The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Noël Coward owned always that luck played a part in his astonishing career alongside his various talents as an actor, dramatist, composer, artist (he described his painting as ‘Touch and Gauguin’), film director and fiction-writer. At various times his reputation nosedived. After he catapulted to fame in his drama of society love affairs and drug-taking
How should ancient Roman history be written? Gibbon larded his account with ironic elegance. Echoing Tacitus’ epigrammatic sarcasm, he made ponderously light of the vanities and savagery of imperial rule. Yet the Latinate charm of his prose implied wry nostalgia, not only for the age of the Antonines, but also for the whole myth of
Until the 1760s British statesmen had two empires to manage. One exercised the public imagination and awoke patriotic dreams: the colonies in America and the West Indies. The public frequently wished the other away — the Holy Roman Empire. Britain had been dragged into the morass of European politics from 1714 with the accession of
The humorist Paul Jennings wrote for Punch when it was still funny — that is, up to and including the editorship of the late Alan Coren. The humorist Paul Jennings wrote for Punch when it was still funny — that is, up to and including the editorship of the late Alan Coren. Jennings also wrote
English cricket was in a desperate state seven years ago. The players had just been booed off the field after defeat at home by New Zealand. Team morale was poor, while there was little organisation and no vision. To the rescue came Duncan Fletcher, a little-known coach from Zimbabwe. He had few connections at the
I approached this book with some trepidation, fearing it would be a load of old bollocks. For my one previous experience of Ethiopian history had been the following sentence in my daughter’s GCSE textbook, when, describing their defeat of a modern Italian army in 1896, the author, Tony McAleavy, wrote, ‘The Ethiopians castrated the Italian
It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour – almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The
The slender book above was the last thing Roald Dahl ever wrote, and was published posthumously by the British Railways Board. It is something of a deathbed conversion. The author spends the whole of it telling children — whom he describes as ‘uncivilised little savages with bad habits and no manners’ — how to behave
Jack Shafer explains why journalists are so keen on writing about the Hollywood wrtiers’ strike and, more to the point, why we all root for the plucky scribblers in this fight. There’s a natural hack-to-hack sympathy here that might, one would imagine, infuriate teachers or postmen or miners or train drivers whose industrial action tends
For once the hype proved accurate. Black Watch, which closed its New York run yesterday, is every bit as good as the reviews, advertising and word of mouth had suggested. It goes to Sydney and Wellington next before returning to the US and Toronto next year (I think the next US venue is Norfolk, Virginia).
In the comments to this post on Bookmanship I’m delighted to see commenter Jim make excellent use of what one would term the Foreign Poet Gambit: Personally I’d swing for the fences with: “A shame to devote so much time and money to yet another translation of a writer who does not wholly merit his
Books Letters of Ted Hughes – ed. Christopher Reid/Faber Finally! Moving, passionate, angry, funny, striking, brilliant and beautiful beyond belief, the collected letters of one of our greatest poets have now taken pride of place on my bedside table, and may, I suspect, be a permanent addition to the pile. They are extraordinary. For too
Coming to a music store near you: Santo Subito!, the first ever papal music DVD. Featuring the late John Paul II, it is to be launched in Britain by Universal — better known for Amy Winehouse and the Sugababes — on 19 November. By Christmas, if the prayers of the PR people are answered, it
The relationship between a great artist and his sitters is a poignant one. But what they say to each other during the long periods of concentrated stillness, on the one hand, and frenzied search for a likeness, on the other, is seldom recorded. We do not know what Leonardo said to the Mona Lisa to
The autumn brings a fine crop of new exhibitions, some of them even full of ‘mellow fruitfulness’. I have been watching the development of Julian Perry’s work over the past ten years with considerable pleasure, but his new show is his best yet. Perry has an eye for the details of suburban living and recreation,
In August 1766, the printmakers of Augsburg brought a case of plagiarism against the Veneto publishers and printmakers Remondini. One of the witnesses they summoned was Giuseppe Fietta, an itinerant pedlar, who was then doing the rounds of Bavaria selling Remondini’s Santi, or prints of saints. They were very popular with country-folk, Fietta explained, because
‘Transformed into a lavish pleasure-dome in the heart of Birmingham this dazzling event, with a spectacular design from Vick’s regular collaborator, Paul Brown, will make the auditorium shimmer with all the opulence and decadence of celebrity excess. The timeless story of call-girl Violetta is one of passion, money, sex and death. Having clawed her way
Theatre: Lotte’s Journey, Cloud Nine, Joe Guy Beware of plays that open on trains trundling through Europe in the 1940s. You know where they’re heading. The strength of Candida Cave’s new work, Lotte’s Journey, is that it evades cliché by telling the passengers’ stories in reverse. In particular we focus on Charlotte Saloman, a brilliant
This film is described on the posters as ‘a powerful and gripping story that digs behind the news, the politics and a nation divided to explore the human consequences of a complicated war’. Should you encounter this poster and should you have a marker pen upon you, you may wish to add graffiti beneath: ‘You
Solo behind the Iron Curtain (Radio Four), International Radio Playwriting Competition (BBC World Service) ‘I was pretty sure I was being followed,’ he said in that unforgettably sleek drawl. We are in Prague at the height of the Cold War in 1968 and Robert Vaughn, aka Mr Napoleon Solo, is under surveillance. Cue blazing trumpets
Joe’s Palace (BBC1), A Room with a View (ITV), River Cottage: Gone Fishing (Channel 4) The word ‘dream’ has different meanings, as in the greetings card: ‘May all your dreams come true, except the one about the giant hairy spiders’. Martin Luther King never said, ‘Brothers and sisters, I have a dream, and in this
Oliver Sacks is a famed neurologist whose books of case studies combine the latest neuroscience with deep humanistic learning. He not only describes his patients with great precision, but also seeks to enter empathically into their experience and then, by means of limpid prose, to communicate it to the general reader. Ever since the publication
The fight to abolish slavery and its consequences is an immense subject so it’s not surprising that the Nigerian Simi Bedford’s new book could be likened to the kind of film once made famous by Cecil B De Mille with a cast of thousands and dramatic events at every turn. There are no quiet pages
It is oddly moving, at a time when mention of the name ‘Homer’ invariably conjures up thoughts of donuts, to know that the author of the Odyssey remains the first classical author to whom most children are introduced. At my daughters’ primary school, for instance, they are told the story of the Cyclops in Year
Olivia Cole ‘Make somebody up’ was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith’s short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children’s writing charity, 826 NYC, founded by Dave Eggers. While that might seem about as radical a command as telling screenwriters to use dialogue, the only rule being
I first went to Antarctica in the (Antarctic) summer of 1984 on board the John Biscoe, a research and supply ship belonging to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Over a period of several weeks we visited various BAS stations on the Antarctic peninsula, including a small station known as Faraday at which vital measurements of
‘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