The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine
There was an unintentional theme to the weekend’s literary pages: murder, in some shape or form. There are fictions, histories and real life whodunits to choose from, if crime is your guilty pleasure. First up: Death in Perguia, a comprehensive account of the Kercher case written by the Sunday Times’ John Follain, who covered the investigation and
Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers marked something of a departure for the hugely successful American novelist, better known for magical realist holiday fodder like Practical Magic or The Story Sisters. Her latest novel plunges us into 70AD, into the midst of Jewish resistance to the Roman siege of Masala, and into the lives of four women
It sounds like mission impossible. To celebrate this year’s 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the RSC set itself the task of mounting a play about the controversies surrounding the translation. A drama, therefore, entirely lacking in drama. No action or spectacle, no romance or comedy, no surprise twists or last-minute poisonings. Just people
Postmodernism is a term with a surprisingly long history. It was first used in the 1870s and was subsequently employed by dazed or disaffected commentators with some regularity throughout the first two thirds of the 20th century, until it became de rigueur in the ghastly decade of the 1970s. The architect Charles Jencks pronounced the
The caption on the photograph (above) makes a difference: ‘A young boy grieves at the funeral of his father who died of Aids at Ndola, Zambia, 2000.’ There were two million Aids orphans in Zambia alone. ‘I care about not letting this tragedy go unseen,’ Don McCullin said. Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin,
Last month, on the most glorious of autumnal days, the world of music paid its last respects to Robert Tear. St Martin in the Fields was packed and the singing, as you can imagine, was magnificent. Sir Thomas Allen gave us Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, Sir John Tomlinson contributed Sarastro’s aria from Zauberflöte, and Dame
The Australians do suburbia well. We seem to be interested in the working classes and the poor (EastEnders, Coronation Street, searing one-off dramas about sink estates), Americans like the rich (Dallas, Dynasty) and well-to-do urban folk (Frasier, Friends). But in Oz they are fascinated by the people who live in medium-size houses in leafy streets
‘We chose to believe things that could not be true,’ says Velma Hart, the American finance officer who famously confronted President Obama at a town hall meeting in Washington DC and told him straight that she was tired of constantly having to defend him against his former supporters among the middle classes. She voted for
To see or not to see, that is the question, just as it is always the question with us — I believe our relationship may be caught in what is generally referred to as a ‘rut’ — but I shall answer all the same and my answer is this: Anonymous is a ‘not see’ and
Compelling, succinct, elemental, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first indisputable masterwork, wouldn’t seem to present any great problems for an opera house, unless his directions about heaving ships are taken too literally — very unlikely — so why does one never see it well produced? The Royal Opera has made especially heavy weather of it, but
Contrary to general belief, there is little glamour in the professional life of a dance critic. What there is, though, is a considerable amount of time spent confronting painfully unsuccessful attempts at making art or, at least, making something worth seeing. What makes one digest those endless stretches of choreographic drabness is the promise —
Peter Brook’s 1964 staging of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade for the RSC was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life as a young journalist. The magnificently titled Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade was a knockout. With
Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind
Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture.
Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this summer with a barnstorming performance in One Man, Two Guvnors. But there’s no doubt that his Fat Lad Made Good persona, and
When I was a Reuters trainee, long hours were spent in Fleet Street pubs absorbing the folklore of journalism from seasoned veterans. One popular story concerned the hapless correspondent sent to verify that Dag Hammarskjöld, head of the United Nations, had safely landed at Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia on his way to talks with
The die was miscast from the start, more’s the pity. As we reach the halfway point in this massy four-volume edition of the letters of Samuel Beckett, I cannot stifle a small sigh or whimper, of the type exhaled by one of those Beckett characters buried up to their necks. And there is no one
Some may question whether a review of a columnist’s work in the magazine in which that columnist’s work appears can ever be impartial. It can, and not just because this particular magazine is, as far as I recall, honest about this kind of thing. It’s because it’s in my interests to be hard on Jeremy
Those of us who have spent an embarrassing number of hours immersed in the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer have learned to live dangerously. We have been overturned in high perch phaetons, held up innumerable times by highwaymen, been kidnapped and spirited across the Channel, lost several fortunes at Faro or Bassett and have even
Imran Khan’s Pakistan: A Personal History describes his journey from playboy cricketer through believer and charity worker to politician. His story is interwoven with highlights from Pakistan’s history. At times he seems to conflate his own destiny with that of Pakistan, and at others to be writing a beguilingly honest personal account. Khan describes how
Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called Komninos against the historical backdrop of the rise and fall of Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, in the 20th century. To make things even knottier, most
Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often
Half a century ago J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society changed the political consciousness of a generation in the English- speaking world and beyond. It vividly re-established in the minds of civilised men and women the paradox of private affluence in a sea of public neediness — for which, as Matthew Arnold reminds us, Cato reported
Two years before the outbreak of the first world war, a Royal Navy officer, addressing an Admiralty enquiry into the disturbing question of lower-deck commissions, ventured the cautionary opinion that it took three generations to make a gentleman. It is hard to know exactly what he meant by that endlessly morphing concept, but if it
Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this
Gangs, suicide bombers, paedophiles, Somali pirates: the world is swarming with people who want to hurt us. And yet Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, thinks we’ve never been safer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, due to a combination of progressive thinking and
<a href= “http://vimeo.com/30774612” _fcksavedurl= “http://vimeo.com/30774612″>NBCC Reads at Center for Fiction: On the Comic Novel</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user2300381″>NBCC</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>. America’s National Book Critics Circle discussed the comic novel last week. Here is a video of their discussion, which ranged from Tom Jones to A Visit from the Goon Squad. Interesting to note Beth Gutcheon’s
When I was a teenager, Death and The Maiden was one of the plays I read when I was discovering that theatre could be angry, obscene and unafraid of speaking truth to power. Ariel Dorfman’s tale introduces us to Paulina, a torture survivor who becomes convinced, but can’t prove, that the urbane neighbour her husband,