The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The book world has been abuzz with the Arabic Booker. High-quality fiction is connecting with political conflict and the convulsions in the Middle East have revealed a literary culture often closed to the West. Boyd Tonkin describes how the ceremony itself was infected by the surrounding political drama: ‘Yet even here, under the obligatory tank-sized
Since pluralism in the arts became the order of the day, categories have been bursting at the seams, and the old definitions have lost validity. No longer does visual art denote painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing, but all manner of extraneous and tangentially linked activities as well. Film, installation and performance are crammed in under
Assailed on all sides by cultural vacuity, we are more than ever in need of the life lessons of Beethoven, argues Michael Henderson We do not, as a rule, meet all our loves at once. Those things which mean so much to us in our emotional maturity did not always strike us as special presences.
Midsomer and Soham The producer of ITV’s murder-mystery series Midsomer Murders was suspended after saying he didn’t want black characters on the show because it was ‘the last bastion of Englishness’. While many English villages still reflect Midsomer in their colour, it is over 200 years since a black man first settled in the English
He’s only been singing about how Loving Her Was Easier for 40 years now, but here’s Kris Kristofferson with an early version of the song from the Old Grey Whistle Test way back in 1972:
In December 1956, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins met at the recording studios of Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. And Million Dollar Quartet, at the Noël Coward Theatre (booking until 1 October), charts this memorable get-together with 90 minutes of rock’n’roll played and sung by a not-exactly lookalike group of
What the world needs now, perhaps as a matter of some urgency, is love, sweet love, but, failing that, wouldn’t a decent, warm, engaging rom-com do? It might but, alas, it isn’t Chalet Girl. What the world needs now, perhaps as a matter of some urgency, is love, sweet love, but, failing that, wouldn’t a
Like a lot of classics, Blithe Spirit doesn’t quite deserve its exalted reputation. Like a lot of classics, Blithe Spirit doesn’t quite deserve its exalted reputation. Every time I see it I discover a little bit less. Catty, slight, charming, clever and a touch too pleased with itself, the play shapes up as nothing more
The jam factory is no more. In one of the great theatrical transformations of our day, the RSC has unveiled its modernisation of Elizabeth Scott’s unloved theatre of 1932; unloved for its ungainly brick bulk on the Avon riverside but no less for the distance of its seating from the proscenium stage. There was much
Scene: the Royal Opera House, last Friday, 10.35 p.m. In the last act of Aida, Amneris, in the formidable person of Olga Borodina, has just concluded her magnificent denunciation of priests: ‘Cruel monsters! You will always be thirsty for blood!’ and the final ten minutes remain, the exquisite scene in which the hero and heroine
Whatever lay behind Radio 3’s decision four years ago to reduce the number of live concert broadcasts to a mere handful, it cannot have been the recent phenomenal success of ‘live’ relays from the Met in New York to local cinemas. Whatever lay behind Radio 3’s decision four years ago to reduce the number of
The BBC’s Horizon is, amazingly, almost 50 years old and this week, in its The End of the World? Guide to Armageddon (BBC4, Thursday), it looked back at some of its scariest predictions. The BBC’s Horizon is, amazingly, almost 50 years old and this week, in its The End of the World? Guide to Armageddon
‘We are humbled,’ said Keiichi Hayashi, ‘we are humbled by the power of nature.’ The Japanese ambassador to the UK was talking on Monday morning’s Today programme on Radio 4. ‘We are humbled,’ said Keiichi Hayashi, ‘we are humbled by the power of nature.’ The Japanese ambassador to the UK was talking on Monday morning’s
At more than 700 pages including appendices, Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (Faber & Faber, £17.99) certainly can’t be accused of skimping on the details. Adherence to the pun of the title has resulted in a thorough if necessarily left-wing history of political dissent since the Thirties,
The collapse of the Soviet Union spawned an entire genre of literature: the Gulag memoir, produced by victims of the USSR’s concentration camps. A few masterpieces were published in the West, or in samizdat, before the 1980s, for example Evgenia Ginzburg’s renowned Into the Whirlwind and the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.But as Soviet-style communism fell
The distinguished writer Brian Masters in his handsomely produced book on the actors of the Garrick Club has set himself a formidable task. Not only, until he reaches the mid-20th century, does he have to assess the art of long-dead actors from contemporary accounts; he is also writing a history of the theatrical profession from
The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the
The first thing to be said about this remarkable book is that it has nothing to do with animal rights. The title is borrowed from the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, who is known mainly for a single aphorism: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin borrowed this gnomic
In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and
The title of this first novel refers to a version of childhood as a magical kingdom where evil can be overturned and heaven and earth remade at the whim of a power-crazed infant. In fact our narrator’s world has already been darkened by the time she is presented by her beloved elder brother with the
Andrew Petrie has written the Bookend column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. At more than 700 pages including appendices, Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs certainly can’t be accused of skimping on the details. Adherence to the pun of the title
That, anyway, seems to be one of the things to come out of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Why Marx Was Right. It’s not published until May but Tyler Cowen reports that it contains these winning arguments: But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of
James Ellroy has been awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters by French Culture minister Frederic Mitterand. According Le Point, Mitterand venerated Ellroy as a ‘master of dark dreams and counter history, truly one of the great names of modern literature’. In turn, Ellroy paid homage to French literary culture, citing Stendhal, Proust, Camus,
An interesting case, the issue of Midsomer Murders and the producer (and creator) of the show, Brian True-May, who has been suspended for saying he deliberately kept ethnic minorities out of it to preserve its sense of “Englishness”. I wonder if the real reason he kept them out is that the point of the programme
Susan Hill once wrote that ‘a prize is a prize and when it is a lucrative and highly publicised prize, it matters a lot in the book world. Not many affect sales directly and hugely but one which now does is the Orange Prize for women writers.’ This year’s Orange Prize longlist has been released.
Foreign fiction gets a raw deal. It’s usually quarantined away in the dustier enclaves of the bookshop, along with all the other worthy but immovable fare: short story collections, regional poetry and non A-level drama. Perhaps buyers and sellers think that ‘non-UK stuff’ has been dealt with by that merrily inclusive idea of ‘world
A stunt on Spanish TV goes horribly wrong and ends in tragedy as the innocent party here bites off more than it can chew and perishes in short order. The snake makes the mistake of feasting upon one of Israeli model Orit Fox’s improbable breasts only to discover that where once lurked flesh there’s now
Strand magazine is to publish a recently discovered short story by Dashiell Hammett, ‘So I Shot Him’. ‘He gave us both Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles — so for a generation of readers, Dashiell Hammett more or less defined both “hard-boiled” and “suave.” Not bad, that. Now, from the long-deceased author of The
First, a note about naming. The artist here presented as Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532) was formerly known as Jan Mabuse, so designated after the Walloon town he came from — Maubeuge in Hainaut. First, a note about naming. The artist here presented as Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532) was formerly known as Jan Mabuse, so designated after the
