The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
How do you write an autobiography without referring to almost anyone else in your life? In The Pattern in the Carpet, Margaret Drabble has done just that, using her interest in jigsaw puzzles to create a ‘hybrid’ book, part memoir, part history. The device allows Drabble to reveal more about herself than any exposé or
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian London. It is clearly the monument of someone both eccentric and egocentric. What saves it from being Hearst Castle, Liberace’s palace or Michael Jackson’s Neverland,
Khomeini’s Ghost, by Con Coughlin The Life and Death of the Shah, by Gholam Reza Afkhami The fall of the Shah of Iran at the beginning of 1979 took the world by surprise. A self-confident autocrat, supported by a large, American trained and equipped army and a ubiquitous and powerful security service, he was driven
A friend who belongs to an old-fashioned London club tells me that all anecdotes related within its walls are met with one of only three accepted responses: Great Fun, Rather Fun and Shame. Stanley I Presume is rather fun. It would have been great fun if the author was less discreet and less loyal and
‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. If the promoters of the e-book have their way, personal libraries of the future will consist of intricate cyber-memories holding thousands of volumes conjured up at the touch of a finger, while the reader, bounded in
‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. As Fellow and then Warden of Wadham College from 1922 to 1970 and successively Professor of Poetry, Vice Chancellor of the University and President of the British Academy, this short, powerfully built, unbeautiful, but magnetic man
The super-talented Lisa Hannigan and her band gather in Dick Mac’s pub in Dingle, Co Kerry for a charming wee session that is just the ticket for a lovely spring weekend…
‘Having every best seat in the house’ is how some describe seeing opera live on screen, and recently we’ve had the opportunity of seeing the nuts and bolts backstage, too. It was a bold initiative of English National Opera and Sky Arts to take the cameras behind the scenes on the first night of Jonathan
Kuniyoshi From the Arthur R. Miller Collection Royal Academy, until 7 June Sponsored by Canon The Royal Academy is making something of a reputation for staging exhibitions of Japanese printmakers: the current Kuniyoshi show follows on neatly from Hokusai (1991–2) and Hiroshige (1997) and adds considerably to our understanding of the genre. There hasn’t been
Dido, Queen of Carthage Cottesloe The Overcoat Lyric Hammersmith Simple plays can be the hardest to get right. James Macdonald has made a dogged assault on the earliest work of Christopher Marlowe. The story is lifted wholesale from Virgil. After Troy’s fall Aeneas arrives in Carthage where Dido promptly falls in love with him. When
Die Feen Châtelet, Paris Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth Bloomsbury Theatre Wagner wrote his first opera Die Feen (The Fairies) when he was 19 and 20. It was never staged or performed at all in his lifetime, and first performed in Munich in 1888, Richard Strauss having conducted the rehearsals. It was a big success, but has
Swan Lake American Ballet Theatre, London Coliseum A complex, somewhat troubled history has turned Swan Lake into the most manipulated ballet ever. The lack of strict historical constraints has frequently led ballet directors, repetiteurs and choreographers to feel more or less free to intervene in the text, often twisting its narrative and altering the traditional,
‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. ‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. Obviously I have completely blanked out who it was, but I do know she was talking out
Since the demise of Socrates in 399 BC, killed by the hemlock he was forced to drink on sentence from the state for corrupting the minds of Athenian teenagers, the Good Death has been deemed possible. According to Plato, his pupil, Socrates died with his senses intact, surrounded by those he loved and who loved
Television often throws up unpleasant images to surprise you, like finding an earwig in the sugar. The BBC has got the transmission rights for Formula One motor racing, and they were lucky in that the Australian Grand Prix (BBC1, Sunday), which opened the new season, proved a very exciting race, and was won by a
I tested the old Freelander when it first came out, taking it up the M6 into the Shropshire hills and returning with backache. That apart, I thought it a good car in four-door form, as did plenty of others — it became Europe’s best-selling smallish 4×4. But I and they were wrong: a component that
Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, by Claire Harman What does Mr Darcy look like? Anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice will be able to give an answer. I believe that he is tall, square-jawed, beetle-browed, slightly weather-beaten and dark-haired. Is any of that at all controversial? But on returning to the
Geoff Dyer is the least categorisable of writers. Give him a genre and he’ll bend it; pigeonhole him and he’ll break out. Clever, funny, an intellectual with a resolutely bloke-ish stance; irreverent and incorrigibly subversive, this is the man who set off to write a study of D. H. Lawrence and came up with Out
If the past is a foreign country, who governs it? Who has the right, particularly in dealing with his parents and siblings, to patent very private memories, and sell them to the public? These are questions that generally nag at the readers of family memoirs, and it is a measure of the quality of The
Privately printed books are now all too often castigated as ‘vanity publishing.’ But at a time when publishers pay vast advances for the ghosted memoirs of people ‘celebrated’ for kicking balls around or howling into microphones but refuse to take a minuscule financial risk on one as elegantly written and entertaining as this one, that
By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations. By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours
Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Nevertheless, writing of the relationship between the two young men who share most of the narrative in Redgauntlet, Professor David Hewitt, editor of the splendid
I can’t stay silent on the issue of Nick Cohen’s intervention at the Orwell Prize shotlisting event earlier this week. But I can’t really say too much either as Nick, in an act of over-extravagant loyalty, claimed it was a travesty that I had not made it from the longlist to the shortlist. I have
Andrew Lambirth talks to Paula Rego about the new museum dedicated to her and the politics behind her work Paula Rego is an artist working at the height of her powers, internationally celebrated and with a museum dedicated to her about to open in her native Portugal. It’s been a long climb to this pinnacle
Richard Strauss died 60 years ago this year. Not only is he one of my top ten favourite composers, he is also the one I would most like to be cast away with on an island so that I could pluck out the heart of his mystery. His subtleties are infinite, especially his constant, minute
Mary Wakefield meets the successful pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, and finds them eloquent critics of New Labour, staunch defenders of civil liberties — and fans of Vince Cable Through the woods, the trees And further on the sea We lived in the shadow of the war Sand in the sandwiches Wasps in the
Van Gogh and the Colours of the Night Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam until 7 June Remembering his former teacher Vincent van Gogh, the painter Anton Kerssemakers described a walk one evening in 1884 from Nuenen to Eindhoven when Vincent suddenly stopped before the sunset, framed it in his hands and, half closing his eyes, cried
When some 700 people throng the auditorium at Earl’s Court to hear a debate about whether eco houses are ugly, then a frustrated tree-hugger like myself may feel that we are halfway to heaven, not that I plan to share my Elysium with Germaine Greer in ranting mode if I can avoid it. When some
Verdi’s Requiem Royal Opera House Carmen Sadler’s Wells Every time there’s a performance of Verdi’s Requiem the issue of whether it is a liturgical or theatrical work gets solemnly discussed, as if it couldn’t be both. If you take the Creator to be the figure described or invoked in the Bible, then He clearly has