The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a half of neglect, and I suppose that it is still the most frequently performed. That isn’t surprising, since its plot is, by Handelian standards, simplicity itself, and the level of inspiration in the arias is
We are already more than halfway through January and I am still managing to stick heroically to my new year’s resolution. This is to keep smoking throughout 2012 — with a particularly large intake of nicotine and tar planned for the dreaded Olympic Games when everyone will be banging on about the glories of physical
How in God’s name did Jonathan Meades ever get a job presenting TV programmes? I ask in the spirit of surprised delight rather than disgust, for Meades is that rare almost to the point of nonexistent phenomenon: the presenter who doesn’t treat you like a subnormal child or so irritate you with his incredibly infuriating
Where mostly do you listen to the radio? In the kitchen, on the M25 or M62, under the duvet, soaking in a bathtub? We’ve got used to moving around with the wireless, often listening with just half an ear, not really connecting at all, and with no opportunity to share the experience with anyone else.
Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to
There are two ways of viewing the changes sweeping through the Arab world in general and Cairo in particular. There is the significance of individual events, such as the moment that the Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight and lit the fuse on protests that brought down the government of President Ben Ali.
She was the ill-educated younger child of the Duke of York; a mere female, she was sickly and not expected to survive, let alone become Queen. But, as this monumental and long overdue reappraisal shows, it was a mistake to underestimate Anne Stuart. She had always been ambitious and had great tenacity. She had no
Over 125 of the 320 pages in this book are either blank, or taken up with black-and-white illustrations, of subjects as various as Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie, slates arranged by Richard Long, Buddhist truth-seekers going for a walk in a wood, and a little boy having his Bar Mitzvah in a New
I think it was a Frenchman — it usually is — who observed that the English love their animals more than their children. At first glance, General Jack Seely’s Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse — originally published as My Horse Warrior in 1934 — is striking proof of this. In an
In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection
The phrase ‘community drummers’ strikes fear into me. When I read it in the programme notes for Survivor, Antony Gormley’s collaboration with Hofesh Shechter, premièred at the Barbican, I paused a beat. The elder cerebral artist paired with the young passionate choreographer: so what exactly is this? In the ladies afterwards I heard the disparaging
Perfect for Friday evening is this: the Gordon Brown-themed version of Ko-Ko’s ‘little list’ from The Mikado that Jeff Randall wrote for us back in 2007. The chorus should be sung, according to Jeff, by three people who have been quite prominent this week: Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper… The clunking fist, Jeff
Jaipur – In a dramatic end to the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, four writers rallied in support of Salman Rushdie by reading from The Satanic Verses. The book has been banned in India since 1988. As a result, a warrant was issued for the festival organizers; arrests which, at time of writing,
Salman Rushdie has withdrawn from the Jaipur Literary Festival. His statement makes for sobering reading. Will this ever end? For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival at the request of the local authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such
Warfare was the fact of life in Britain from the reign of Henry VII to that of George II. Nobody who lived on these islands could escape it. It is estimated that, between the battles of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Culloden in 1746, 1.2 million people died as a direct result of warfare in Britain
Earlier this week, Steven McGregor wrote a touching memorial to Gilbert Adair, the late novelist and critic. Adair self-deprecatingly described himself as ‘one of the great unread writers’, but two of his books were made into films. He adapted The Holy Innocents with the director Bernado Bertolucci; the ensuing film was called The Dreamers, and
Publishers’ eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come
Did you survive without Wikipedia yesterday? English Wikipedia, and perhaps as many as 7,000 other websites, was blacked out for 24 hours in protest at the passage of two internet piracy bills through the US Congress. Simple souls merely dusted off their battered encyclopaedia, but the technically astute lifted the blackout with a host of
The dowdy Queen Anne is back in fashion. Anne Somerset’s new biography of Queen Anne, that most enigmatic of monarchs, is published today. It is nearly 300 years since Anne’s death, and a popular account of her life is well overdue. She assumed the throne of a frankly second-rate power and left it a dominant
Fresh from sixty radio and TV appearances in 2011 alone, the popular historian and constitutional expert, Kate Williams, is on Shelf Life this week. She tells us about her religious fervours under the covers and what’s worse than finding Mein Kampf on someone’s bookshelf. Her first novel, The Pleasures of Men, is out tomorrow. 1) What
Gilbert Adair was a mentor to me, even in the year following his stroke, which was when we became closest, and I knew him best. I had just left the US Army and moved to London when I met Gilbert at a cocktail party at a friend’s flat in Maida Vale. Though it was an
The Guardian reports on a fascinating story from across the Atlantic, where an imprint of Penguin USA has reprinted Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. The book is a based on a copy of the Gospels kept by the third President of the United States between 1803 and 1820, from which he expunged those passages which he could
The Cold War produced some of the great classics of British spy fiction. From the gadgets and babes with exotic Eastern European accents of the James Bond books, to the non-stop action of Alistair MacLean or the dark treachery of John Le Carré and the intricate office politics of Len Deighton, it served as the
John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone has won this year’s T.S. Eliot prize, the most controversial in years. Nominees Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew from the prize on discovering that it was to be sponsored by a hedge fund, Aurum. Oswald’s objection was that “poetry should be challenging such institutions”, although she appeared to make
What a shame the Christmas literary recommends season is over: otherwise I would have loved to draw this to your attention as quite the funniest book of the year. In The Reactionary Mind political author Corey Robin pretends to analyse the psychopathology which drives conservatives to think and act the way they do. I say
A cacophony of opinion broke out across the weekend’s literary pages, all of it eloquent and entertaining. On Thursday, Nick Cohen will publish his anticipated account of England’s pernicious libel law, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Cohen condemns the legal establishment that values deference to the mighty above freedom
As cuts in government funding begin to bite, the innovative Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn finds itself short of £350,000 a year, and its long-serving artistic director, Nicolas Kent, is standing down as a result. Into the breach has stepped 89-year-old philanthropist and Tricycle devotee Al Weil. He is donating 37 paintings (including ‘The Gulf of
When R.B. Kitaj put together The Human Clay, his ground-breaking 1976 exhibition of figurative art at the Hayward Gallery, he wrote: ‘If you have a great subject, say, a person or people or a face or some complex theme, you have no right to be negligent about form or colour. Great themes demand the highest
This ain’t necessarily Townes at his best. Then again, the singing was never the biggest point of TvZ. But of all his songs this is close to being my favourite and not just because it means much to at least one other person. Self-indulgent? Sure. But so what? This is a blog. My blog, actually.