The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I am writing this at teatime on Sunday — day nine of the Olympics. So far: 34 medals, we’ve all gone completely bananas, and the Great British mood has improved by what commentators call 110 per cent. Andy Murray has just won gold, beating Roger Federer in straight sets, and by the time I finish
It’s no good. We’ve been putting up with weird character changes, laughably unconvincing plotlines, calculating theatricals for a while now. But life in Ambridge has now plunged into the danger zone. If we don’t rise up in protest, The Archers is doomed, destined for broadcasting oblivion, killed off by a flash flood of OTT dramatics.
Richard III is seriously bad for your health. Any actor will tell you that the part of the ‘bunch-backed toad’ is so physically punishing that the chap in the title role usually ends up being injected with painkillers by the local quack before each show. Or he finds himself in hospital when he should be
In the beginning was the Edinburgh International Festival, a carefully curated exhibition of high culture. Then came the Fringe, in which every pub and church hall in the city became a venue for everything from student theatre to experimental dance. Now, it is mutating again — and for the better. The real arts story of
OK, let’s get this over with quickly so we can all hurry back to watching the Olympics. I’m obsessed by the Olympics (Go, Mo, go!; Yes, Jess, yes!) and all our gold medals. It’s like we can’t stop being showered with them. In fact, I went to the corner shop just now and came back
My first visit to Dorset Opera, last year, left me very impressed. If anything this year was even better, though I found one of the three operas dull. In last year’s programme, I seem to remember, we were promised an Olympically themed opera, Jesse Owens, but that didn’t materialise, nor was there any mention of
Adrian Heath (1920—92), like so many artists, was a mass of contradictions. Jane Rye begins her excellent study of him by quoting Elizabeth Bishop: ‘A life’s work is summed up as the dialectic of captivity and freedom, of fixed form and poetic extravagance, of social norms and personal deviance.’ Heath thought of his painting as
If you are in the habit of reading short-story collections straight through you will not fail to notice the repetition of motifs in Ryan O’Neill’s playful debut. I’ve no doubt he would like you to, for his book is a set of variations on the theme of language. We meet tattoo artists, English teachers, readers
Loss of innocence happens to us all and is one of the great themes of literature. With The River, a novella first published in 1946 and now rightly republished by Virago, Rumer Godden gave us not only her best book (she wrote more than 60) but a small masterpiece, a near perfect account of how
Having lived for 15 years in Japan, Lesley Downer has already written several highly informed books with Japanese themes. For her most famous, Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, she spent six months with those artful women who make every man they entertain with song, dance and chat feel adored, without — usually
James Stourton is not only a successful auctioneer and chairman of Sotheby’s but also an accomplished writer, the author of the delightful Art Collectors of Our Time (2007). He has now produced a book about how the English, and subsequently the British, set about acquiring and presenting works of art. He has been helped by
Alan Furst’s thrillers have been compared to le Carré’s, which does neither author much service. His espionage novels are set mainly in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. They don’t form a series, though there are connections between their characters. Most of them explore the choices forced on ordinary people whom the current of history
According to Ogden Nash, the reason the British aristocracy wrote so much is because they could never understand what they were saying to one another. Much of the advice proffered in Gentlemen’s Pursuits (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) from the pages of Country Life, seems aimed at people who can neither write nor talk. Take this
Pity the modern dictator. Time was he could bump off a recalcitrant opposition figure, take out a dissident stronghold, massacre the entire population of a town and the world would be none the wiser. There might be a pesky reporter trying to get to the truth, but that could be taken care of, as President
It is very possible that unless you are a Bulgarian or a Wykehamist or an SOE buff or ideally all three you will not have heard of Frank Thompson. Somewhere outside Sofia there is a railway station and a kinder-gartern named after him, but apart from one touching but derivative poem, printed in the Times
When I won the first Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, it was gratifying for me on every level. It helped me find a market for my work in the national press, and gave me the confidence to regard myself as a full-time writer. – Hilary Mantel. The Shiva Naipaul prize is awarded to the writer best
This review will not be kind. But let’s not start that way. Ground lies between. Rewind. Am I the only person to find being addressed like this intensely irritating? China Mieville’s new book Railsea is full of it. Some books are so wrought with references, intertext, allusion that can only manifest itself through repeated syntactical
In a notebook from Iceland in this week’s magazine, Max Hastings pays tribute to the late Sir John Keegan with, among other things, a notable anecdote: ‘One day at the beginning of 1986, he rang to gossip. I told him an implausible announcement was due that night: I was becoming editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura’s second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place. Tom and his father live on a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee’s South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The
When you begin in subediting – the odd little craft of preparing other people’s journalism for publication – certain things, or pairs of things, are drummed into you. St James’ Park is where Newcastle United play; St James’s Park is where the band of the Grenadier Guards play. Lloyds is the bank; Lloyd’s is the
It was a surreal experience to meet Maajid Nawaz for the first time. I had known of him for years and admired his bombast. He was a hero — not just my hero — but a hero to hundreds of young Islamist radicals. ‘Woah, this is the brother in Egypt, isn’t it?’ said an erstwhile comrade,
Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note. Just after we were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated
Book lovers are always pleased when water-cooler conversation turns to the latest phenomenon in which a novel or author has had the kind of popular success that extends far beyond the usual book reading public. The general tenor of such discussions runs along the dyspeptic lines of: ‘Why aren’t people reading better books?’ I have
Nell Freudenberger is one of the brightest young novelists in America, and she takes the Shelf Life hot seat this week. She suggests that Michael Gove should introduce English Literature GSCE students to international authors, and confides that she needs to read the self-help book she would like to write. Her latest novel, The Newlyweds, is
It has been a bad week for men of letters, with the loss of Gore Vidal a few days ago and Robert Hughes today. Gore was famous for his feuds, but Hughes, a Spectator contributor, had a softer side, unless your art was phony: ‘The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is
Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its
This is a nice big question to ponder on the holiday beach or in the rented villa. A vast amount has already been written on the rise of China and whether the US will be replaced as the global superpower. And where exactly does Europe fit into all this? It is easy to make a
The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell
The story is well known. One wet summer by the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley — 18 years old, living out of wedlock with the poet Shelley — had a horrifying dream, one that she would later write as the novel Frankenstein. What is less well known is that another of the key pillars