Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Golden corn

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Sebastian Barry’s novels, I’m beginning to think, are a bit like that famous illusion of the two faces and a vase. Most of the time you’re reading them, they seem to be wrenchingly powerful and heartfelt depictions of suffering and grief. Yet, it doesn’t take much of a squint for them suddenly to look like

Kim Philby’s library

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Kim Philby was the only man in history to have been made both an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and a Hero of the Soviet Union. After his defection to Moscow in 1963, aged 51, he admitted missing some friends, some condiments (Colman’s mustard and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce) and English

Bookends | 6 August 2011

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Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest. Once, Superman, Batperson and the like were just lowbrow trash for kids, but while some of us were looking in the opposite direction they acquired legendary status and became the cornerstones of Western civilisation. Now

Bookends: The Super Age

Marcus Berkmann writes the Bookends column for this week’s issue of The Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest. Once, Superman, Batperson and the like were just lowbrow trash for kids, but while

Messages from Tahrir Square, part 3

Here is the final installment of Karima Khalil’s photo-history of the Egyptian revolution, Messages from Tahrir. You can read the previous two posts here and here. IMAGE 9: (Photo credit Beshoy Fayze) Protesters protected themselves with whatever came to hand; this man fashioned a makeshift helmet from a cooking pot. He has written “Down with

A hatful of facts about…the Man Booker Prize

1.) Last week, the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2011 was announced. The lucky authors included established writers like Sebastian Barry and Alan Hollinghurst alongside first-time novelists like Stephen Kelman. The presence of independent publishers attracted admiration in the press. For the betting man, current odds have Hollinghurst primed to nab his second Booker,

Messages from Tahrir Square, part 2

Here is the second installment of Karima Khalil’s photo-history of the recent Egyptian revolution, Messages from Tahrir. You can find the first post here. IMAGE 5 (Photo credit Sherif el Moghazy) Protesters wrote their messages on whatever they could find, many using on their own bodies to convey their frustration, like this determined young man.

Going global | 2 August 2011

Here’s some news that you may have missed from last week: World Book Night is to be extended to America. The American arm will be led by Carl Lennertz, currently with Harper Collins, and former head of marketing at Foyles, Julia Kingsford, is to become chief executive of the whole charity. The organisers hope that

A 19th Century writer for our times

In November 1844, Dostoyevsky finished writing his first story. He confides in Diary of a Writer that he had ‘written nothing before that time’. Having recently finished translating Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, he suddenly felt inspired to write a tale ‘of the same dimensions’. But he was not only prompted by artistic aspirations. In a letter

Across the literary pages | 1 August 2011

Former Booker judge Louise Doughty says hooray! for the bravest Booker longlist ever compiled. * Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending  * Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side  * Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie * Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers  * Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues  * Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats  * Alan

A new ending

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” lamented Wilfred Owen in his Anthem for Doomed Youth. When RC Sherriff wrote his play Journey’s End just a decade after the Great War, he never set out to answer this haunting question or justify what he had witnessed at Passchendaele. But he was the first to

Show of wonders

Exhibitions

One of the art books purchased in recent months that I’ve most enjoyed has been Arthur Boyd: Etchings and Lithographs, published in 1971. Boyd was an Australian painter, potter and printmaker, born in 1920 in Melbourne, who came to England in 1959 and made his home in this country. A deeply interesting image-maker, he came

Seeking closure

Arts feature

What makes an appropriate encore? And when should they be performed? Michael Henderson on the art of finishing well After a recital at Wigmore Hall earlier this year András Schiff performed an encore, as pianists often do. Normally a Bach prelude or a Schubert impromptu will round the evening off. It is part of the

The great unknown

Features

Who was Carlos Kleiber, and why has he been voted the best conductor of all time? Carlos Kleiber — the name evokes both Hispanic and German spheres — cancelled performances, never gave interviews, claimed he only conducted when the fridge was empty, and told Placido Domingo he’d prefer to devote his time to drinking wine

Chaotic mishmash

Cinema

Horrid Henry (3D, like we care) is the first big-screen adaptation of Francesca Simon’s bestselling children’s books, and if you would like to save yourself a trip to the cinema you can recreate the experience at home by tuning into some super-noisy, busy, brightly coloured Saturday-morning kids’ TV programme while simultaneously bashing your head between

Spellbound | 30 July 2011

Opera

Die Walküre (Bridgewater Hall, Manchester) What is the best way to introduce someone to Wagner, granted that, for assorted reasons, his art is thought to be exceptionally forbidding? I have always found that it’s enough to provide a few dates, to place him in respect of his forebears and contemporaries; to say a few things

Lloyd Evans

Double sensation

Theatre

Loyalty at Hampstead is two sensations in one. First, it’s a sensational drama written by the partner of a key Blair aide, Jonathan Powell, about the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, it’s a sensational finale to Mr Powell’s career. The author, Sarah Helm, records events unfolding in London and Washington from

Spreading the word | 30 July 2011

Radio

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Take Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. She wanted ‘to do something nice for the folks in my home county [Tennessee]. I wasn’t thinking on a larger scale,’ she says. But her idea to send a free book every month to every child enrolled in her scheme from the moment

James Delingpole

Power and influence

Television

Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything. OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to

Bookends: Corpses in the coal hole

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Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces with her latest novel is a little unusual even by her standards. Set in the present, The Vault (Hutchinson, £18.99) deals with the discovery of four corpses in the disused coal hole of a Georgian

Life & Letters | 30 July 2011

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There was a photograph the other day of a Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West, Florida. Bizarre? Perhaps not. It’s 50 years since he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off, but he remains the most famous and widely recognised American writer of the 20th century, indeed of

Sam Leith

Mutiny, mayhem and murder

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Nothing more gladdens this reader’s heart than a book that opens up an interesting and underexplored historical byway. Well, perhaps one thing: a book that opens up a historical byway that turns out to be a complete catastrophe. On that count, A Merciless Place more than delivers. Here is one of the great colonial cock-ups.

Don’t blur the lines

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Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921,

A choice of first novels | 30 July 2011

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As L.P. Hartley noted, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And no more so than during the two world wars, a fact that has provided a rich seam for several debut novelists to mine this summer. In Mark Douglas-Home’s puzzler The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99), the tidal pull of

Appetites and resentments

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According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred Kazin’s biographer as well as the editor of his journals, the nearly 600 pages of entries assembled in this book represent only one sixth of the total mass Kazin deposited in the archives of the New York Public Library. According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred