The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, British Museum, Sponsored by Morgan Stanley Here’s a show to pull in the public. More than 100,000 advance tickets already sold (Michelangelo’s drawings, though popular, sold only a fifth of that before it opened), and so much media coverage you scarcely need my review. Except, of course, that most
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. But not with Sir Elton John, who last week brought the Red Piano Show that has thrilled audiences at Caesar’s Palace for two years to London’s O2 Centre. While not yet etched in legend quite as deeply as Sinatra’s residency at the Sands, or Elvis’s performances at the
Theatre: Lone Star & Pvt. Wars, King’s Head; We The People, Globe; All About My Mother, Old Vic The King’s Head has a deserved hit on its hands with a James McLure double bill about soldiers haunted by Vietnam. Emasculation is the linking theme and the scripts dance nimbly between the opposing poles of pathos
3:10 to Yuma has everything you might want from a western apart from anything original or interesting, and as for Russell Crowe, he’s actually pretty crap. Obviously, I can’t say what the director, James Mangold (Walk the Line), who apparently fought hard to make this project, was thinking of. What shopping to get in on
British Youth Opera celebrates its 21st birthday season with its annual two productions at the Peacock Theatre: this year one is reasonably successful and one a triumph. The moderate success is The Magic Flute, in Jeremy Sams’s sharp translation. Flute is a work which students and young singers go for whenever possible (this is the
Catch ’em young makes sense if you’re selling a product, an organisation or a belief system. Catch ’em young makes sense if you’re selling a product, an organisation or a belief system. And the BBC has never lagged behind the commercial broadcasters and their advertisers in this regard. From its inception children’s programming was seen
Watching television as a critic is an artificial way of watching television. For the most part we see DVDs supplied by the television companies. We start and finish when we like. If the phone rings, we don’t groan and bark ‘yes?’ — we can press pause and settle down for a leisurely chat about our
V. S. Naipaul is one of the more striking figures of the great Indian literary diaspora. Yet he was not born in India and has never lived there. His family were originally impoverished high-caste peasants from the region of Gorakhpur. His grandfather migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant at the end of the 19th
Globalisation is not as new as we sometimes like to think. Within a mere five years of the publication in 1798 of Jenner’s tract about vaccination, Dr Francisco Xavier de Balmis set sail to the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) with a view to introducing vaccination there. Having done so successfully, he sailed on
The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The
In the original Decameron by Boccaccio (mid-14th century) ten characters get together and tell stories within a narrative framework. It is an immensely attractive idea for a writer and has been used periodically ever since, notably by Chaucer. This is the basis for Fay Weldon’s latest novel. However, it has an odd and unattractive contemporary
Was Agatha Christie a good writer? The American critic Edmund Wilson was one of the unhappy few who thought not. In 1944 he wrote a famous essay on Christie whose contentious (and contemptuous) tone can already be inferred from the rhetorical question which its title poses: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’. That title, in
Ursula’s story begins at dawn on the day her ex-husband is to marry his new love. Ursula lies awake, alone with her bitter thoughts, until a reporter rings seeking her reaction to the wedding. For Bill Osborne is no ordinary ex; he edits a national newspaper and hosts a popular television series, while his new
Lavinia Greenlaw’s clever riposte to the High Fidelity band of writers (a misogynistic group who believe that an obsession with pop and rock is strictly for boys) is a memoir that takes us back through her teenage years in the Seventies to the accompaniment of T. Rex and War’s ‘Me and My Baby Brother’. Music,
The eight short stories which form this collection began life in a multicultural magazine called Metro Eirann, which was set up in 2000 by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin. Roddy Doyle heard of the magazine, liked the idea, and offered his services. As he says, in his introduction: There’s a love story, a horror
‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ ‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson,
If you’re planning a visit to the cinema this weekend, I recommend you bypass the cold, albeit visually impressive, ‘Atonement’, in favour of Julie Delpy’s first effort as an actor, writer and director, ‘2 Days in Paris’. The premise is simple: a couple round off a tour Europe by spending two days with the girl’s
No words required, mes amis. Peter Martin’s commentary for Radio Clyde is almost as good as the goal itself.
My 12-year-old sister shouted, ‘Come and watch this TV programme, you’ll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.’ She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online
Henrietta Bredin has put together a series of events to celebrate the Royal Opera House’s Ring cycle It is with considerable trepidation that I venture to write about Richard Wagner in these pages, considering that in doing so I am following a trail well blazed by Bernard Levin — a passionate and lushly articulate devotee
Exhibitions: Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s ‘Adam and Eve’; Work, Rest & Play Amazingly, the Courtauld can claim to have mounted the first exhibition in England devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472–1553). He’s not an artist we know at all well here, though one or two images will be familiar from reproduction, probably elegant,
Where does Sibelius stand today? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been not very high. Today, 50 years after his death, I think it would be ‘on the up’ again, especially as we now know not just the symphonies and tone-poems but also the wonderful songs in performances by Karita Mattila, Soile Isokoski, Anne
I see Squeeze have reformed and are touring again. In fact, there don’t seem to be many bands who haven’t reformed and aren’t touring again. Out there on the road: that’s where the cash is. There seems to be a particular process here. 1. Band splits up in a spirit of mutual enmity and recrimination.
For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part
Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better
There has been such a lot of fuss and hype around this adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel — as if this is all anybody has ever been waiting for — that I did wonder if I had anything new or useful to say. But then I realised: 1) it’s never stopped me before and
Sorry, I’m in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn’t find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don’t mind I thought I’d just have a general grumble about the state of TV. First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one
Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true.
Alternative reading Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives by E. Annie Proulx E Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain: she has also won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the O. Henry Award and the Dos Passos Prize, and is thus one of the most lauded of all American