The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris
Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He
Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is
Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a
When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation,
Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not
There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English
A brief flurry of excitement in Guardian-land over the festive period as the news trickles out about who might be cast in Dreamworks’ silver-screen adaptation of the paper’s turbulent love-in with Julian Assange and subsequent fall out with the Wikileaks chief. Benedict Cumberbatch will play the reclusive protagonist, but enter stage (liberal) left Dan Stevens,
The Costa Book Awards has made its own history tonight by selecting, according to its press release, an all women shortlist* for the first time. Here are the category winners, each of whom bags £5,000: 1). Mary and Bryan Talbot win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a book that examines
The children who grew up when Christopher Martin-Jenkins began to commentate on cricket (both in print and on the air) have got old. CMJ’s 40-odd year career has been brought to a premature end by cancer; and the cricket writing world has paid tribute to its companion. The pieces by Mike Selvey, Jonathan Agnew and
2012 is done. Here is the final selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Happy 2013. Susan Hill Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author (Saltyard Books, £20). The writer started a daily blog about his life in Spitalfields — people, jobs, buildings, street life, monuments. A whole
‘The street scenes in Newlyn lack nothing of subject for the painter,’ reported the young Frank Richards from the Cornish art colony in 1895; ‘paved with cobblestone, some of the narrow streets are occasionally strewn over with fishheads and entrails, so that one’s progress in going “up” or “down”-along is sometimes considerably facilitated by an
John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) is a key figure in the great tradition of English watercolour painting. A prominent member of the Norwich School (he was born in the city), he was a landscape painter of genius, who transcended mere topographical record by making paintings of superb abstract design which also evoke the particularity of place.
There’s a K-Pop Academy in London. Students go through a 12-week course and learn not only the finer points of PSY-style hip-hop, but also Korean cuisine, fashion, history and traditional music. Not everyone can attend — as with Hogwarts, one must be chosen. Applicants submit an essay to the Korean Cultural Centre and 30 students
Looking back can be fatal and is usually ill-advised, inducing a nostalgia that can only blight what lies ahead. Let’s risk it, though, reliving those radio moments of 2012 (avoiding the Jubilee and the Olympics) when words took shape and became visceral. Most memorable (perhaps because most recent) was John Humphrys’s grilling of his boss
It must be ten years now since I risked life and limb to brave the Cresta Run, go fox hunting and be driven round a racetrack by Lord Brocket in a Ferrari for a Channel 4 documentary on the British Upper Class. In the heady few minutes following its first transmission I thought it would
Michael Grandage is homeless. After a near-faultless decade in charge of the Donmar Warehouse, he now reinvents himself as a roving thesp, a buskined vagabond, a theatrical mendicant wandering the byways and the turnpike lanes and ushering his troupe of all-stars into any pen that will accommodate them. It’s a medieval conception. The strolling players.
The trouble with this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more. If
In one of his finest essays, Gore Vidal recalls that when he worked as a scriptwriter for MGM the Wise Hack always used to advise his toffee-nosed team that ‘shit has its own integrity’. If crap is what you’re producing, make sure there are no signs in it that that’s what you think it is.
A flock of bells takes the air and you come to me, out of nowehere and I smile, knowing you’ll visit me always, that this is how it will be till the last thread of an island slips through a bell-ringer’s hands and they put me in the listening earth.
2012 is very nearly finished. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Matthew Parris There’s been a fad for publishing ‘biographies’ of entities that are not human beings: everything from longitude to the mosquito, and the format can prove forced. But Robert Shepherd’s Westminster,
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an ordinary Kilburn lad he keeps dropping hints about a knighthood. So it is only fitting that, at the age of 32 and with the help
On 1 September 1978, the then prime minister Jim Callaghan invited six leading trade unionists to dinner at his Elizabethan farmhouse in Sussex. By all accounts it was a very jolly affair with Callaghan’s wife Audrey doing the cooking and their granddaughter Tamsin Jay handing round the dishes. The trade union grandees went away convinced
In 1471 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, led a brash entourage of wine-swilling, jewel-bedecked courtiers into Florence. It was Lent. This was not the most auspicious way to begin a diplomatic mission to settle the dispute over Imola, the tiny Romagna fiefdom that Galeazzo had offered to sell to Lorenzo de’Medici. Even Lorenzo, epitome
The fascination with the last of the cavalry is enduring, perhaps partly because of the horseman’s apocalyptic links: one of the contenders for the last cavalry charge, about which there is still no consensus, is the battle of Megiddo in 1918, on the Plain of Armageddon. Now we have another question: who was the last
A fanciful and doubtless risky parallel between Charles de Gaulle and the Russian emperor Alexander I suggested itself while I read Marie-Pierre Rey’s superb new biography of the latter. Both men came to power through an act of political parricide: Alexander because he was tacitly complicit in the plot to overthrow his father, a plot
2012 is drawing to a close. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. 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
Find out which books PD James, Sam Leith, Susan Hill, Mark Amory, Barry Humphries and many more hate, then tell us about yours in the comments section. Craig Brown Which classic work do you think this comes from? ‘Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same
The word ‘turboparalysis’, coined by Michael Lind (who has a brilliant piece on the subject in the Spectator Christmas double issue), is paradoxical, even illogical. And yet it is clear, perfect for our times. Lind defines his term as: ‘a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine
