The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Jarvis Cocker on Writing and Publishing his Lyrics from FaberBooks on Vimeo. Faber&Faber’s excellent The Thought Fox blog carries an interview with Jarvis Cocker on how to write lyrics. The key, it seems, is to record the mundane, especially if it happens in Sheffield; although I suspect you need more than a pair of horn
As I came to the end of my English degree I applied to several universities for further study on Joseph Conrad, along with UEA for their creative writing programme. Owing to a misunderstanding with my tutor her reference arrived at East Anglia late and I was told my application would be deferred to the following
What a good idea. Faber have launched a Waste Land app. Among the numerous features is T.S. Eliot reading from The Waste Land. Listening to it, I was reminded of the opening lines of Four Quartets (Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future). There seems something fitting about Eliot’s patricianly
At the end of last month, the British Library signed a deal with Google to digitise 40 million pages from its collection. Today, Tristram Hunt has written a piece in the Guardian welcoming the change, but saying that, when it comes to history, it’s best to dirty your hands in an archive. He has set
Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, Hilary Spurling and AL Kennedy celebrate the life and work of Mervyn Peake, who was born 100 years ago next Saturday. Editor of the Times James Harding talks to his predecessor William Rhys Mogg about the latter’s memoirs (£). ‘What did you think of Ted Heath? “Well, I liked him, but
There are just 26 drawings and watercolours in the magnificent exhibition at Lowell Libson, but they are all of such quality and interest that the show is a feast of connoisseurship and visual delight. Selected by Libson and Christopher Baker from the National Gallery of Scotland, the range of work gives a distinct flavour of
Niru Ratnam tackles the thorny question of what constitutes British — or should that be English? — art In the past few months there have been two large-scale exhibitions showcasing British art. The first was the British Art Show at the Hayward Gallery; the second Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy. On show at
Been a while since the standard-bearer of the modern Bakersfield sound was featured here. Time to make amends for that prolonged absence. So here’s the man himself with a fine rendition of his lovely, mournful song I Sang Dixie. Pure class.
It was in his room in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1875 that Oscar Wilde said, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ Now, more than 130 years after he left Magdalen, with a double first in classics, the room has been decorated in his memory by Robert
Tristan und Isolde is one of the greatest challenges that an opera house can take on, in some ways the greatest of all. So it is wonderful to be able to report that at Grange Park it has been mounted with a large degree of success, and that most of the things that are wrong
Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to
According to a superstition shared by several Mediterranean countries, the frantic buzz of a fly trapped in a room spells the arrival of unpleasant news. I wonder whether the controversial and multitalented Catalan artist Sol Picó knows that, for in her 2009 El Llac de les Mosques (The Lake of the Flies) the annoying sound
Larry Crowne is horrible, just horrible, and I urge you to avoid it like the plague. It’s a ‘rom-com’ starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and if you thought you can’t go wrong with Hanks and Roberts, two of the greatest screen presences alive, here is proof that you can. This is stilted, lifeless, bears
‘To be speaking to you through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. ‘To be speaking to you through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. It means that once again I am officially a free person,’ says Aung San Suu Kyi at the beginning of the first of her Reith
Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of a camel train; dates in childhood were exotic. The mystery words Deglet Noor were as sweet to roll around the mouth as the fibrous fruit. But we learn from Dates – A Global History by
Sam Leith tracks the careers of Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating new characters through youthful exuberance to old age, dust and a literary afterlife It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns
I only ever heard my mother admit twice to fancying other men. One, remarkably, was Saddam Hussein, the other was Richard Burton, and of each she said, ‘He’s a good-looking old man.’ She said this the way only a Welsh Baptist matron could: grimly, and because she was secure in the knowledge that she was
If he is remembered at all, A.J. Cronin is known now for Dr Finlay’s Casebook, which ran for many years on both BBC television and radio, and today resonates with the glow of a gentler past — when a GP happily made house calls, delivered babies, and served as shaman, shrink and confessor to his
Gully Wells is a spirited and amusing writer, the daughter of the American journalist Dee Wells and the stepdaughter of the famous philosopher Freddie Ayer. While an undergraduate at Oxford she had an affair with Martin Amis and travelled to Italy with him, a trip fictionalised in his recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (conveniently out
River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. Redruth, the vessel
As someone who was born ‘the other side of the tracks’, I really wanted to like Owen Jones’s book, which sets out to expose how in recent years the working classes have become ‘objects of fear and ridicule’. It’s true; they have. The problem is, however, that he implores us to pity them rather than
The Catholic Monarchs — Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile — had five children together. The Catholic Monarchs — Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile — had five children together. Each child was married off to a promising European neighbour, thereby acting as a diplomatic tool in the Monarchs’
A biography of Ed Miliband has to try hard not to be the sort of thing one buys as a present for someone one avidly dislikes. This effort, the first in what its authors seem (perhaps optimistically) to imagine may be a long series of accounts of their subject’s life, does not try hard enough.
British poverty is normally a subject for comedy, rather than documentary. Scotland gave the world Rab C. Nesbitt with his string vest and indecipherable accent. Channel 4 had Shameless, the capers of a family ruled by drink and drugs. The BBC has now brought us the real thing: The Scheme (BBC1, Tuesday), a fly-on-the-wall portrayal
Fay Maschler has written the Bookends column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of a camel train; dates in childhood were exotic. The mystery words Deglet Noor were as sweet
As a pleasant distraction from a busy work schedule, I’ve been reading a recent collection of twenty essays (or are they short stories?) about death. Edited by David Shields and Bradford Murrow, The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death approaches that tall, dark stranger from a variety of perspectives. David Gates opens the series with a
The worth of long words in children’s books (the comments thread is the main bit). Academic criticism: still worth reading. A long view of librarianship. Words only used in exam answers. The aftermath of the great Oxford comma blogstorm. An American view of the questions English newspapers ask Alan Hollinghurst.
The Booktrust has cancelled the John Llewellyn Rhys prize this year because it is suffering a ‘lack of funds’. £13m was cut from the Booktrust’s annual grant from the Department of Education was cut earlier in the year and the organisation has been forced into retrenchment. Now, it is a pity that this widely respected
Book reviewers are, on the whole, a polite bunch, and rarely say what they really think. Instead they use a clever code, whereby “her most experimental novel yet” means “an utter mess”, “exhaustive and scholarly” = “I fell asleep”, “draws heavily on previous studies” = “the scoundrel has copied and pasted his entire book”, and