The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There’s something decidedly odd in being part of a largely grey-haired audience sitting respectfully through a play about the discomforts of a cantankerous old butcher’s ménage consisting of a chauffeur, pimp, demolition worker and, ah yes, a professor of philosophy incomprehensibly returning from his American campus to the bosom of his dysfunctional family. This revival
Weird experiments in stone and glass clutter the South Bank opposite the Tower of London. The near-spherical City Hall looks like a speeding squash ball photographed at the moment of impact with a racquet. Around it stretches an acre of sloping flagstones, ideal for freestyle biking and skateboarding. (Sure enough, both activities are vigorously suppressed
It’s somewhat surprising that there are many people who are still amazed by the Mariinsky Ballet’s sparkling response to the choreography of George Balanchine. After all, it is well known that the father of modern American ballet, born Georgi Melitonovic Balanchivadze, had been trained at the Imperial Ballet School, from which developed the artistic principles
Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules (Faber & Faber, £14.99) by insisting that it is not a primer for would-be writers, but of course it is, and much more. Lynn was
In the early 20th century, explorers were goaded and galvanised by the blanks on the maps — the North and South Poles, and the mist-draped floes and glaciers around them. Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen set off with one prevailing purpose: to reach the extremities of the earth. Hardy, maniacal, even
At about 5.15 p.m. on 9 April 1953, Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman of no account, leaves the three-room apartment in a northern suburb of Rome that she shares with her father, a carpenter, and five other members of the family and never returns. Thirty-six hours later her body is found by the edge of
Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old
Karl Miller wrote a book called Doubles, exploring the duality of human nature, Jekyll and Hyde, and such like. Duality fascinates him. Another book was Cockburn’s Millennium, a study of the Scottish judge and autobiographer, an Edinburgh Reviewer, a figure so prominent in Edinburgh’s Golden Age that the society which sets out, not always successfully,
In 1977, Roy Kerridge was a lavatory cleaner; in 1979 he was a well-known contributor to The Spectator. Yet this was no rags-to-riches discovery of a literary talent. Apart from anything else Kerridge had perfected a line in second-hand clothes — a short sheepskin coat, a brown Dunn’s suit, pastel shirts — that fitted his
The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al
Even brilliantly accurate satirists can become boring unless they have something to say. That is the triumph of CrickiLeaks. Purporting to be a series of spoof Ashes diaries that reveal the innermost thoughts of famous English and Australian cricketers, CrickiLeaks doesn’t just superbly capture the players’ voices and vocabularies, it also makes them say surprising,
I received a call from the Irish writer Paul Howard, who, as Ross O’Carro-Kelly (‘Rock’) has written a number of popular satires about Ross and the Celtic Tiger, a series now necessarily discontinued. Howard is presently embarked on a new project — a biography of Tara Browne, who famously ‘blew his mind out in a
Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in
Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules by insisting that
1.) Colin Dexter’s famous creation, Inspector Endeavour Morse, is due to fill our screens once more. ITV has announced that a new Morse film will be on the box next year. However, it comes with a twist. The film will be set in 1965 and feature a younger version of Morse, who will be played
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as
The communications revolution has gone viral in Britain this summer. The recent riots and looting appear to have been co-ordinated by smart phones and social networking sites. Gone, it seems, are the days when hoodlums fomented insurrection with a combination of furtive messages and indiosyncratic tic-tac. I doubt that facilitating mass disorder was quite how Steve
This morning’s Bookseller observes that, with one or two exceptions, bookshops have escaped from being looted during the recent London riots. Independent shops and high street retailers alike remain largely unscathed; even those situated in Croydon and Hackney, where criminality was particularly acute yesterday. Electrical shops and sports clothing vendors have, of course, fared less
Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work? Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue
Kate Petty Recently, I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. It was a set book for school and I sat down reluctantly to begin reading it in the morning; five hours later I was still sitting in exactly the same place, completely engrossed in the story. The voice of the protagonist,
Exciting news. New York Magazine reports that Jesse Eisenberg has been cast in a film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella, The Double. Eisenberg is to be directed by Richard Ayoade, known to British audiences for his comedic roles in The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Man to Man with Dean Learner. Ayoade made his
Might Albert Camus have been murdered by the KGB? Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, has details of a new theory. Here is a translation, courtesy of the Guardian. ‘The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech
When a major artist dies while an exhibition of his or her work is up and running, there is inevitably a surge in visitor numbers. Consequently, the death of Cy Twombly at the beginning of last month has sent along to Dulwich a number of people who didn’t know his work to find out what
It’s difficult to believe that John Hoyland is dead. He was a man so full of life, with such appetite for living, that his absence from our midst makes no sense. Even when grievously ill in the past months, he was more likely to engage in anecdote and tell jokes than complain of his increasingly
We owe Giverny to the generosity of Americans Whoever coined the famous aphorism ‘When good Americans die, they go to Paris’ didn’t tell the full story. For American plein-air painters, Paris was never more than limbo. Heaven, they eventually discovered, was Giverny, presided over by the Impressionist deity Monet. It was 1887 when the first
Sure, you don’t necessarily think of Elvis as a country singer. But then you remember his gospel roots and the rockabilly and it all makes sense. How could such a great American ever escape the greatest American musical genre of them all? He never did. Or, if you prefer, he just often returned to it.
Everything is there – except the central character English Wagnerians really can’t complain about what they’ve been offered this year, so long as they can get around the country, and particularly around the countryside. In London we have only had ENO’S Parsifal, but that was musically magnificent. Many of us found Glyndebourne’s Meistersinger tremendous both
They’re back. In August the capital fills with bored, dim-witted, half-naked semi-vagrants who have nothing to do here but get in the way of Londoners who do have things to do here. Tourism is an invitation to robbery. If you aren’t going to a place to work, you’re going there to get worked over. The
Project Nim is a story about man and chimp in which chimp comes out of it well, man does not and, I’m warning you, it’s fascinating, but not pretty. The starting point is an Oklahoma lab in 1973 when Nim, a male baby chimp, is taken from his mother at a fortnight old and sent