954, was ‘the best investment that the royal family has made in all its history’. But would she have thought so had she seen him a few days earlier at a ‘crazy’ party where, according to his first cousin Pamela Hicks, he ‘excelled himself, managing
To write this book Aman Sethi, a journalist for the Hindu, spent five years hanging out with the casual labourers of Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, who live and die on the streets. ‘Why,’ asks one of them, ‘are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What
I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes
When novelists write essays, they often boom through megaphones, aggrandise the importance of their views and inflate their stature. Julian Barnes, however, seems to be a novelist who enjoyed feeling special when young, but now finds increasing rueful comfort in reminders of his own insignificance. Certainly there is no swagger in his 17 essays about
Phaidon Press invented the art book. It was in 1930s Vienna that Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider established the format of the illustrated monograph: a short essay by an expert, usually an Austrian art historian hired for a modest fee, followed by a sumptuous range of high-quality repro. They left before the Anschluss and arrived
It is no mean feat to produce a publication of the type that used to be described as ‘a coffee-table book’, devoted to the subject of great Scottish houses, and manage to find a fresh slant on a genre that has illustrated and described country houses for decades. James Knox and his photographer, James Fennell,
A.N.Wilson Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie (Bloomsbury, £14.99). At last, an Anglican Father Brown. Runcie has sensibly set his detective stories in the 1950s, before the boring era when DNA and science spoilt the poetry of crime investigation. Canon Chambers, a self-effacing, clever clergyman with a taste for pubs and shove-halfpenny,
Some thirty-five years ago, in 1977 to be exact, I first published A Savage War of Peace, a definitive history of France’s war in Algeria. The war dragged on from 1954 to 1962, torpedoed six French governments, and the Fourth Republic itself, bringing de Gaulle to power. It also introduced a new meaning to the
The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did, and better than most people we see every day. This brilliant new biography by eminent Keatsian Nicholas Roe has caused controversy with
The bare statistics of the Great Irish Famine are chilling enough: in 1845-55 more than a million people died of starvation and disease and a further two million emigrated. Ireland’s population fell by more than a third. John Kelly does an excellent job of sketching the background in The Graves are Walking: massive population growth
Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he ought to be a Nobel Laureate – American Pastoral stands as one of the best books written since the war about, among other things, the
The words ‘Saville’ and ‘Inquiry’ have taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent weeks. But this is just to tell interested readers that my book on the original Saville Inquiry, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry is out now in paperback. If you can still find a bookshop then you might find
Since the publication of her debut collection, Satan Says in 1980, which was awarded the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, Sharon Olds has become a prominent – and controversial – voice in American poetry. Olds’ work has been given many unflattering adjectives from her harshest critics: self-indulgent, sensationalist, solipsistic, and pornographic, to name a
Go back 90 years to the first radio broadcast by the newly formed BBC and you might think you’ve entered a time warp. The company (it became a corporation later) was obsessed about a government inquiry and accusations that it was elitist and biased towards London. How could it survive without the licence fee? How
The primary experience of looking at painting is the crucial encounter between a painted surface and the human eye. Nothing is quite like it, and this unique experience cannot be replaced or replicated by looking at a painting in printed reproduction or on a computer screen. This may be a truism but it is worth