The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If you’re thinking of putting on a West End show, here’s what you need. Half a million quid. That should cover it. Unless it’s a musical, in which case you’ll need five or ten times as much, depending on how munificent/crazy you happen to be. Investors tend to be fretful, superstitious types who rarely make
Faith is the theme of this year’s Summer Festival in Lucerne. Not that I would have guessed it from the three concerts I went to in the Concert Hall on consecutive evenings last week. But the programme books insist on it, and there are, besides the musical events, lectures and discussions on Faith, with a
Circles and Tangents sounds like a show of abstract art, but actually the title is somewhat misleading. As Vivienne Light, the exhibition’s curator and author of the accompanying book, explains, the circles are intended to denote networks of artists (not the circular forms in a Ben Nicholson painting, though Nicholson is included in the show),
As the whole world knows, London has been putting its best foot forward this summer, and has done it very impressively. From the success of the Olympics to the best-contested Test Match I’ve ever been to (the final result, notwithstanding) it has been a pleasure to be part of the scene. But of all the
The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s biggest and most prestigious architecture exhibition, struggles to know who it’s for — the professional architect or the interested public — and indeed why it exists at all. This is partly Venice’s fault. To spend one’s time looking at architectural models, drawings and, this year, photographs and film when
It’s hard enough convincing people to read finished novels much less unfinished ones — though perhaps our cultural obsession with The Great Gatsby is reason enough to republish F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon. The partial manuscript now appears alongside his personal essay The Crack Up in one slim volume. Read the
How much attention do you pay to the physical descriptions of characters in novels? Interviewed on Five Live recently about her latest book NW, Zadie Smith said that she never really bothers with them, either as a reader or a writer. ‘Descriptions of how people look – how many of them have you read?’ she
Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston Blumenthal’s latest wheeze: instead the cure for piles advocated by William Buchan, 18th-century author of Domestic Medicine, now republished as Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? (Bodleian Library, £14.99). The new title gives you a clue to
Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically
Sarah Losh is not forgotten (as the subtitle of this book suggests) in her own village of Wreay (pronounced ‘Rear’), south east of Carlisle in Cumberland. The locals refer to ‘Miss Sarah’ as if she were still alive, rather as they speak about Lady Anne Clifford at Appleby. Anybody who has visited the village and
Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a
Howard Jacobson’s new novel is a satire on modern literary publishing seen through the eyes of a writer, Guy, who wants to sleep with his mother-in-law even though he’s married to a stunner famed for her casseroles and ‘street blow jobs’ (that’s what it says). Things happen in it not to feed the story but
Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age
In 1904, the great Halford Mackinder, founder of the modern academic discipline of geography, published one of the most subversive maps of the century. It might seem unlikely that a scientific representation of the physical world projected according to mathematical principles onto a two-dimensional surface could mess with your head, but that is the unmistakable
In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of
Like the deserts of the Middle East, the barren islands of the South China Sea now loom as a new theatre of war. Asian countries, indeed America, too, are at odds over how to deal with this power-play by a rising China — if that’s what it is; or scramble for maritime minerals; or as recently
Patrick Hennessey was a founder member of the Junior Officers’ Reading Club, formed when the Grenadier Guards toured Iraq in 2006. He is the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club — the story of how a ‘wise-arse Thatcherite kid’ became a thoughtful soldier. It is among the best examples of British military witness written
The 1996 Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize was won by Miranda France. Here, she shares her experience of winning the award and visiting the Spectator office and then-editor Frank Johnson to get her £3,000 cheque. Miranda France has since had four books published. Her Shiva Naipaul-winning entry, ‘Bad Times in Buenos Aires’, can be
Somehow, sex is less appealing when it’s characterised as ‘equitable return’. Though I’ve heard the phrase used in a similar context a dozen times since, I wasn’t quite sure what it meant when I first encountered it three years ago. I’d been drafted in to persuade a wealthy businessman at an art auction that taxidermy
For many of us the Battle of Midway is just one more Hollywood spectacular in, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, a far-away sea of which we know little. But having recently taken a closer look at the battle I am struck both by what was at stake and what the consequences of the American victory were
‘Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford’ ‘Here lies wise and valiant dust, Huddled up ‘twixt fit and just: STRAFFORD, who was hurried hence ‘Twixt treason and convenience. He spent his time here in a mist; A Papist, yet a Calvinist. His prince’s nearest joy, and grief; He had, yet wanted all relief. The prop and
‘This man makes a pseudonym and crawls behind it like a worm,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in The Fearful. The weekend’s literary pages were gripped by a story of pseudonyms. R.J. Ellory, the well-regarded and critically acclaimed crime writer, has been caught penning rave reviews of his own work, and damning that of his rivals, under
Liberal Democrat party president Tim Farron is on the books blog this evening sharing his favourite reads. He reveals which book he feels best sums up ‘now’ (which we hope for his sake says nothing about the state of his party), and says he’d most like to be a woman exploring outer space if he
Tim Farron is president of the Liberal Democrats and shares his reading list with Spectator readers. Hopefully he is not thinking of the state of his own party when he suggests Lord of the Flies as the book that best sums up ‘now’, but in case he is, the next book he plans to read
I’ve only just got around to watching Tom Holland’s documentary for Channel 4 from earlier this week: ‘Islam: the untold story.’ It had some good things in it, despite suffering from the two problems all documentaries now suffer from: attention-grabbing statements at the end of segments which are not followed up on, and endless shots
As Roger McGough approaches 75, his latest collection of poems As Far As I Know shows him writing with the same blend of mischievous word play, subversion of cliché and distinctive sense of humor that makes him one of Britain’s most popular poets. McGough became a prominent force in the late 1960s when his poems
The idea came to me after I had just got back from South America after a long trip to Peru. Perhaps because I was badly jetlagged, everything about England looked strange, different — and certainly worthy of as much exploration as I would give to a foreign country. The few other times I’ve ever had
Mr Steerpike was overcome with joy when he read the press release from Pippa Middleton’s publishers. It told him that her forthcoming book Celebrate will be a ‘useful, practical and inspiring journey into British-themed occasions, focusing on tradition.’ Well, thank goodness for that. What a treat. Over to the sister-in-waiting: ‘This book is designed to be
After the record-breaking success of the Fifty Shades trilogy, publishers are desperately trying to answer the multi-million dollar question, what comes next? What will all those millions of readers who have raced through Fifty Shades want to read now? With a depressing lack of imagination, many publishers seem to have landed on the answer of