The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If book reviews in The Spectator were, God forbid, ‘starred’, this self-styled biography of James Bond would merit just two stars out of five. The rationale behind so mediocre a score, however, would not be, as you might expect, that Pearson’s book is a curate’s egg, good in parts. Rather, it would reflect the fact
Roy Foster’s new book has its origins in the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2004. This is a distinguished lecture series initiated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past with such high points as Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and
In my English school our hymns were mostly in Latin which, despite years of instruction, rendered them sufficiently opaque to be appropriate. What few hymns we sang in English seemed rather weepy, which didn’t appeal. Therefore, emerging from that place into a wider England, it was a surprise to discover there was a culture of
There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little
J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the
Michael Billington is the Val Doonican of theatre criticism. He’s been at it since the days of black and white telly and he shows no sign of giving up. Starting at the Times in 1965, he moved to the Guardian in 1971 and there he remains, rocking, crooning and warbling. He reckons he’s spent 8,000
John Watkins is Head of English Heritage’s Gardens and Landscape Team. Tom Wright was for 25 years Senior Lecturer in Landscape Management at Wye College. They are two professionals who have made an immense contribution to gardening in this country and abroad. This book makes available their combined lifetimes’ knowledge and experience. The authors begin
First published in 1836, this novella shows Alexander Pushkin’s mastery of almost any form. The following year — after a miraculously productive short period — he died in a duel over the alleged adultery of his wife with the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Evocative, swashbuckling, romantic and sentimental, The Captain’s Daughter centres on
Doris Lessing was last week awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Philip Hensher traces the career of ‘one of the greatest novelists in English’. Doris Lessing’s Nobel win came as a surprise to everyone, the author apparently included. Despite her enormous, decades-long international reputation, she was less fancied than dozens of patently smaller writers. That
John Cage was the composer of 4’33”, the piano performance piece that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence — except for the mutterings of the audience — and Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which 12 radios are played at the same time for several hours. He was also the inventor of
In Version 2.0 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a ‘preferred customer’ gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon. Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once
Any show that sets out to be definitive encourages brickbats and controversy. When Charles Baudelaire called in 1863 for a painter of modern life, he was seeking the kind of artist who would do justice to the realities of contemporary existence rather than escape them as was the habit of the French Salon painters of
Ever since he burst on the scene in the 1960s Michael Sandle RA has been the rogue elephant of British art. At Ludlow Castle, a perfect venue for work whose subject is war, both metaphorical and actual, his artistic power is irrefutable. This is a superb show. John Powis, who owns the castle, should be
There was a piece in the Telegraph last week claiming that nearly two thirds of people over the age of 50 are happier now than at any previous time in their lives. We know there are lies, damned lies and government surveys, and at first sight this seems to be one of the least persuasive
Dance: Transports Exceptionnels, Compagnie Beau Geste, Jubilee Gardens; Cast No Shadow, Sadler’s Wells Dance-making has come a long way since the days when a duet was the expected climatic bravura piece for principal dancers. Even before modern and post-modern challenges altered the traditional format of the classical pas de deux, 20th-century ballet-makers such as Mikhail
Theatre: Present Laughter, Lyttelton; Moonlight and Magnolias, Tricycle; Dealer’s Choice, Menier Perhaps it was all a joke. In 1939 Noël Coward wrote a play starring a vain, bullying, self-obsessed, misogynistic diva called Garry Essendine. Himself, that is, with his worst faults exaggerated. He duly took the role into the West End and everyone duly loved
Now, listen, and listen good, or I’ll come round and box your ears. Should anyone happen to say to you, ‘Shall we go see The Nanny Diaries tonight?’, you must answer, ‘No.’ There should be no need to embellish this. Just say ‘no’. It’s very simple. Practise it now. No, no, no, no, no. Should
As I sat contentedly watching the latest, and supposedly last, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute last week at the Coliseum, I wondered why, when something is as serviceable and as flexible as that, it need ever be retired and replaced by another — which, to judge from recent experiences, especially ones
There is no end to the programmes about the land we live in: we have had portraits of Britain, the Britain we built, the coast of Britain, and journeys around Britain. There seems no aspect of the country that’s not been covered. The Beeb must be desperate. How about Underground Britain, Around Britain on a
The only good thing about being stuck in crawling traffic at 9 a.m. on Monday morning was that it gave me the rare chance to tune in to Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on Radio Four, and even better to listen to it full-on instead of with my attention half-drawn to a weekend’s worth of
This is the latest in the long- running series of popular books that Steven Pinker, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard, has written about the human mind, particularly about the nature of thought and its relationship to language. Pinker is extremely interested not only in the nature of language, and the way in
Between 1997 and the passing of the Hunting with Dogs Act in 2004, parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting. Over 250,000 people took part in the Countryside March through London in 1998. Why such an apparently marginal issue, involving a tiny minority of rural troglodytes, should have mattered so much in the modern age of
One of the stories that haunted my childhood (I can’t remember where it came from) was the ancient conundrum of the mandarin, which I later found retold by Eça de Queiroz and Ursula K. Le Guin and goes like this: If you can get anything you want by pressing a bell and killing an unknown
Much of The Painter of Battles takes place in a crumbling watchtower on the Spanish coast, its silence broken only by the respectful commentary issuing from the daily tourist boat. Here on the circular wall of the tower a veteran war photographer, Faulques, is painting a gigantic mural on the theme of conflict through the
This is a book about drugs, drug addicts, and the people who try to help drug addicts — and the author, a prison doctor, thinks we’ve got it all wrong. For instance, most people think of heroin addiction as something like a terrible disease. We also tend to think that withdrawal from heroin is an
To the outside world, France has always seemed monolithic. The richest and most powerful of Europe’s nation-states until the 19th century, intellectually and artistically insular at most times, intensely nationalist throughout, the French have been fascinating neighbours but never easy ones. Yet until the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, few of its inhabitants felt truly
James Delingpole The American War of Independence is one of my least favourite periods and I expect it’s the same for a lot of Englishmen. For a start, the wrong side lost. Also, it’s fiendishly complicated, what with all the Whigs, Tories, Loyalists, Patriots, Frenchmen, Indians, Militia, Virginians, Marylanders, Light Bobs, Fusiliers and Continentals biffing
Adam Lang, until recently Prime Minister, is keen to write his memoirs as soon as possible. He employs for this task a hulking apparatchik who was part of his inner team at 10 Downing Street. He takes his wife Ruth, his secretarial staff and this ghost-writer to a luxurious house made available by a millionaire
As every biographer knows, all evidence is suspect. Probably the diary comes nearer to the truth than any other source: it is subjective and no doubt biased but a least it usually reflects what the author really thought at the time. Letters are second-best. They too are contemporary but they contain what the writer wanted