The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
As budgets fall and standards slip, it’s inevitable that TV is going to get worse and worse and that the job of the TV critic in trying to shame the bosses into arresting this decline will become more important than ever. But this doesn’t make me feel happy. It just — like so many things
When I was a child of four or five my big sisters told me edifying stories about the rise of the British empire, which then occupied a quarter of the earth’s surface. A favourite villain was Tippoo Sahib, Sultan of Mysore, a ‘little monster’ who was son of a ‘big monster’, Hyder Ali. Tippoo was
Roger Scruton has called Les Orphelins by Louis Pauwels the best French novel since the 1939-45 war. Since it seems unlikely that even Professor Scruton has read all the good French novels of the last 60 years — after all, who among us has read all the good English or American ones? — this really
What is the point of this book? This isn’t a rhetorical question — and it isn’t meant to be a sneer. It’s one that needs answering. We have an extremely full biography of Kingsley Amis. We have an accomplished memoir by Martin Amis. Do we need either a joint critical study of these two unalike
There is growing unease at the contemporary proliferation and inflation of human rights. Not only do undeserving cases benefit from over-generous or quixotic judicial interpretations of Labour’s Human Rights Act, but there is a booming business in ascribing rights to groups. Peoples, nations, races, ethnic, cultural and religious groups are now perceived to have rights
‘Why have we come here? The Directory has deported us,’ grumbled the heat-stricken and exhausted soldiers of Napoleon’s Army of the Orient, having travelled for days across the desert to a spot just west of Cairo. There, at what would later be called the Battle of the Pyramids, they would face the forces of the
If you think that you or anyone else knows anything for certain about the universe, or stack of universes or whatever it is, you are probably wrong. I say probably because it is impossible in this world to be certain about anything. The firm ground of reality that progressive thinkers once expected to discover through
Liliane Lijn: Stardust Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London W1, until 5 July Liliane Lijn has always made ‘far-out’ sculpture, innovative, adventurous and aesthetically exhilarating. Her imagination fires on three cylinders: light, movement and the use of new and untried materials — untried, that’s to say, in art, though already in use for industrial or scientific
In 1888, visitors to Earls Court were treated to the novel sight of an exhibition of avant-garde art from Italy. The show was mounted by the Milanese Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, the art-dealer son of an impoverished Hungarian baron. A follower of the Paris art scene and a convert to the optical theories of Ogden
While the TV chiefs squirm with embarrassment, exposed for misleading the public in the phone-voting scandals, radio has had a brilliant week. Not just an announcement that 34.22 million listeners have been listening each week to BBC radio (let alone all the commercial radio stations, digital and online) but also endorsements from two people not
William Feaver explains how his book ‘Pitmen Painters’ inspired a new play at the National ‘It means knaaing what to de.’ This is Jimmy Floyd speaking, his Ashington accent spelt out, his words — more dialect than dialectic — written by Lee ‘Billy Elliot’ Hall. In Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, newly transferred from Live Theatre,
Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book V&A, until 29 June The partnership between the written word and the visual image has a long and distinguished history. Leaving aside the pictographic tradition and the fertile area of calligraphy, the first artists’ books must date from the modern period when artists began to grow ever
‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ an inquisitive adult asked during the break for tea at a tennis party given by my parents in the Vale of Clwyd, North Wales, c.1948. ‘A cotton broker,’ I replied, wishing to follow in the ancestral footsteps. Then my father’s head shook from side to
Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The
In the days when English counties were untouched by the dead hand of central government rationalisation, odd little chunks of them used to fetch up in neighbouring shires, appearing as little green or brown blobs, defiantly labelled ‘part of Leicestershire’ or ‘part of Somerset’. The Mediterranean sometimes seems like a larger version of this topographical
With more Poles in Britain than at any time since the second world war, when the 17,000 remnant of the Polish army arrived after the fall of France, this book could not be more pertinent. Nor could it have been written by anyone better. Douglas Hall (b. 1926) was the first Keeper (indeed the Alfred
Pete Hoskin on the Hollywood actor James Stewart, who was born 100 years ago The great director and critic François Truffaut once labelled James Stewart as one of those rare actors who could be ‘moving and amusing within the same scene’. Quite so. On the one hand, Stewart — angular, lanky, and awkward in action
It’s tough out there in the crazy world of pop. Two years ago The Feeling were the most played act on British radio. Their debut album, Twelve Stops and Home — almost certainly the only album in history to be named after a late-night Tube journey from Leicester Square to Bounds Green — sold 1.5
The Taming of the Shrew; The Merchant of Venice Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon While the RSC’s Histories sequence is rightly grabbing critical and popular acclaim in London, what’s left for visitors to Stratford over the summer? To The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice will shortly be added a revised revival of Gregory
Macbeth Opera North Punch and Judy Young Vic The Minotaur Covent Garden Don Giovanni English Touring Opera, Cambridge In a hectic and heterogeneous operatic week, three out of four of the things I saw were successful or even triumphant, so you couldn’t call it typical. Opera North’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth largely erased memories
I’m writing this on the May Day bank holiday, with birds singing outside, probably in terror as the cat Nelson is on the prowl, searching for some luckless fledgling to kill and devour on our doorstep. He will then roll on his back, wave his legs in the air and look cute, expecting to be
Who are the big intellectuals today? There are academics, to be sure, each with their speciality, and journalists, ditto. When something comes up the BBC will call on them to pontificate, to explain, but only on their speciality. Off their own piste they are no more valuable than a saloon-bar or dinner-party bore, eager to
Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and
Are there too many biographies? Thomas Carlyle thought so 150 years ago. ‘What is the use of it?’ he wrote growlingly. ‘Sticking like a woodlouse to an old bedpost and boring one more hole in it?’ He was then engaged in his 13-year task of writing the life of Frederick the Great, and spoke from
C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential
This sprightly book recounts the life of Idina Sackville, the author’s great-grandmother. A glamorous aristocrat with a penchant for scandal, she married and divorced five times and was a protagonist of the Happy Valley set, the coterie of dim and adulterous cocktail-swiggers who achieved notoriety in inter-war Kenya (pronounced Keenya). Idina was not beautiful —
To be a member of a good audience is exhilarating. The sounds that it makes around you are as much a part of the show as the sounds from the stage: the sound of alert anticipation before the curtain rises — the sound of silence — the sound of implications being understood — the sound
Richard Askwith is Associate Editor of the Independent and lives in a small Northamptonshire village; presumably he commutes. After a year’s absence abroad he returns to his village and finds that two loved neighbours have moved, eight houses (out of 94) have been sold, and five more have ‘For Sale’ notices outside them. The pub
Special to Souter-born, Phoenix-residing reader MG, here’s a photograph of Selkirk, taken from the hill above my parents’ house: