The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
David Priestland is worried. Towards the end of his recently published book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, he warns: ‘[The crash of] 2008 has set the world on a course towards potential conflict, and the domestic and international forces that brought us the violence of the 1930s and 1940s are with us today – albeit still in
The last time I visited Kew was to see the installation of Henry Moore’s sculptures in 2007. Moore’s monumental bronzes made an enormous impact on the botanical gardens, so much so that the gardens were in danger of becoming merely a backdrop for the sculpture. Although a good many people came to see the exhibition,
If you want to see how myths arise from misunderstandings, the Tower of Babel provides a textbook example. In ancient Assyrian babilu means ‘door of God’ and thus correctly describes the Babylonian ziggurat erected to the god Marduk by Nebuchadnezzar II and later seen in ruins by Herodotus. But in Hebrew the word bâlal means
The title of the new show at the Palazzo Strozzi is a little confusing. Most of the artists in Italy in the 1930s weren’t beyond fascism; they were in it up to their necks. They didn’t really need much persuading by Mussolini to come up with pictures like Luciano Ricchetti’s 1939 painting ‘Listening to a
Each of the Buddhist monks’ faces tells a variation on the same story. One simmers with fury, another sags with despair, a third is locked in a stoical gaze. The sign they are holding is written in Mandarin — its message the latest piece of sadistic invention by the Red Guards promoting Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
‘Shhhh! Listen!’ Peter White demands of us, his listeners. ‘You’re about to enter into a blind man’s world.’ White, who for years has presented the In Touch programme on Radio 4 on Tuesday nights and who is now a stalwart on You and Yours, has become such a finely attuned listener that he can tell
One of the many pleasures of television is that it allows us to forget our manners: we can treat it with an impolite offhandedness that would not be considered sociable — or sensible — in the run of everyday life. This isn’t a vicarious enjoyment of bad behaviour that we see on screen, but an
You know how it is: you wake up in your knock-down corrugated shack, surrounded by chickens and dogs and pigs, before staggering out into the morning sun to press the animals against your ear, listening to their heartbeats. No, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. You probably don’t know how it is, and neither did
The Met Live in HD series for 2012–13 got off to a brilliant start with a new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the most warm-hearted of comedies — in fact, a work so genial that I’m always surprised it doesn’t lapse into insipidity. This production by Bartlett Sher made that seem less of a danger
Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a
Fifty years ago it was not possible to bid at auction via the telephone — that first historic telephone bid was made for a Monet at Christie’s in 1967. Now the auction house’s Great Rooms, and indeed every other international saleroom, is lined by banks of telephones and digital screens, and absentee clients may also
Britain’s country houses were constantly in the news a generation ago. In 1974 The Destruction of the Country House, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris, offered a dismal chronicle of the houses that had disappeared in the past century. It proclaimed their importance to
Son, never boast of the bird you have done. Masters of the art of crime never serve A scrap of time. They may shit on everyone. They keep their noses clean. A fable says, There was a crooked horse who kicked an ass For being an ass, and down the line He got stitched up
Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is
‘The history of our love affair with violence’ is how Michael Newton describes his new book, Age of Assassins. In fact, its scope is much narrower: assassination in Europe and the US from the murder of Lincoln in 1865 to the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981. So, no Gandhi, no Allende, none of the
Timothy Bateson Richard Burton was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic, but he was very nervous and not at his best. John came round to his dressing-room afterwards, to find him stark naked. ‘I’m so sorry, Richard,’ he said. ‘Shall I come back later when you’re better — I mean when you’re dressed?’ To
The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie is a freelance journalist but his mission is to save tetrao tetrix britannicus (the britannicus added in 1913). He devotes much of his time protecting a black cock and a couple of its grey hens
In 1941 Roy Plomley was 27, and living in Bushey, Herts. After stints as an estate agent, film extra and mail-order astrologer’s assistant, he had found a better billet on a wireless programme called Swing from London, and, though only a freelance, was excused compulsory enrolment in civil defence on grounds of his valuable contribution
At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and
Edna O’Brien would obviously never write a typical Irish ‘misery memoir’, though she has experienced more misery than is quite fair, even to the point of planning suicide. Country Girl is an emotional roller-coaster of a book, beginning with two disturbing dreams of her old home, setting the elegiac tone. Family life was a ‘ragbag
Horatio Nelson is England’s most loved military hero. Marlborough is remote from our view, and the aristocratic Wellington was perhaps too stiff and unbending a Tory for popular taste. Nelson, by contrast, had an engaging personality and a colourful private life. The disabling wounds that he suffered and the affecting circumstances of his death in
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared. Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal:
Like mists and mellow fruitfulness, Val McDermid novels often arrive in autumn. The Vanishing Point (Little, Brown, £16.99) is a standalone thriller whose central character, Stephanie Harker, is a ghost writer who compiles the autographies of celebrities. Her relationship with Scarlett Higgins, a foul-mouthed reality TV star known to the nation as the Scarlett Harlot,
It takes less than an hour to fly from Washington DC to New York City. But, if you are a diplomat, you might as well be travelling to a distant planet, such is the gulf in diplomatic culture between America’s capital and the United Nations’ headquarters. Whenever I went to see my opposite number at
It is initially unsettling to read a new novel by an acclaimed author that is not really new at all, merely available in an English translation for the first time. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner, wrote Silent House way back in 1983. It was his second novel, and helped to cement his reputation as
‘What porridge had John Keats?’ Browning offers this as the crass sort of question that stupid people ask. But in fact the first person to answer it would have been John Keats himself. He loved to talk about food, good and bad. He writes to his dying brother Tom from Kirkcudbright that ‘we dined yesterday
Like Mont St-Victoire itself, looming over the country to the north of Aix-en-Provence — seen unexpectedly, then just as suddenly hidden, now clear-cut against the sky, at other times a presence in the corner of the eye— the work of Paul Cézanne has been a landmark in the art of the century and more since
Screenwriter for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and now promoting his latest film Now Is Good starring Dakota Fanning and Olivia Williams, filmmaker Ol Parker tells us which book is the funniest ever written, when he might find himself in bed with Martin Amis and what he does exactly when his wife, Thandie Newton, is
When Dan Hannan’s book, A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe, arrived through the post I was alarmed to see that it was shrink wrapped in the same way as top shelf pornographic material. For those of you Europhiles who rather warm to the idea of a federal Europe and look forward to the day when