The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The fashion for museum-quality exhibitions in commercial galleries continues apace with two notable shows in Mayfair: Cy Twombly at Eykyn Maclean, and Julio González at Ordovas. Both galleries specialise in this kind of display, which must be more to do with impressing potential clients than with generating income, given that both are loan shows. I
William Cook believes that the British cannot really understand the artist until they’ve been to Antwerp In a quiet corner of Tate Britain there is a little exhibition that sheds fresh light on an artist whom the British have never really learned to love. Rubens & Britain (until 6 May) is a fascinating show, documenting
From an early Transatlantic Session. I think you’ll find it speaks for itself. How could it fail when it’s got Emmylou, Rufus, Kate and Anna? Simple but pretty nifty.
Let’s not waste more millions ‘saving’ Old Masters Last week the National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland proudly announced that they had jointly raised £45 million to buy Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ from the Duke of Sutherland, thereby ‘saving it for the nation’. A few days before, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced
I’m told that the new production of Dvorˇák’s Rusalka at the Royal Opera House is controversial. There were boos at the first night and reports of audience members walking out in disgust. I too walked out in disgust. Mine, however, had nothing to do with what was happening on stage. It was prompted by the
The Choirbook for the Queen, which has recently been launched, is a remarkable initiative, involving most of the leading Church musicians of our day and many philanthropists besides. The idea behind it is simple enough: to put together a collection of anthems (I use the word precisely) to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the
There can be no doubting the nobility of John Adams’s intentions in writing The Death of Klinghoffer to a text by Alice Goodman, nor ENO’s courage in putting it on, though they do have a captive audience for minimalist and near-minimalist operas. The work is conceived, as all commentaries tirelessly tell us, in the spirit
Jackie Mason, the New York stand-up, looks very strange. It’s as if somebody shrank Tony Bennett and microwaved him for two hours. Mason is short, dark, troll-like, densely built, with shining bulbous lips and a twinkly expression of diabolical mischief. His hair gathers over his head in a wave of red-brown crinkliness. For his solo
Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it —
Paula Milne’s drama serial White Heat (BBC2, Thursday) starts in 1965 which to some of us might seem like yesterday, but is equidistant between the end of the first world war and now. So to most people it’s ancient history. Various students in London are looking for accommodation, which is strange since Churchill died in
What took them so long? For weeks and weeks he’d been limping into the farmhouse whining about how cold he is, how tired, how he’s had enough of Tom gadding about Borsetshire selling his gruesome-sounding pork meatballs while he’s stuck on the farm trimming leeks and getting up at the crack of dawn to do
The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed. ‘Of the folly
One of the pleasures of Alan Judd’s books is their sheer variety. His work includes biographies of Ford Madox Ford and Sir Mansfield Cummings, the first head of what became MI6, as well as nine novels, many of which have little in common with each other apart from unflashy but elegant prose. The Devil’s Own
The mighty convulsion that was the French Revolution has stirred the blood of historians from Thomas Carlyle to Simon Schama and consideration of it still inflames opinions. At its centre stood Maximilien Robespierre — 5’ 3”, stern, unaffacted in manner or dress, Spartan in his domestic habits — deified by his followers as the ‘Incorruptible’
In l958, my hero in life, the person I most wanted to be, was Keith Dewhurst. I had arrived on the Manchester Evening Chronicle straight from Durham as a graduate trainee reporter, which was a laugh, as they did no training. Keith was the paper’s Manchester United reporter, knew all the players, went to all
‘Very, very, very sexy’, a field-researcher scratches in his Antarctic notebook. He is describing a meteorite the size of a £1 coin that he has just picked up off the ice. The episode, recounted in Gabrielle Walker’s hugely informative book, reveals the passion of intrepid polar scientists. From the enthusiasm and diligence on display in
Hmm. Of the 30-plus characters in this novel, not one is both black and British. Odd, since it’s set in 2007-8, in south London. An early passage shows us a Polish builder listening to a ‘crowd of black kids’ on the Northern Line: ‘You never—’ ‘He never—’ ‘Batty man—’ And that’s it: six words in
The blurb on the front of Grace McCleen’s debut novel (from Room author Emma Donoghue) proclaims it to be ‘extraordinary’, and goes on to praise it as ‘brutally real’, commending its mixture of ‘social observation and crazy mysticism, held together by a tale of parent-child love’. Unusually for a blurb, this is all accurate. McCleen’s
Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of course, especially his son David, archetype of the boy sent crying home from school, who wrote a brilliant book about it, Bringing the House Down
At last a diary as penetrating on Berlin as the Goncourt brothers’ on Paris has been translated into English. The author, Count Harry Kessler, resembled a character from Sybille Bedford’s masterpiece, A Legacy. Born in Paris in 1868, he was educated in England, France and Germany. His father was a Hamburg banker; his mother was
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at something else too? As a quarter of Blur, Alex James (above), spent a decade creating critically acclaimed yet commercially successful pop anthems, thereby earning himself access to more drink, drugs and Doris than you could
I think we should have a short poll. Who is the thickest person ever to appear on the BBC’s Question Time? I ask having watched a woman last night, can’t remember her name, who worked for the Daily Mail, and who could have been outwitted by a bowl of semi-thawed Iceland Atlantic Prawns. Also, she
Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper is an extraordinary book. It is not perfect — it is repetitive, opinionated and long — but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Perlman unites the Holocaust and the civil rights movement as themes in a narrative that runs from rural Lithuania in the early ‘30s to modern day New York. Calls
Much ado this morning about Joanna Trollope, the chief judge at this year’s Orange Prize, who admitted that she was ‘influenced’ by a book’s cover. The Bookseller’s Philip Stone told the Times that ‘he was surprised that Joanna Trollope said that covers are significant. In a literary prize a book should be judged by the
Just his luck. Adrian Mole is 30 years old — or 43 and ¾s to be precise. The appreciation of Sue Townsend’s most famous creation has grown into uncritical hagiography. The Mole series is not effortlessly and consistently brilliant as the Blandings or Jeeves and Wooster novels, or Tom Sharpe’s Wilt farces. The later Mole
The Orange Prize longlist has just been announced, followed by the perennial hoo-ha over its right to exist. Is it sexist to have a prize just for women? Is sexism the reason why we need a prize just for women? Does anyone outside the comment boards on the Guardian website actually care? All it is,
Which books (if any) have you got in the loo at the moment? The term ‘loo book’ has come to mean ‘lightweight/undemanding humour book’ – but does it have to mean that? The three titles currently gracing my own cistern have made me consider the question. They’re Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, The Magic of
Who remembers Chips Channon? Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was an American born Conservative MP, a Bright Young Thing, and a marvellously indiscreet diarist. Or so he is alleged to have been. His diaries have never been published in full, so scandalous was their content — particularly of his promiscuous liaisons with many of the great
More farm life than park life, the only cheese Alex James now produces is in his dairy. He lets us in on which books he’s reading in his country house, what he’d get girls & boys to read for school and why he thinks literature is what a good camembert could never be: past its