Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Lloyd Evans

Relative values

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The Family Reunion Donmar Chicken Hackney Empire August: Osage County Lyttelton T.S. Eliot was in his fifties when he turned to the theatre. What’s amazing about his 1939 play, The Family Reunion, is its experimental verve and nonchalant risk-loving energies. Harry, a country squire, returns from eight years abroad to take possession of his estate.

New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last

Features

A Sondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd,

The view from the middle lane

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The Hugo Young Papers: Thirty Years of British Politics — Off the Record, by Hugo Young, edited by Ion Trewin The late Hugo Young was the political columnist of the chattering classes. This book, rather more grandly, describes him as the ‘the Pope of the liberal left’. A lifelong Cath- olic, educated by Ampleforth monks

Living the legend

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My Judy Garland Life, by Susie Boyt The story of Judy Garland is a magnificent example of the truth that life imitates art. Things would surely have been different had she stuck to being Frances Ethel Gumm of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. As it was, the trajectory of her life under the stage name she assumed

Saints and sinners

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With the publication of their Christmas cookery books, Nigella, Jamie, Delia and Gordon all have a brand image, or a halo, to polish. Nigella’s brand is greedy, kitsch, sexy and celebratory, and in Nigella Christmas (Chatto & Windus, £25) she has found her perfect subject. The book is fun, but it is also very thorough:

A rose-tinted view of the bay

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The Ancient Shore, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller Variety of impression, diversity of atmosphere and mood, incongruities of many kinds, these are only to be expected in books on travel, and perhaps particularly in one concerning Naples. But The Ancient Shore is by two hands, and there is a radical difference in style and

Humph swings

Last Chorus: An Autobiographical Medley, by Humphrey Lyttleton ‘Old Etonian ex-Guards Officer jazz trumpeter’. That was the way tabloid gossip columnists used to describe Humphrey Lyttelton (1921-2008) in the early years of his fame. Not long after he was released from the Grenadiers at the end of the second world war, he hyphenated his identity

Surprising literary ventures | 3 December 2008

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‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’ Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is

Out of the ordinary

Arts feature

Carolyn Bartholomew talks to Tilda Swinton, an actor who has made a career out of being unconventional Tilda Swinton is undoubtedly one of the great artists of her generation, although it is only relatively recently that she has become more conspicuous with mainstream films such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Michael Clayton (for which

Sting in its tale

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Changeling 15, Nationwide Changeling, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a most melodramatic melodrama starring Angelina Jolie and her totally amazing, bee-stung lips. (I was stung by a bee once, but on the eyelid; it didn’t look so great.) Anyway, based on a true story, it’s set in Los Angeles in 1928 and is

Enchanted forest

Music

Hänsel und Gretel Royal Academy of Music Jenufa Birmingham Hippodrome Pelléas et Mélisande Sadler’s Wells Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel loses none of its charm with repeated viewings, a good thing since there are plenty of productions of it around this year in the UK, the latest being at the Royal Academy of Music. I saw

James Delingpole

Apocalypse now

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The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after? Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just

Global warning | 29 November 2008

Any other business

Because of the economic crisis, I was waiting at the bus station: £2.80 for a bus instead of £28 for a taxi home. I had 50 minutes to wait and was reading a book by Richard Yates. I was wondering why the literature of so optimistic a country as America was so deeply pessimistic (awareness

How to write a wrong

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‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’ ‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that

Lloyd Evans

The fall guy

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Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. The fourth centenary of John Milton, which falls on

Lloyd Evans

Lost treasure

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  Duality, yin and yang, twin-tub theatre. Call it what you like, a Christmas show must straddle the generations and please both kids and adults at once. Casting Keith Allen as Long John Silver in Treasure Island was clearly intended to achieve this double-barrel effect. To kids he’s Lilly Allen’s dad while adults know him

Life lessons

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Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald

Forgotten wonders

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Byzantium 330-1454 Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009 In his excellent book Portrait Painters, written more than half-a-century ago but still full of wisdom and stimulating observations, Allan Gwynne-Jones includes a note on the character of English art. He has been discussing the great glories of the medieval school of manuscript illumination in Britain, often

Stars bright and dim

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Much great American writing is regional in a way that British or French writing never has been. Most of the best writing coming from the States inhabits a place which apparently feels no pressure from the great metropolitan centres — Annie Proulx on the Texas panhandle, Cormac McCarthy on the Mexican border territories, Jane Smiley

The spice of danger

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From the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written

Gruff Justice

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James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? by James Hogg, with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson ‘You — what’s the bleeding time?’ Sir Lancelot Spratt, consultant surgeon at St Swithin’s, barks at Dirk Bogarde’s trainee doctor. ‘Ten past ten, sir’ is the sheepish answer. Another cherishable exchange in the long-running series of medical comedies sees

Chalk and cheese

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The British in France: Visitors and Residents since the Revolution, by Peter Thorold Peter Thorold has not written an orthodox history of French and British political cultural and social relations. He sees them through the eyes of Britons who settled in France or tourists who trod its soil for a brief holiday. French aristocrats who

Highs and lows on the laughometer

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Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw

Not just Hitler

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The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, by Richard L. Evans Any historian attempting a survey of Nazi Germany during the second world war confronts formidable challenges. First, the available literature is so huge that it almost defies synthesis in a single volume, however substantial. Second, the author needs to avoid writing yet another Hitler biography.

Deadlier than the male

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When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s

The power of the evasive word

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The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe De mortuis nil nisi bonum, or so it used to be said. That was then. Now, since the late Hugh Montgomery- Massingbird became obituaries editor of the Telegraph, James Fergusson of the Independent, and Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe of the Economist, all has