The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A change this week as we wind down for the Christmas holiday: Alastair Sim’s immortal Scrooge the morning after the night before. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 to rapturous applause — the Spectator’s original review will be republished shortly. Critics praised Dickens’ success at distilling the Christian message of goodwill to
Snowdrops, A. D. Miller’s literary thriller, has to qualify as the book I was ‘most unable to put down’ this year. It’s set in a contemporary Moscow which I instantly recognised — glamorous, vicious, amoral and terrifying all at once. Miller puts his finger right on what makes modern Russia so compelling to outsiders. When
Quiz question: which famous 12-word quotation is followed by the phrase ‘for there is in London all that life can afford?’ Clue: two of the words are ‘tired’. If you need any more clues … well, I might as well warn you now that this probably isn’t the blog post for you. Because it’s about
It was an exceptional year for the novel, with impressive books from Adam Mars-Jones, Ali Smith, Edward Docx, Edward St Aubyn, A.S.Byatt, Cressida Connolly, Ross Raisin, Amitav Ghosh, Tim Binding and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to mention a few. Many congratulations to the enterprising Hesperus for bringing a small but enchanting German classic, Hans Keilson’s Komodie
After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography
What strange persons get themselves chosen to govern us. I have spent quite a bit of the past year reading some brilliant lives of our prime ministers, each of them heavy enough to sprain a wrist but light enough to tickle the imagination: in historical order, David Brown’s Palmerston, D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life
Library campaigners in Brent suffered a setback yesterday when the Court of Appeal decided that the local council was not in breach of the law when it closed 6 local libraries. The library campaigners lost on all counts, including on grounds of equality. The judgment also said that the burden of centrally imposed budget cuts was a
Music fans may groan at the glut of greatest hit collections clogging up shelves at this time of year. Bookshelves are usually immune from such compilations, though the odd one slips through. In this case, it’s a positive. Forever Rumpole: The Best of the Rumpole Stories brings together some of the most winsome of John
Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here received less attention that it deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with
Death has made a telling visit to the literary world in the past week: Christopher Hitchens, George Whitman and Vàclav Havel have all died. The appreciation of Hitchens is fast approaching the precedents set by his targets, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa — an irresistible irony that he would certainly have appreciated. The growing beatification is the measure of
Picking my favourite albums this year reminded me of three things about the current state of music. First, the obvious point of how everything is driven by single tracks rather than albums, making the task harder each year. Second, how so much of the most interesting and innovative art is being made by women right
Andrew Lambirth on John Leech, artist friend and travelling companion of Dickens, whose pictures help illuminate the novelist’s work Christmas approaches, and my thoughts turn, with reassuring inevitability, to Dickens. As the nights draw in and the winter winds blast across the fields of East Anglia, the counter-urge is for the comfort of a good
There is one carol that has particular resonance for Londoners: ‘Silent night, holy night’. Just the idea of it can bring on an involuntary shiver of pleasure. In the 36 or so hours between Christmas Day and Boxing Day, after a solid month of the eldritch screeches of office parties and Westfield shopping, we city
It’s never been easier for a single mistake to define a whole life Occasionally, as a television presenter, you come across stories that make your blood run cold. The last time it happened, I was live on air and I virtually stopped speaking. I wish I could say the story was about some appalling human
Going to see the new smash hit show Matilda the other night, I was once again reminded that, as a creative musical force, the contemporary West End musical is dead. It contains the sort of music you only find in musicals; it has no relevance to contemporary music; it exists in a creative ghetto. The
As soon as Thanksgiving is over, the Beverly Hills bitches are out and about in full force and full maquillage. Driving their Beemers and Mercs with maniacal intent, they hit the department stores determined to put a dent in their hubbys’ credit cards. Black Friday is what the day after Thanksgiving is called, as all the retailers
My German grandmother never understood the point of pantomime. She’d lived in England for more than half her life, spoke English like a native (actually, a good deal better) and had a sound appreciation of English humour, from Lewis Carroll to The Good Life. However, she was happy to admit that the panto bug had
It is one of Kenneth Tynan’s most-quoted observations. After seeing the first night of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in May 1956, the mustard-keen young critic could not contain his enthusiasm for John Osborne’s play. ‘I could never love anybody,’ he wrote, ‘who did not want to see Look Back in
Having seen and been most impressed by two New York Met relays of Wagner operas on the big screen, I was interested to see how the largely close-up medium would cope with a Handel opera, where the challenges are quite different. Both composers have single characters singing for large stretches of time, but, while Wagner’s
Juno and the Paycock is a slice of documentary realism from the earliest years of the Irish Free State. The skint Boyle family are living like a gang of hobbits in the leprotic ruins of a grand Dublin townhouse. The paint blisters and peels. Diseased mortar crumbles into scabby flakes. The plaster-work centrepiece on the
The Iron Lady is a better performance than it is film, although I suspect the performance will carry the day. My good friend Meryl Streep, whom I have personally witnessed making pie with her very own Meryl hands, is awesome, flawless and magnificent, etc. but the film itself is peculiarly glib and superficial and somehow
It seems that Christ was born with the sound of choral music in his ears. That, at any rate, is what is to be deduced from many of the works of art that the manger scene has subsequently inspired. There is the holy family gathered round the crib, gold and lapis lazuli everywhere, beneficent animals
One of the unwritten rules in our house is that Christmas should never be mentioned until a few days before the big day. Mrs Spencer gets into a state in the run-up to the festive season, not least because, as a teacher at the Royal Ballet School, she has rehearsals of The Nutcracker to attend
It might cheer the spirits of our over-stressed EU leaders this weekend if they were allowed time out from their delicate financial machinations to listen to the Day of Christmas Music broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday and in the other 55 countries of the European Broadcasting Union (set up in 1950 as a cultural
My prize for the best thing on TV this year goes to the comedy Rev (BBC2, Thursdays). I know Simon Hoggart disagrees with me on this — he finds it all a bit predictable. But in the spirit of Christmas I should like to point out that Simon is a wine-soaked pinko Guardianista who hasn’t
‘I don’t like him looking daft,’ growls Alastair Campbell to the camera as Bafta-winning documentary film-maker Molly Dineen shadows Tony Blair for the 1997 party election broadcast. The warning is clear. Forty hours of footage became a mere ten minutes of spin, but it’s testament to Dineen’s rapport with the member for Sedgefield that despite
The posthumous publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime diaries continues the restoration of his reputation, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft Nothing is more elusive than reputation. A writer’s standing goes up and down like a share price, during his life and after, for no obvious or objective reason, as D. J. Taylor observed in a recent perceptive essay
In the first book of his scientific-cum-philosophical poem ‘De rerum Natura’ — or ‘On the Nature of Things’ — Lucretius draws the reader’s attention to the power of invisible forces. The wild wind, he wrote, whips the waves of the sea, capsizes huge ships, and sends the clouds scudding; sometimes it swoops and sweeps across
‘Who was she?’, a browser might ask on finding three re-issued novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and ‘Why should I read them?’ Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of 13 children of a Victorian physician. After his death, his widow wrapped herself in anger and subjected her children to cruel, neurotic tyranny. Their verbal laceration continued