The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Sex and the City 15, Nationwide I do know that not everyone gets Sex and the City. Bubbles, for example, does not get Sex and the City. ‘I don’t know what you see in this crap,’ he would say, whenever I watched it on television, and before going off to do something pointedly manly in
This is a book from beyond the grave — the last that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, and though it is unfinished, there is no mistaking the sting in the tale. There was nothing the Regius Professor of History at Oxford enjoyed more during his lifetime than annoying the Scots. From time to time he would break
A few years ago a friend of mine, a writer, attended a conference with Kurt Vonnegut. During coffee breaks and intervals my friend would sneak outside with Mr Vonnegut, Vonnegut to smoke his famous unfiltered Pall Malls and my friend to smoke a couple of Marlboro Lights. ‘What was he like?’, I asked, as if
The Battle of Britain and the campaign by the French Resistance make ideal settings for fiction, since they are full of potential for conflict, romance, adventure, heroism and moral dilemmas. In this first novel, Patrick Bishop has exploited these rich possibilities to produce a gripping story. He has already proved himself a fine military historian,
Mirabel Cecil reviews Judith Mackrell’s biography of Lydia Lopokova . Judith Mackrell describes her subject as ‘a star whom the world almost forgot’. Lydia herself lamented, on the death of Pavlova, that ‘a dancer can leave nothing behind her. Music will not help us to see her again and to feel what she could give us, nor
When the planes flew into the Twin Towers many rushed to declare it the end of the end of history. But it was not. All the plans that emerged immediately afterwards about how to remake the Middle East were premised upon the assumption that history was at an end; that the world was moving inexorably
I’ve been meaning to rave about and recommend Gene Healy’s terrific book The Cult of the Presidency for some time. Now George Will saves me the trouble of doing so. His Newsweek column this week is a useful precis of Healy’s case. Will makes the obvious point that the expectation that the President be some
Robert Gore-Langton talks to an irreverent Dominic Dromgoole about the Globe A few months ago I was at a literary festival on a drama panel which featured a senior actress of the stage. She was holding forth about working with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford when I suggested that Shakespeare’s Globe was just as
Leon Kossoff: Unique Prints Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s St, London, N1, until 21 June Paintings of Stockport by Helen Clapcott Stockport Art Gallery, until 28 June Leon Kossoff (born 1926) is best known as a painter of people and buildings, rendered in thickly meshed paint surprisingly full of light. He trained at the
Royal Ballet: Double Bill Royal Opera House Theatre magic has a lot to do with the unpredictability of the performed event. Regardless of the alluring promise of an all-star cast or the doubts raised by daring artistic choices, there is no certain way to forecast what any live performance will be like. Indeed, it is
The Deep Blue Sea Vaudeville The Birthday Party Lyric Hammersmith Pygmalion Old Vic Osborne crushed Rattigan. Crudely stated, that’s what we’re told happened in 1956 when Osborne’s demotic new voice displaced Rattigan’s classier, cosier manner. Even now Rattigan’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered and The Deep Blue Sea, which premièred in 1952, is the first of
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 12A, Nationwide After a 19-year break, Indiana Jones, the world’s greatest adventurer and probably the world’s worst ever archaeologist — listen, even I know you can’t go around ripping open ancient mummies whenever you so fancy — is back. He is back because he has to
I used to have one of Alan Sugar’s old Amstrad computers; in fact I wrote two books on it. The great advantage it had over modern computers was its slowness; you could literally make a cup of tea while it saved a page of text, and prepare a three-course meal while it saved a chapter.
The press launch of the Sex and the City film in the Plaza in New York a few weeks ago took the form of a junket very like the one Hugh Grant blunders into in Notting Hill, made surreal by the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was ill and cancelled her whole first day of
Anyone who has been stuffed down a foxhole at a young age to pull out a hound, and has come back out attached to a hound attached to a fox attached to a badger, deserves to be read. Is it any wonder townies do not understand country folk you ask yourself as you read this
Cecil Rhodes hoped that the scholarships established through his will, would, by creating educational ties between the Empire and the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘render war impossible’. The scholars, he insisted, should not be weedy bookworms, but manly, robust types, Plato’s guardians, a society of the elect. The 20th century has not been kind to such ideals;
There are now two full columns of entries on the ‘Also by Doris Lessing’ page — 58 separate books. Along with work of an entirely fantastical, invented variety there is a good body of her work which shades off, in calibrated degrees, from the realist and directly observed novel, towards the autobiographical fiction, and into
The commentariat has at last realised that in practice, if not in theory, the Labour Party believes in the hereditary principle. This is a phenomenon that those of us who, for one reason or another, have innate antennae for such things have long recognised. Homo sapiens in settled societies is more likely to follow anthropology
This is a meretricious, puzzling and deeply unsatisfactory book and I resent every one of the 12 hours I spent plodding through it on a Sunday. Cherie’s publishers call her ‘insightful’ and ‘funny’, which she ain’t, and they bill the book as the inspiring tale of a clever, indomitable, feminist woman with a fierce sense
Tosca Royal Opera House Idomeneo Barbican Carmen Bernie Grant Arts Centre The latest revival of Tosca at the Royal Opera, with many changes in production by Stephen Barlow, shows signs of taking the work seriously, though they are contradicted by the corporate- and bar-friendly intervals, of a length to dissipate tension and momentum. Antonio Pappano’s
You can almost hear the whispering through the ether. A whole weekend devoted to Chopin? Whatever was Roger Wright, Radio Three’s controller, thinking of? The Polish-born composer was only 39 when he died of TB in 1849. And he only ever really wrote for the piano. Surely there’s not enough music to fill 24 hours,
This book is so important that I hope the publishers have the civic spirit to send a copy to every parliamentarian, decision-maker and opinion-former in the land. For Philip Bobbitt, the legal and constitutional historian best known for The Shield of Achilles, has drawn nothing less than a philosophical route-map for the war on terror
‘Might it amuse you to see (and perhaps even buy) Gibbon’s spectacles?’ John Saumarez Smith made Bevis Hillier a once-in-a-lifetime offer. It was 1976 and Hillier dithered. He neither saw nor bought Gibbon’s spectacles, but he did make a Saturday column out of it for the Times — characterising Saumarez Smith as ‘perhaps the most
The latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event – a conversation with the great American novelist, essayist and playwright Gore Vidal – is under way. To listen to live audio of the event click here.
More polling! This time it’s Setting the Woods on Fire who wants you to list your ten favourite country music artists. My off-the-top-of-my-head list, then, is: 1. Gram Parsons2. Waylon Jennings3. Townes van Zandt4. Johnny Cash5. Emmylou Harris 6. Hank Williams Sr 7. Dwight Yoakam8. Gillian Welch9. Lyle Lovett10. Merle Haggard Make your vote count
Martin Gayford questions the point of art shows. Should they educate or give pleasure — or both? Towards the end of June, 1814, Maria Bicknell, the wife-to-be of the painter John Constable, went to an exhibition at the British Institute on Pall Mall. It was the second retrospective exhibition ever held in London. The first,
Caramel PG, Key cities Caramel is a lovely and engaging film and just what we all need right now. You may well ask: how do I know what you need? Have I canvassed your friends? Your family? Of course. And what they all say is: yes, this is just the sort of film you need
King Lear Globe That Face Duke of York’s Beau Jest Hackney Empire Every time I see Lear I discover something old. It must be at least two centuries since somebody first noticed that one of the many factors that make this titanic play unplayable is that the great speeches are delivered by a bearded geriatric
Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House There was a time when dancers were very often given the means to gain a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be interpreting on stage — the well-known story of Ninette de Valois taking her artists to see William Hogarth’s paintings while creating The Rake’s Progress