The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Rivers of Blood (BBC2); Delia (BBC2); The Most Annoying Pop Moments … We Hate To Love (BBC3) It was a fine week for nostalgic people of a certain age, like me. Rivers of Blood (BBC2, Saturday) was an excellent, and not entirely unsympathetic, filleting of Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech. Historical events shuttle back and forth in our minds:
Has anyone else begun to suspect that The Archers’ scriptwriters have been taken off Prozac? Maybe it’s something to do with the recent bad publicity about the drug, or perhaps the Pebble Mill Health Trust has been given new guidelines on pill dispensation. Whatever the reason, harsh reality has taken over from ‘everyday life’ in
Some roles in domestic service truly capture the imagination and have supplied English literature with several of its most enduring figures. There are the manservants from Sam Weller to Jeeves. There are butlers, including the terrifying one who receives the news of Merdle’s death in Little Dorrit with such equanimity, Henry Green’s Raunce, and Kazuo
One of the glories of British public life is the way in which ancient institutions, if left unmolested by officious politicians, can evolve over centuries to become something quite different from their original function, but just as valid. This is certainly the case with the office of Lord Lieutenant. Originally created in Tudor times to
Any proof pleases me: if I could prove by logic that you would be dead in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but the sorrow would be very much mitigated by my pleasure in the proof. G. H. Hardy, one of the finest mathematicians of the 20th century and author
It would be hard to imagine a worse title for a book, or one more likely to unite the sceptics of every camp. For those poor souls who think the Cheltenham Festival has something to do with books the idea will be ludicrous, and for the rest of us whose year begins with the Melbourne
Some non-fiction books seem inevitable before they are even written. Dawkins on atheism, Hitchens on contrarianism, Ackroyd on London: with such works, the author is allied so closely to the subject that it is a question of when, not if, their full-length treatment of it will appear. Julian Barnes on death must fall into that
He who holds Rome, Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin in November 1943, ‘holds the title deeds to Italy’. Two months earlier, immediately after the armistice and the surrender of the Italian forces, the main Allied invasion force had landed at Salerno, just south of Naples, and were now fighting their way north. It was, as
The Chinese are coming — or, rather, they’ve come. China Design Now at the V&A is the latest arrival in the China Now Festival — a nationwide celebration of all things Chinese, leading up to the Olympic Games. It kicks off tomorrow – and runs until 13 July – but I was lucky enough to
I’m indebted to an old college buddy for alerting me to this description of David Irving’s recent appearance on Irish TV’s venerable The Late, Late Show. As the programme’s website put it (emphasis added): In 2006 David Irving was jailed for denying the holocaust ever happened. Despite being branded an anti-semitic, active holocaust denier in
Who else reckons that Mr Darling’s plodding budget could have used a lively soundtrack? Well, here’s my recommendation: Goody Two Shoes by Adam and the Ants. The lyrics pretty much sum up the whole sorry affair! “Put on a little makeup makeup Make sure they get your good side good side If the words unspoken
Perhaps it’s greed. Or is it greed laced with betrayal? Certainly it’s unseemly. As their careers draw to a close, British authors have developed a habit of stuffing their collected notebooks into a rucksack, hopping to America on Virgin and flogging their life’s jottings to the highest bidder. In 2006 Salman Rushdie accepted an undisclosed
Pompeo Batoni 1708–1787 National Gallery, until 18 May The first impression offered by the Batoni exhibition in the Sainsbury Wing is one of dullness. I tend to do a quick reconnaissance of any show before starting the serious work of looking in detail, in order to gauge its range and extent, and my initial response
Mrs Spencer had to spend five days in Paris during half-term observing ballet classes, so my son Edward and I tagged along too, on the strict understanding that watching dance lessons was absolutely not on the agenda as far as we were concerned. It came as a jolt to realise that my first visit to
Touring the more rural college campuses in the United States with Victoria’s Requiem is a very modern challenge. To be sure, the inmates of these Young People’s Homes have little experience of performers and performances which do not actively sell themselves, so I can imagine that the reality of 11 people standing more or less
Insane in the Brain Bounce, Peacock Theatre An upbeat, street-dance version of Romeo and Juliet, presented by Rumble, was one of the hottest tickets at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival. Some critics did dislike it as yet another example of modern-day cultural and artistic madness, but others welcomed its innovative approach to the creation of both
I first met Simon Briscoe when, as a young MP enjoying a summer evening by the House of Commons terrace bar, I observed a youth in a Refreshment Department staff uniform pelting a group of Thames ducks with dry roasted peanuts. ‘Could you sink one?’ I asked. ‘Thanks,’ he said: ‘a pint of lager and
I was astonished by the huge success of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin which I staggered through back in 1994. Many separate passages were colourfully and beguilingly written, but the book as a whole was confusing and over- written, as if the author couldn’t bear to stop. I haven’t read any others since, and
In the midst of a passage devoted to the transcendent qualities of Henry V — ‘a true hero [with] a strong claim to be rated the greatest of all English monarchs’ — Paul Johnson abruptly drops in an aside that begins: Once when I was giving a history lesson to the late Princess Diana, we
Although there have been many architectural books featuring the works of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan born architect, most notably a first monograph authored by David Robson a year before Bawa died in 2003, a second book, Beyond Bawa, also by Robson, is a biographical and artistic revelation. What is surprising and different about this
It is questionable whether psychiatry as a whole does, or has done throughout its history, more good than harm. Certainly there are some patients who benefit from its ministrations; but there are many others who have been harmed by the wrongful administration of noxious drugs or other therapies. A less tangible, but nevertheless potentially serious,
The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that
Megan finally gets to see The Pogues live and, happily, it’s worth the wait: Did I mention that for the actual last song, at the end of the second encore, Spider Stacy did his signature “bashing a beer tray against my head” percussion act? I mean, it really doesn’t get much better than that.
November I suggested that Hillary Clinton’s own autobiography provides no evidence to support her on-the-trail assertions that she was a foreign policy player during her husband’s administration: The book is not a policy manifesto of course. But even making that allowance it is striking how much of Hillary’s memoir is taken up with fluff –
If you haven’t seen Mad Men—the drama set in a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960—already, I’d thoroughly recommend watching it. (You can catch up on the first episode here.) It is the best drama that there has been on TV in quite a while. As James Delingpole says in the magazine this week, it
The Royal Ballet Royal Opera House It is a well-known fact that ballet lives, thrives and survives in a world of its own. By the time the ‘new’ ideas developed in other artistic contexts have seeped through its thick artistic, technical, cultural and social barriers, the other arts have already moved on. Luckily, such a
You have neat, slicked-back hair which never gets dandruff. You keep a pile of beautifully laundered white shirts stacked in your office drawer. You look great in your sharp suit and so does everyone else in theirs. The girls in the office are there to service your every need, and actually discuss with one another
Who would think that a battle as decisive as Marathon or Waterloo took place at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? Such is the question that Adam Zamoyski poses at the beginning of his account of the war between Lenin’s Soviet Russia and Pilsudski’s Catholic Poland, fought in the twilight between the first and
In one of the stories in this collection, a woman whose sister has died of anorexia remembers ‘an incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve’ when the little girls encountered a flasher: . . . it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At