The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Danish composer Per Norgard – whose death at the age of 92 was announced this morning – was a towering presence in European new music, and the shine-bright timbres and heady narrative drive of his eight symphonies posed crucial questions about what it meant to be a symphonist during the late 20th century. In 2000
I have counted the days. It is my 122nd eighteenth of November. I have come a long way from the seventeenth and I do not know whether I will ever see the nineteenth. But the eighteenth arrives again and again. This is life for Tara Selter, the protagonist of On the Calculation of Volume, a
The collector, art historian and critic Douglas Cooper (1911-84) relished conflict. He was a formidable man, loud in speech and dress, with forceful views and a taste for ridicule. He could also be very funny. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, who knew Cooper better than most, said it was as though an angel and a demon
In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North
Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or
In 1778, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, dramatist and author of the early science fiction novel L’an 2440, claimed that only a small minority of writers in ancien régime France lived by their pens: ‘One exclaims everywhere that the number of authors is enormous… But in fact, there are not more than 30 writers in France who make
Those who have read Madeleine Thien’s bestselling Do Not Say We Have Nothing will recognise The Book of Records as being the title of the manuscript at its heart – a dangerously dissenting history of China. In her latest novel, Thien uses the title to explore the future rather than the past – or so
There are three parties when it comes to global warming. First, the hard right, which says it isn’t happening, and even if it is that we can do nothing about it. Then there are the far leftish Luddites who would smash all power generation systems, allowing only wind turbines, wave power etc. Finally there are
In the early 1370s, Louis I of Anjou, the second son of the French king, commissioned a vast series of tapestries, now on display at the Château d’Angers, representing the Book of Revelation. In the middle of the narrative is a group of men on horseback wearing distinctively English armour; one wears pheasant feathers in
In 1995, Dame Muriel Spark, then one of Britain’s most distinguished living writers, was interviewed for a BBC documentary. During filming, the show’s editor commented that ‘her biographer must be the most depressed man in England’. Three years earlier, Spark had personally anointed Martin Stannard as the writer of what she intended to be the
British opera was born with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and then vanished for two-and-a-half centuries, apparently. Between the first performance of Dido in 1689 and the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945, serious British operas effectively didn’t exist – or so we’re told in textbooks and biographies. But what if there was a different
You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one
AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, but especially mine. There is absolutely no good reason for The Spectator to keep sending me to watch films with my wobbly biological eyes, not when they could just feed the latest releases into a computer, set the parameters to ‘contemptuous’, and watch a perfectly serviceable review assemble itself,
Richard Bean appears to be Hampstead Theatre’s in-house dramatist, and his new effort, House of Games, is based on a 1987 movie directed by David Mamet. The script sets up a rather laborious collision between two vastly different cultures. A gang of small-time crooks in Chicago are visited by a beautiful, high-flying, Harvard-educated academic who
Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and
The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if
I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it’s
Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.)
Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance:
To most people, the salient qualities of Gertrude Stein are unreadability combined with monumental self-belief. This is the woman who once remarked that ‘the Jews have produced only three original geniuses – Christ, Spinoza and myself’. Of the reading aloud of her works, Harold Acton complained: ‘It was difficult not to fall into a trance.’
Three years ago, when memories of the final series of HBO’s Game of Thrones were still fresh, Joanne Paul published The House of Dudley, a gripping account of three generations of the Dudley family, whose efforts to seize the crown from the Tudors, as I noted in these pages, made the machinations of the Lannisters
The translator’s preface to the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance informs us that ‘Several deadlines came and went on the way to this translation’. That is quite the understatement. The German edition of Peter Weiss’s 1,000-page historical novel appeared in 1975. A full English translation has been in the offing for more than
‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As
‘The first thing I did after waking up was grab his cock – stiff with sleep – and hold still, as if hanging on to a branch.’ The opening of Annie Ernaux’s essay might suggest that the ‘possession’ of the title is of a husband’s penis. But after our nameless protagonist leaves ‘W’, her husband
This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here. In our everyday spaces.’ Switching effortlessly and with relish between history, science and anecdote, the author selects ten
From a young age – ten perhaps – the author Dan Richards has had a strained relationship with night-time. Grappling with insomnia, he would take ‘the homeopathic approach to [his] waking nightmares’, rereading Moominland Midwinter despite its existential terrors. Even now, he writes, he finds it easier to sleep when he is not at home.
The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly
Ships change not just their location but their identity throughout their lives. Medieval trading vessels became warships at royal command. The Queen Mary was a troop ship during the second world war. Ian Kumekawa, of Harvard University, has had the clever idea of following a modern ship through its metamorphoses and asking how these changes
‘I am an Adina,’ the four-year-old protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland writes to her extraterrestrial superiors on Planet Cricket Rice, which is light years away from Earth. ‘Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass,’ she adds, using the fax machine her mother retrieved from their neighbour’s trash. ‘DESCRIBE BUNNIES,’ they respond, sparking a dialogue that