The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit,’ said Winston Churchill in a speech on foreign policy in Edinburgh in February 1950, thus coining a phrase for meetings of international leaders that has stuck, and indeed spawned further ones, such as ‘summitry’ and ‘summiteer’. Churchill’s hope
An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man
Eric Clapton lost his virginity to ‘a girl called Lucy who was older than me, and whose boyfriend was out of town’. Lucky chap, you immediately think, and indeed, he seems to have lived a charmed life, which he hasn’t enjoyed one bit. ‘Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon
Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French
Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1893, when the city was still a provincial Ottoman town. His family were grain merchants, Sephardic Jews who had been settled there for 400 years and still spoke Ladino at home. In concise, elegant prose, he describes in this memoir a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded
The Sloane is dead — but long live the Sloane. Her mother, Caroline, and father, Henry — the original Hooray — may be in their natural retirement homes in the Shires or Scotland along with the family dog snug by the Aga in the cosy kitchen, but she, we now know, using her native skills,
Despite its puzzlingly hideous appearance, this is an excellent book. Subtitled ‘Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century’, it consists of 18 chapters being, with one exception, the texts of lectures given by Professor Howard between 1991 and 2003. It is not easy to craft a good lecture that reads well on the page,
When Professor Braude, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Maryland, told colleagues about his interest in psychical research, he was shocked and astonished by their reactions. They were angry and scornful and accused him of pandering to unreason. It would be the ruin of his career, they threatened. What is wrong with these people?
It is odd to think that fatness — now known as obesity and apparently a serious problem — was not so long ago a subject for ribald hilarity. The disgraced clown Fatty Arbuckle was once considered funny simply because of his size. The fictional schoolboy Billy Bunter and his sister Bessie were icons of greedy
If George W. Bush goes down in history as the most disastrous US president since Herbert Hoover, it will be because of his foreign policy mistakes. Yet the person who tutored candidate Bush on foreign policy, co-ordinated it in his first term and was its public face in his second term is probably the most
Robert Adam is probably Britain’s most famous architect never to have built a house. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but it is certainly the case that the greater part of Adam’s professional output consisted of remodelling the internal architecture of existing buildings and creating interior decoration for houses already built by previous hands. When
When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for
Simon Barnes is chief sportswriter for the Times; wearing his other boots he is a fervent eco-warrior, a spell-binding preacher, a missionary. His book is broken into small descriptive sections and each contains a moment, an exaltation at a contact with ‘the wild’. These are perhaps best read in snatches, rather than as a continuum,
Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it. Given that he himself followed in Hammett’s footsteps, this was an understandable remark, aimed at what might already have been called the classic English detective novel. ‘Can’t read Christie,’ he told someone who had sent him a
I’ve had occasion to write about Not Reading Books before. As a public service I’ve also mentioned the importance of Oneupmanship. Today’s text, then, is the new and handsome translation of War and Peace. Clearly this is the kind of gift horse no self-respecting Lifeman looks in the mouth. Needless to say it is not
Act one, scene one The curtain opens on the offices of The Spectator magazine, London SW1, where a woman stands, stage left, staring at a telephone. A clock on the wall says 7.15. Something about the woman’s demeanour suggests it to be p.m. How long can she look at a phone? Just as the audience
The latest exhibition in the grim dungeon of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing actually looks rather splendid. After a slow start, this tribute to later Renaissance Siena blossoms forth — despite the dim lighting — into real magnificence. It brings together more than a hundred exhibits, mostly paintings and drawings, but including sculpture, ceramics and
Exhibitions 2: British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750–1950 This stunning, and constantly surprising, exhibition is the brainchild, or love child even, of the Flemish art historian Robert Hoozee, author of the first Constable catalogue raisonné and director of the Museum of Fine Art in Ghent. He regrets that ‘British art is still
Opera: Siegfried; Götterdämmerung, Royal Opera Siegfried is in some ways the most complex of the Ring dramas, showing us alternately, and then simultaneously, the old order recognising or/and resisting its need of replacement, and the new order beginning to emerge, but with no consciousness of what its purpose is — for Wagner much of the
Theatre: The Country Wife, Haymarket; Rent, Duke of York’s A rarity at the Haymarket. A new production of a straight play. Such is the despair over the creeping musicalisation of the West End that this feels less like a review and more like a life-and-death prognosis on a stricken prince whose wellbeing has become an
Vanity publishing is all the rage these days. Not long ago the idea of putting out something by yourself under an independent label, owned by yourself or one of your many dependents, was considered to be rather shoddy. There was really no replacement for winning a contract (important words) with one of the ‘majors’, whether
Already, the word is out that Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn’t up to much, and it isn’t. It may even be a dog’s dinner although, I should stress, not our dog’s dinner. Our dog, Woofie, likes sushi, which he eats tidily with chopsticks before cracking the top of his crème brûlée with a teaspoon. You’ve
With ever longer gaps between albums, it’s becoming difficult to identify which rock stars are just having a quick lie-down, and which are actually missing in action. Retirement: now that is a bold career move. There must be a few old rockers currently eyeing the example of Joni Mitchell, who retired very noisily some years
According to Tom Roden, one half of New Art Club’s dynamic duo, ‘audience participation is s**t’. I could not agree more, especially since public involvement has become the trite last resort many performance-makers turn to when short of ideas. Yet, if it is well handled, it can still work marvels, as the New Art Club’s
There’s an endless amount of ‘chat’ on radio and TV, but how much ‘conversation’? A recent book by an American, Stephen Miller, reminds us of the difference between them, and how much we have lost by our obsession with argument, obfuscation, self-revelation, or should I say self-deception. Conversation, argues Miller in his thought-provoking book on
Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday) was heavily flagged beforehand as a drama that was going to annoy a lot of people. Naturally, I assumed that one of those people would be me. It came in two parts, the first telling the story of Sohail, a young Bradford Muslim recruited by MI5, the
I don’t want to know too much about writers. The endless revelations about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have put me off their poetry. Nothing can shake my love of Keats’s Odes but I don’t have any desire to see his full medical records. Nor do I care to learn anything more about Byron’s club
He was a noisy boy from the start. At the age of two, he was taken out for walks in order not to disturb his ailing grandfather and he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming!’ Or sometimes, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’ Despite these precautions, his grandfather died and
Norah Lindsay had wit, beauty and a bohemian spirit. Diana Cooper described her dressing ‘mostly in tinsel and leopard skins and baroque pearls and emeralds’. At Sutton Courtenay, the house where she lived through the early years of her marriage to Harry Lindsay, she entertained non-stop. Raymond Asquith, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Maurice Baring and