The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question:
If you drive West out of Carmarthen on the A40, you pass through a landscape of dimpled hills and lonely chapels and little rivers full of salmon trout. This is Byron’s Country, the place where Byron Rogers was brought up in the late Forties, not knowing a word of English, until at the age of
Today’s Dilbert strip is for commenters and bloggers everywhere: We love you all, of course. [Thanks to MS, JPM, AH and others for the tip.]
Colin Amery has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath remains a real shocker. The fury of his polemic against
If one scientist were to sit at a table full of philosophers it might seem at first that the scientist had the upper hand purely by virtue of their self confidence. The philosophers’ humility might be no match for the all encompassing certainty of science. Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry and author of A Scientist’s
A way of becoming very drunk while stocktaking your bookshop’s science-fiction section (via). A collector’s guide to true crime, including an unexpected connection between Dennis Nilsen and Virginia Woolf. A celebration of the typographic specimen book that is rather lovely to look at. An easy way into Jean Rhys – at least, easy if you
Like most Shakespeare comedies, Much Ado About Nothing is often performed as a garden party fantasy of Merrie England – so it’s a treat to see two major productions both committed to restoring the Mediterranean flavour of this hot-blooded piece, which Shakespeare actually set not in Stratford, but Sicily. At the Globe, Jeremy Herrin strews the stage
I don’t arrive at my camp site until 11pm, partly as a result of my own sense of comic timing, partly the result of a long lunch with Dear Mary and chums. Good fortune would have it that Spectator HQ has been pitched next to Radio Cymru’s weather reader, who tells us in the morning
Our coverage of the final days of this year’s Hay Festival begins today. Here’s a selection of facts and myths about the world’s grandest literary festival. 1) This year’s reconciliation between Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul joins a long list of memorable events at the festival. In 2009, Ruth Padel held her resignation press conference
It is 82 years since the publication of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. It was an unlikely commercial success. After James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury might be the most famous unread novel in English. American schoolchildren are forced to plough through it (on the assumption that the
James Bond is the great chameleon. From the velvety burr of Connery through to the tango tan of Moore and the aluminium pecs of Craig. And then, of course, there is the Bond of the books. Between covers (of the literary sort, at least), Bond transforms again: refrigerated in the black-and-white of print, he becomes
The Telegraph is live at the Telegraph Hay Festival. The Salon reports on ‘Stephen from Baltimore’s’ attempt to re-write James Joyce’s Ulysees on Twitter: ‘All volunteers need to do is choose a section, or several, from the 18 episodes, structured loosely on Homer’s epic, “then thoughtfully, soulfully, fancifully compose a series of 4-6 tweets to
Cleanliness was nowhere near godliness in 17th-century Europe — except in Delft, where God came second. The Wellcome Collection’s examination of humanity’s relationship with dirt begins in Vermeer’s city, where thousands of girls with pearl earrings scrubbed hearths for a living. Delftware, those distinctive blue and white ceramic tiles so common in antique shops, was
William Cook takes refuge from the modern world at an exhibition of the artist’s paintings of his beloved Salisbury I’d always thought of Constable’s paintings of Salisbury Cathedral as grand, majestic things — but seeing them again in Salisbury, with Richard Constable, the artist’s great-great grandson, you begin to look at these splendid pictures in
Amidst all the Dylanmania this week it’s worth recalling that Steve Earle once said, “Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” He may be forgiven his touch of hyperbole. Nevertheless, To Live is to Fly is
When the photographer Ida Kar (1908–74) was given an exhibition of more than 100 of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, history was made. When the photographer Ida Kar (1908–74) was given an exhibition of more than 100 of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, history was made. She was the
Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one of the most taxing of all operas to stage, with a large cast, gigantic proportions and requirements of stamina, both musically and emotionally, such as very few works make. Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one of the most taxing of all operas to stage, with a large
A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. His latest hazard as theatrical travel agent is to whisk Antonio and Shylock off to Las Vegas. The hurly-burly of a modern casino turns out to be
The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. It’s also his richest. The madness starts immediately. To set the opening scene of a sprawling family drama at four o’clock in the morning seems eccentric to the point of rashness but Chekhov is a master of
Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV. Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may
Two self-directed films this week, and that is usually a bad sign. Every television auteur, even the best, needs someone at his shoulder saying, ‘Nah, mate, won’t work.’ The lack of an independent voice can be disastrous and lead to Billy Bunter levels of self-indulgence. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC2, Monday)
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2697 you were invited to take as your first line ‘How do I hate you? Let me count the ways’ and continue in verse for up to a further 15. Readers are no doubt familiar with the given first line, which comes, with an impertinent tweak,
In the summer of 2003, in a bar in Malta, George Best was approached by a man holding a paper napkin and a pen. ‘It’s been my childhood dream,’ said the man, ‘to have George Best ask me for my autograph.’ Best obliged. As so often, his fame was so great that it turned normality
Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and
Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Kit, painter of meretricious society portraits, has whisked Alice, his younger, pregnant girlfriend, off to Jordan for an indulgent weekend. Their car skids off a mountain road leaving Alice trapped inside. Kit behaves like an unheroic imperialist. ‘You bloody
The quasi-religious zeal with which certain popularising neuroscientists claim that man is no different, essentially, from the animals, and that consciousness is but an epiphenomenon, strikes me as distinctly odd. The popularisers seem to take a sado-masochistic delight in it, in the way that some people get a thrill from envisaging the end of the
By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. In this ambitious, humane and absorbing book Virginia Nicholson moves Mummy firmly to the centre of the
Derby Day is meticulously plotted and written with bouncy confidence. It tells the story of a sordid, conniving rascal called Happerton who plots a betting swindle for a Derby of the 1860s. He marries the colourless but near-sociopathic daughter of a rich attorney, and cheats on her without noticing the intensity of her passion for
The misery memoir is the fad of the moment. We seem to have a limitless desire to delve into other people’s hardships. Robert Irwin has gladly shown the way to a more enlightening type of memoir, that of the spiritual quest. But surely, I hear you say, the spiritual quest is nothing new? Think of