The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The trend for documentary portraits of individual cities assembled from archive footage continues with Julien Temple’s London: The Modern Babylon, out now on Bfi DVD. Temple was the obvious choice of director, as a native of the city and creator of London films Absolute Beginners and Oil City Confidential, not to mention 2010’s superb Requiem
It takes Alistair Cooke three minutes, or about 450 words, before he finally gets round to declaring ‘I was there’ — on the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. Cooke was talking just a few days later on his weekly Letter from America slot on Radio 4. You might think Cooke would
Derren Brown is a great big cheating liar. Or so my old mucker Rod Liddle reckoned last week in his Spectator blog. Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was ‘clearly, demonstrably, faked’, declared Rod. Well, I guess that settles it then. Or does it? First some background for those of you who missed it. (Though my advice for
When Philippe Decouflé first introduced the idea of sheer fun into the deadly serious business of postmodern dance-making, sceptics predicted that his comic strip and animated movie-like ideas would soon start to wear off. Almost 30 years later, his stuff is still as provocatively entertaining, and his work holds a special place in the history
Uncle Vanya comes into the Vaudeville at an artful slouch. Lindsay Posner’s take on Chekhov’s story of bickering Russian sophisticates has an unusual visual style. In Britain we’re used to seeing Chekhov set in some fading Palladian mansion just outside Haslemere or Bath. Designer Christopher Oram has rummaged through the archives and discovered some hideously
Old blokes make records too; they just take their time over it. Graham Gouldman of 10cc has one out, his first for 11 years. Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra has two out, but they’re his first for 11 years too. Donald Fagen’s new one is his first for six years, but he may be
Mother’s Milk is an adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novel of the same name and is about an English family who are about to lose their beloved holiday house in Provence. (Diddums, I’m minded to say, but only because I’ve never had a holiday house in Provence to lose, and am quite bitter about that.)
The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is outdoing itself in putting on a triple bill of little-known operas, two by Massenet and one by Martinu. What is still more remarkable is that GSMD has put them all on before, though I think in different productions. This time round the designer Yannis Thavoris has produced
An ordinary woman, rather like yourself.’ These were Peter Fleming’s words when he commissioned Jan Struther to write what became her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns for the Times. Critics complained then, and have complained ever since, that Mrs Miniver is no ‘ordinary woman’. She rings the bell for tea, takes taxis everywhere, and has a second
Where our great Victorian writers are concerned we live in an age of rolling biography and contradictory interpretation. I’ve read half a dozen lives of the poet since picking up, as a schoolboy, the Penguin paperback of Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, with its diagnosis of a crippling case of
Montesquieu observed that popular governments are always more vindictive than monarchies. So it proved in Iran in 1979, where the demise of a 2,000-year-old monarchical tradition made most ‘Arab spring’ revolutions seem like child’s play. More than 30 years on, the descent of Ayatollah Khomeini from a jumbo jet, wearing an American bullet-proof vest, also
On a ridge high above the River Ancre, four miles to the north of the town of Albert, stands the greatest of all Britain’s memorials to its dead. For some curious reason the Thiepval Arch has never touched the imagination in the same way as Blomfield’s Menin Gate, but as an evocation of the pity
Building on the success of his acclaimed Radio 4 series and bestselling book A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor has now successfully narrowed down the format. Selecting 20 objects that he suggests formed part of ‘the mental scenery’ of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he exploits what he calls ‘the strange potency
Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to trace a legacy left by the 17th-century composer Agostino Steffani, a slippery customer who mixed libretti with realpolitik in the courts of Europe. The bequest turns out to consist mainly of nasty secrets, which seem
Rebus is back, in a novel long, meaty and persuasive enough to make up for the years of absence. Actually, he is only part-way back — on a civilian attachment to the Edinburgh & Lothian Police, and working on cold cases. However, the retiring age has been raised, and he has applied for re-instatement. He
This is a story of impossible gifts. The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, stands to inherit a 17th-century baronetcy and a large fortune accumulated by his enterprising father. He was also blessed with intelligence, charm, ambition, eloquence and the mysterious ability to seek out power and use it for his own ends. His biographer, Janan
Parish churches are the sentinels of England’s past. They soar over every town and village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede primacy to the mosque. But the Church of England guards our rituals and speaks for our communities.
There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years
Scottish novelist Iain (M) Banks is this week’s Shelf Life provocateur. He tells us how he likes to test his potential lovers and what extreme punishments he exacts on books he doesn’t like. 1) What are you reading at the moment? The Hell of it All by Charlie Brooker and Anatomy of the Orchestra by
On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write about the world around them, and, as an observer on the ‘inside’, there was no shortage of material. Gloom and frustration hung heavily in those
‘The German sense of humour,’ Mark Twain famously observed, ‘Is no laughing matter.’ Although many Greeks, stretched on the Euro’s rack at Berlin’s behest, may be inclined to agree, Rudolph Herzog’s intriguing study of humour in and against Hitler’s Germany, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany, proves conclusively that the Teutonic funny bone, while
‘To the Grave’ Unclasp thy womb, thou mortuary shrine, And take the worst part of the best we had. Thou hast no harbourage for things divine, That thou had’st any part was yet too bad. Graves, for the grave, are fit, unfit for thee Was our sweet branch of youthful royalty. Thou must restore each
‘Passion for freedom‘ is now holding its fourth exhibition at the Unit 24 Gallery just behind Tate Modern. The show is a visible and occasionally dazzling manifestation of an often submerged movement in western liberalism that regards the liberal-left mainstream with something close to disgust. They – we – find the indulgence of radical Islam
If you didn’t watch Derren Brown’s Apocalypse, then the following will be meaningless… I suppose all television is a kind of charlatanism, a usually agreeable deception to which the rest of us more or less willingly sign up. We know, at the back of our minds, that TV is fake. Which is why Derren Brown’s
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948, and published his first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. Fans of Carson had to wait eleven years for his second book, The Irish for No (1987), which earned him the Alice Hunt Barlett Award. Belfast Confetti (1990) won The Irish Times Literature Prize for
What London can give jazz music — beyond an audience in its concert halls — is a setting to match the music’s diversity. The city offers access, culturally, to what is European, American, African and more. And so it is with the London Jazz Festival (9–18 November), whose extensive programme is significant both for its
It’s business as usual for the BBC’s radio stations. While the boardroom burns, the production teams are busy creating — weekloads of entertainment, information, erudition. The doomsayers love a crisis, and this latest disaster is a devil of a mess, but we should probably remember that the Corporation depends for its survival not on the
I thought my 27th Wexford Opera Festival since 1972 was going to be one of the best. I had seen and enjoyed the Cilea and Chabrier operas on the bill at Holland Park and Opera North in the 1990s, and I was intrigued whether Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was viable music theatre. Wexford
Martina Cole is a rarity among novelists. Her work is set in the ugly, male-dominated world of London’s criminal fraternity and yet nearly all her fans are women. Blonde women, in particular, as I found out when I took my seat in the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see Patrick Prior’s adaptation of her breakthrough
