The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Written soon after Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida is by a long chalk Shakespeare’s most unpleasant play. With a pox-ridden Pandarus and the filthy-minded nihilist Thersites as our guides to one of the least savoury episodes in the Trojan war, Shakespeare probes the cesspit of human nature. It’s an exploration of a farthest frontier from which
Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational
Where better to explore the history of the city than at its very heart? Guildhall Art Gallery, nestled between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Bank of England, is currently home (until 23 September) to Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker, a collection of artefacts from London’s Livery Companies, or guilds — an historic part of London’s identity.
The Peckham Peace Wall began life as a window: a long pane of shop glass in the front of Rye Lane’s newly refurbished branch of Poundland. During the riots last summer, the glass went, along with some of Poundland’s stock. The next morning, after the damage had been boarded up, a local theatre group covered
I saw a few car crashes at Edinburgh but I’ll mention only one. Hells Bells (Pleasance, Courtyard) by the excellent Lynne Truss is a peculiar experiment. Truss sets her play in a TV studio and she spends the first 40 minutes explaining the storyline. The show lasts 45 minutes. So when we finally learn what
Every so often a programme appears which can be recommended even to people who hate television. Parade’s End (Friday, BBC1) is such a work. The awkward — one might think impossible — problem of shortening Ford Madox Ford’s 800-page masterpiece into five hours of television, without violating the spirit of the book or seeming to
It’s a brave soul who buys a cinema ticket at this time of year, when all the studios try to bury their rubbish, and it’s a brave soul who buys a ticket to The Watch. This is a comedy starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade as four suburban men who take
Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home, enjoyed great acclaim: a memoir presented in comic-strip form, it described her father’s suicide and hidden homosexuality, her childhood visits to the family funeral home and Bechdel’s dawning realisation of her own lesbianism. The comic book does not immediately suggest itself as the ideal format for material of such
This is a big juicy slab of a book, as thrilling and nourishing as a Victorian three-parter. It resembles its forebears thematically, too. It asks a straightforward question: how does one know how to do the right thing when there is no moral foundation for our actions? Where the Victorians had a forthright Christianity, modern
The location of Philida is a Cape farm which used to be named Zandvliet and is now the celebrated vineyard Solms Delta, owned jointly by Richard Astor and the eminent neuropsychologist Mark Solms. It was Solms who brought to André Brink the story on which the veteran South African novelist bases his 21st work of
Ten years ago a cartoon appeared in the Independent showing the New World Order — Bush and Blair peering at a distorted global map with only one entry for South America: over Colombia was written ‘Coke-snorting bolshie gorillas’. Back then the Farc guerrillas were on the edge of the capital Bogotá, the country had the
Caroline Norton seems an unlikely pioneer of women’s rights. Born in 1808, the granddaughter of the playwright Sheridan, she was a black-eyed beauty, a sharp-tongued socialite with a gift for writing. She matters today because she quarrelled with her husband and refused to put up and shut up. That quarrel is the subject of Diane
Book-collecting fraternities are far from uncommon, but none of them is the equal of their British progenitor, the Roxburghe Club, either in age or exclusivity. This June the members celebrated its bicentenary, apparently in due style. At the inaugural dinner in 1812, 18 book-collectors, chaired by the Lord Spencer of the day, gathered to celebrate
In October 1810, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist substantially rewrote a review submitted to a publication he edited, the Berliner Abendblätter. Indeed, as few editors would dare — even in those days — he transformed its tone from critical to positive. The subject was a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich, ‘The Monk by
The Edinburgh Fringe is a place of youthful hopes, naive dreams and occasional flashes of genuine inspiration. Usually these turn out to be very much flashes in the pan. But not so last Friday night’s ‘story slam’ at the Southall: a contest of storytelling between writers, poets and ne’er-do-wells divided into two teams, representing their
‘I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things — and you can
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is being republished as well as adapted for the screen by the BBC. I first discovered the tetralogy when, in an attempt to improve my chances, I asked my future mother-in-law for a list of must-read novels. Parade’s End and The Good Soldier featured near the top of the list.
Mistakes will sometimes happen even in the best-run places. Pictured with this post, by way of proof, is a 1947 Penguin paperback of Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads, with the author’s name misspelt on the spine. It’s still common to talk of ‘typographical errors’, or typos, but back in 1947 there really was such a
Walk into a coffee shop on any high street today and you’re confronted by an amazing array of caffeine-connected choices: flat white, red eye and doppio to name a few. We’ve become coffee connoisseurs with our own particular preferences for skinny or full fat, dry or wet. Yet the words we use to describe our
English Literature GCSE isn’t a compulsory qualification, and the number of pupils taking the qualification has been dropping since 2008. With the current state of the course, you can see why. It’s not that the exam boards set awful texts, or that the subject is dull. It’s that the means of testing are inadequate. The
Author of classic children’s novel Carrie’s War and the Booker shortlisted Circles of Deceit, Nina Bawden has died today aged 87. Apart from writing over forty novels for adults and children, she campaigned for justice in one of her last books after the 2002 Potter’s Bar railway crash took the life of her second husband Austen Kark. Interspersed
In celebration of the birthday of Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967) today, here’s a review from the archives of her biography The Late Dorothy Parker by Leslie Frewin. Where be your gibes now?, Victoria Glendinning, 12 Sep 1987 Dorothy Parker was ‘America’s wittiest woman’. Here is an example of her wit. Rising from her chair at
Not only will you be able to catch Freddie Fox this month in the BBC’s mega drama Parade’s End (also starring Rebecca Hall and Benedict Cumberbatch) but you can also see him live at the Hampstead Theatre when he appears in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss with Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde. His current reading shows he’s been
On the 5th of August Mary Robinson delivered the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town. It should have been an occasion when the former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner looked back on South Africa’s achievements since the end of apartheid. Yet her speech will probably be remembered for just one sentence: ‘…the
The fanfaronade for Ian McEwan’s latest book Sweet Tooth, a seventies spy novel tantalisingly based on his own life and featuring a cameo from Martin Amis, has begun ahead of its publication date tomorrow. Two puff interviews (one in the Guardian and a slightly sexier one in the Daily Mail) with McEwan managed to include
For five weeks from 24 August BBC2 is doing a brave thing: serialising Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s quartet of first world war novels. Arguably the first great modernist English novel and, according to Graham Greene, the greatest novel in English to come out of that war, this £12-million project is a brave thing to
If you were to condense everything that was most quintessentially English about quintessential Englishness — from the green man and morris dancing to Vaughan Williams and The Whitsun Weddings — feed it into a liquidiser, have it remixed by an electronica DJ, and then transformed into the soundtrack of some trendy arthouse film premièred at
With the death of the critic and historian Robert Hughes, a great beacon has gone out in the art world of the West. I take his absence personally, not because I knew the man (I met him only once), but because he was such an invigorating and perceptive guide to excellence. Of course I didn’t
‘Our fate lies within ourselves. We just have to be brave enough to see it,’ says Princess Merida, the winsome, feisty heroine of Disney-Pixar’s latest animated romp Brave (PG, nationwide). ‘Why shouldn’t we choose our own fate?’ asks another character, chafing at the constraints imposed by family, duty and tradition. Why not, indeed? As Brave
