The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Jeremy Clarke, our Low Life correspondent, has sobered up to answer our impertinent questions this week. His latest book, One Middle Aged Man in Search of The Point, is available in hardback. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader 2) As a child, what did you read under
Some war veterans slip back into civilian life with reasonable ease, stiff of limb, stiff of upper lip. If at first it’s a case of concealment and self-restraint, there’s at least some chance that play-acting can infiltrate reality. The protagonist of Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home, is called Frank Money. He has just returned to
A major business deal took place in the United States yesterday that could revolutionise the books market. Microsoft has invested $300 million (£185m) in Barnes and Noble’s Nook eBook reader. The two companies have created a subsidiary, named Newco for the time being. Microsoft controls 17.6 per cent of the equity. The standard analysis is
‘A Short Song of Congratulation’ Long-expected one and twenty Ling’ring year, at last is flown, Pomp and Pleasure, Pride and Plenty Great Sir John, are all your own. Loosen’d from the Minor’s tether, Free to mortgage or to sell, Wild as wind, and light as feather Bid the slaves of thrift farewel. Call the Bettys,
Don’t be fooled by the incessant rain and your resurgent rheumatism, the summer literary festival season is upon us. The line-up at the Hay Festival is old news; the hotels of Edinburgh are preparing; and anticipation fills tea rooms from Warwick to St. Ives. The festival market is flooded, but there is one new festival
Now that the great design surveys regularly mounted by the V&A have come up to date, what will it seek to beguile us with next? These exhibitions have always been of interest, at least in parts, and often infuriating, a combination that has helped to ensure their success. The wide range of paintings and objects
William Cook says that I.M. Pei’s latest building, Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, once again captures the spirit of the age Standing outside Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, you’re reminded of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: ‘less is more’. Van der Rohe was a hero
Willie Nelson. An Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground. That is all.
A few weeks ago, feeling stale and stressed, I escaped to our dilapidated cottage in Dorset for a few days on my own. When I was younger, and especially when I was drinking heavily, I often felt ill at ease in my own company, but these days I get on quite happily alone, though I
Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely bewildering why it should be, but there are ways of coping with structural defects, which is what it suffers from. Yet I don’t think there has been a UK performance of it since Edinburgh in
Artifact was the first work that the groundbreaking dance-maker William Forsythe created in 1984 for the legendary Ballet Frankfurt. It is, therefore, pure ‘vintage’ Forsythe, even though it is as aggressively and engagingly provocative today as it was 28 years ago. It therefore comes across as a theatrically vibrant reminder of where it all started.
Be still, at last, you clamouring brainboxes. Those who long for more highbrow drama in the West End can thank God for David Edgar’s Written on the Heart. Commissioned by the RSC, this celebratory play tells the story of the King James Bible, which was first published in 1612. Making scripture accessible to the masses
As last week I believe I provided the world’s first entirely interrogative film review, I thought that this week I would up the stakes and embroider this review on antimacassars, in mirror writing — this has also never been done before, as far as I know — but time, alas, proved my great enemy, so
It would never have worked on TV. Ann Widdecombe going out for a night on the town with a group of young professional women. No self-respecting binge-brunette would have allowed themselves to be seen on camera with a sexagenarian ex-MP who just happened to be off the booze for Lent. But there she was, in
Rest easy on your deckchair, Delingpole, for I come in peace. Your column is safe — from me, at least — because this week I have made an unpleasant discovery: your job is really hard, and I don’t know how to do it. It’s not the watching that’s so hellish, it’s deciding what to watch.
Breakin’ Convention, now in its ninth year at Sadler’s Wells, offers a feast of hip hop for all-comers, be they newbies or hip hop heads. Hip hop developed in the Bronx in the late 1970s from a mix of Bboying (breakdance), graffiti art, MC-ing and DJ-ing. From street-corner hobby of young Afro and Latin American
When Hannah Rothschild first met her great-aunt Nica it was 1984. Hannah was 22, and Nica, then 70, had asked her to come sometime after midnight to a basement jazz club in an area of pre-Giuliani downtown Manhattan ‘known for its crack dens and muggings’. She was able to find the venue, as promised, by
On my desk is the vertebra of a narwhal. It was given to me by a man in Canada after a convivial dinner. Narwhals are Arctic whales with long spiky tusks on their noses. This vertebra is about three inches across, embedded in bone expanding into waisted wings, like a propeller. If I were the
It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that he never gave it much thought. Then he got oesophageal cancer. He had a horrible operation, got a bit better. Then the cancer came back.
Why would anyone want to buy this dreadful book? The frightful Simon Cowell appears to have co-operated with the author, and it is littered with repellent photographs — chiefly of a smirking Simon surrounded by beautiful ‘ex-girlfriends’. (Cowell is keen to inform us that he has had lots of girlfriends. He is not gay. Not.
The London Underground is methadone for people with nerd habits. Were it not for its twisty, multi-coloured map, its place in the capital’s history, its tendency to throw up facts such as ‘the QE2 would fit inside North Greenwich station’, we’d be on the hard stuff. The smack of nerd-dom. We’d be on the platform
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of him — the second, and surely not the last — entitled Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Now follows Pedal Power: How Boris Failed
Since I discovered this interview on Armando Iannucci’s Twitter feed I wondered if it was actually a spoof. But no, it seems Bill Shorten really is an Australian politician and not an Ocker Chris Morris. Anyway, for the time being it is my new favourite political interview…
Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves
‘Oh yes, Dracula,’ said a colleague. ‘Two splendid bits at either end, and 200 boring pages in the middle.’ It was exaggeration, but only slight. Dracula sags in the middle, but that is a reflection of the knockout opening and conclusion. Film adaptations have the luxury of cutting out the fat to concentrate on Jonathan
Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The
Penguin has launched a new design for the Penguin English Library. The press blurb says, ‘Each cover is a crafted gem, they’ll look and feel lovely in your hands.’ And they do. Steal into a bookshop in the next couple of days and hold one. The covers are individual and relevant to the book —
Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having
It is fitting that Bram Stoker is more celebrated in death than life. This week marks the centenary of his death. Numerous events have been held in his honour. It’s a typical jamboree. Horror writer Stewart King has explained how Stoker’s legacy is being sustained by a new wave of vampire fiction, which, for those