The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles and Reviews, by Diana Mitford, edited by Deborah Devonshire Nancy was the only one of the six Mitford sisters who, throughout her life, bitterly complained of the fact that she had not been sent to school. Her younger sister, Diana, on the other hand, dreaded the very thought of
This unassuming book is in fact a valuable addition to the Proust bibliography. The author, himself a painter, has had the apparently simple idea of extracting all references to works of art in the great novel in an attempt to demonstrate Proust’s knowledge of, and reliance on, paintings to give resonance to his characters and
Collections of Nothing, by William Davies King At the start of this memoir, the author, a college professor in California, describes a scene from his divorce. He walks into the garage of his former family house, and looks at his possessions, which his wife has put there. He sees the stuff you’d expect — the
If anyone should wince at a hint of aggression in the title of this book — and some Catholics might — let him or her remember or read Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), in which every Spaniard is a sallow coward, every priest a slinking prevaricator and every Protestant Englishman an apple-cheeked exemplar of straightforwardness
Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman It was the second or third time that I ever saw Kind Hearts and Coronets that I noticed in the opening credits: ‘Based on the novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman’. It prompted a ten-year search for the book in secondhand shops that finished in a dusty corner of a
‘Christmas without Ian,’ wrote my mother, ‘was a bleak affair. He was always there at Christmas.’ My mother was Ann Fleming and Ian the man the centennial of whose birth we have so markedly been celebrating this past year. There was another man who was always there at Christmas: Peter Quennell, of whom Paul Johnson
When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas by Justin Cartwright In 1920, at the age of 38, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father, Hermann, accusing him of ruining his life by his dictatorial and insensitive behaviour, which left him lacking in self-belief and unable to escape his father’s dominance.
A major new exhibiting space is always welcome in London, and the multi-purpose venue at Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1, comes with the added attractions of restaurants and concert halls. It’s a conference centre as well as the home of the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the new
Hänsel und Gretel Royal Opera House Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen Ardente Opera The Royal Opera’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, has two completely different casts and two conductors. For that matter, it has two producers, too, but they are both involved in the same production: Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, with their usual
Mother Goose Hackney Empire Hamlet Novello God, I hate the panto season. Especially the reviews. You get some cynical, steely-hearted, acid-flinging critic who takes his two-year-old kid to a Christmas show for the first time and the old bruiser’s heart melts, his brain mushes up and his review reads like the last paragraph of a
So what were we watching in 2008? The multiplication of television continues at speed. If you have cable TV you might have, say, 80 channels to choose from, most of them having nothing to offer you whatsoever. Some have almost no viewers. You could afford to advertise a missing cat on some of them, except
Hooray for anthocyanin. Where would we be without it? It has long been my favourite water-soluble, vacuolar, glucosidic pigment, and I feel that this autumn has justified my preference. True, chlorophyll is more important until then, being essential for photosynthesis, so we should all be in dead trouble without it; and the carotenoids, carotene and
Patrick Appel, standing in for Andrew while the Boss Man takes a break, has the audacity to nominate Terry Teachout for one of Mr Sullivan’s “Poseur Alert Nominee” awards. Yikes! What has the urbane Mr Teachout written to deserve such teasing? Why only this: “I know how it feels to see the design for the
A Countryman in Town: Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group Southampton City Art Gallery, until 14 December The Women’s Land Army — A Portrait St Barbe Museum, New Street, Lymington, until 10 January The recent Camden Town exhibition at the Tate was a useful reminder of the originality of one of the few significant
Dean Spanley U, Nationwide Dean Spanley is a family film and a sweet film and a kindly film with the most delicious cast (Peter O’Toole, Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, Judy Parfitt) but it is also a slow film — the first hour is almost unbearably uneventful — which could do with a bit of a
Riders to the Sea Coliseum Ascanio in Alba King’s Place Vaughan Williams’s short opera Riders to the Sea was to have been conducted by Richard Hickox, but in the sad event it was played as a tribute to him, and conducted by Edward Gardner. It had a kind of appropriateness, but my own abiding memory
In a Dark Dark House Almeida I Found My Horn Tristan Bates Maria Friedman: Re-Arranged Trafalgar Studios What, already? Another Neil LaBute play? Here we go again then. This time his close-knit group of eloquent and stylishly tormented yuppies (he doesn’t do other types) are haunted by the aftermath of a child abuse episode. As
Over the years I have met some unusual obstacles to my self-appointed task of spreading interest in unaccompanied singing around the globe. The main one is that music without instruments doesn’t have any ‘musicians’ in it and therefore cannot be taken seriously. Another is that church music which is not by Bach falls into a
If I had been given a monkey for every time someone had told me knowledgeably that Boris Johnson was a comical buffoon unfit for high office, I’d be able to open a very large ape house. It annoys me not just because it’s not true but also because of what it says about the stupidity
Last night, The Spectator and Barclays Wealth held a launch party for the online Spectator Book Club. We’ve uploaded photos of that event, which you can see here. Or click here to access the Book Club itself.
Wales, by Simon Jenkins Last year, having been to Scotland, I called on the mother of an old friend. Mrs Molly Jones of Carmarthen, I found to my great surprise, was very enthusiastic about Scotland. It was so unlike Wales, she said. All those castles . . . ‘But Mrs Jones, there are castles at
The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people
Timing is all. In 1969 Margaret Atwood’s An Edible Woman was published, and its iconic portrayal of women moulded into objects for male consumption caught the crest of the feminist wave and surfed into the shelves of required reading. Almost four decades on, Payback, her meditation on the nature of debt, appears just as the
Survivors of a Kind, by Brian Bond In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of the military memoirs of the first world war, bearing all the authority of a life- time’s work on the British Army. With some of the
You know you’re getting old when the people who made the TV programmes you liked as a kid start dying. So, farewell, Oliver Postgate, creator of Ivor the Engine and, of course, the immortal Bagpuss. I suppose those of us born in the mid-1970s (post-Clangers then) were the last for whom Postgate’s work was a
Saul Steinberg: Illuminations Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 15 February 2009 Cartoons & Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster The Wallace Collection, until 11 January 2009 Saul Steinberg (1914–99) was born in Romania and studied architecture in 1930s Milan. His first cartoons appeared in 1936 and he began to build a reputation, despite the threat of
My favourite programme last week was France on a Plate (BBC4, Sunday) in which Dr Andrew Hussey investigated the link between gastronomy and la gloire; French glory and destiny. He began with a recreation of François Mitterrand’s last meal, which climaxed with the illegal consumption of ortolans, an endangered songbird which is blinded then boiled
‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram. ‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram. ‘I know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope,
If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin
