The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Since the 1990s, a tartan tide has flooded the coasts of crime fiction, and it still shows no sign of ebbing in terms of either quality or quantity. Broken Skin (HarperCollins, £12.99) is Stuart MacBride’s third investigation set on the wilder shores of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. The novel opens as Logan’s
George Kennan: A Study in Character by John Lukacs George Kennan died on 17 March 2005, aged 100 plus one year, one month and one day. The last half of his life he had spent in semi-retirement at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, but for a few years, between 1946 and 1952, he had
Winnie and Wolf: A Novel by A.N. Wilson In her infamous five-hour ‘confession’ filmed by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg in 1975, Wagner’s English-born daughter-in-law Winifred talked openly and unashamedly about her close friendship with Hitler and his support for the Bayreuth Festival, which she personally managed throughout the Third Reich. When Syberberg confronts her with the rumours
The English House by Hermann Muthesius In 1896 Hermann Muthesius, a Prussian architect and civil servant in his mid-thirties, arrived in London to work as a cultural and technical attaché at the German embassy. His mission, apparently instigated by the Kaiser, was to study the domestic architecture of the United Kingdom, a subject that was
Tony Blair has engaged the same lawyer – Robert Barnett – that negotiated Bill and Hillary Clinton’s respective books deals. Blair is reported to be wanting as much as £8m for them (please lord, let his book be better than either Bill or Hillary’s). My mate James Forsyth asks readers to submit working titles for
This Tim Luckhurst piece for (who else?) The Guardian may be the dumbest thing even this professional contrarian has ever written. Apparently Elvis made “dull music for duller people” and “affection for Elvis is a workable predictor of anti-intellectual attitude”. Mr Luckhurst concludes that: The only credible claim that can be made on Elvis Presley’s
Stuart Reid suggests that if we really want to pay a fitting tribute to Elvis thirty years on from his untimely demise we should put up Lawdy Miss Clawdy. So here it is:
Any Coffehousers still hunting for a holiday read should pick up a copy of Alex James’s Bit of a Blur, which is keeping me company in Andalucía. For those who care, this is the second indispensable account of Nineties culture to appear (the first being John Harris’s The Last Party). For everyone else, this is
Readers with elephantine memories may recall a discussion on the merits of not-reading and on Oneupmanship. With regard to that latter cause, I present The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, reviewing the Library of America’s new and handsome edition of four Philip K Dick novels: While he served a fairly long apprenticeship—a series of almost unreadable
I do not know whether, as was so often claimed, Tony Wilson, who has died aged 57, was a genius. But, as music mogul, club entrepreneur, loudmouth and zealous Mancunian, he was certainly one of the most important and remorseless figures in British popular culture of the past 30 years. Immortalised by Steve Coogan’s performance
‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘You can’t have done, we were away when it came out,’ I said. ‘Well, it seems very
It was a bit surprising to find a programme marking the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Radio Two (Tuesday), not Radio Four. The stations are changing, morphing into each other as they seek ever more urgently to catch that elusive thing, a dedicated listener. Next we’ll find Terry Wogan putting
When the public ignores a playwright, it’s not because the public is wrong but because the playwright deserves to be ignored. Director Paul Miller and translator Clare Bayley have ‘rediscovered’ an obscure Swedish novelist, Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote one play (and it shows) and then stabbed herself in the throat. Set in Paris, The Enchantment
Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Early Adopters buy only the latest thing, they are up to the minute, maybe even up to the second, these crazed opinion-formers whose reckless compulsion to spend all their money on
‘I fear the opera will be banned — unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance — : only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, — I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ So Wagner famously wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, his muse while he was composing
Why do people spend their lives doing something which makes them nervous, even to the point of making them sick? I have watched musicians go on stage so frightened that it has been obvious to everyone present that they could not possibly be about to perform as well as they could. They look pale, they
If you are planning a holiday visit to Shakespeare country and fancy a change of mood and visual pace from the usual round of sightseeing and theatre-going, Compton Verney is a splendid alternative destination. Besides the remarkable permanent collections of paintings, Chinese bronzes and English folk art, there is a programme of changing exhibitions which
On 30 January 1999, not long after the Royal Academy had mounted its second Monet exhibition, The Spectator published my first exhibition review. It was about a renewal of Cubism in the sculpture of Ivor Abrahams and began as follows: ‘The end of a century, like a wedding, notoriously calls for something new. A millennium
God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britainby Rosemary Hill Pugin is not unknown in the way he was 50 years ago. Two major exhibitions in the 1990s, in New York and London, the formation of a flourishing Pugin Society and 3,000 people who one weekend last summer crowded in to see his highly
Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk man, champion of local individuality, anti-globaliser and explorer of the links between nature and culture. (Guess how many of these attributes he shared with this reviewer.) He founded Common Ground, the organisation that gave the
Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts
It would be easy to be mean about this book — so here goes. It purports to be David Mamet’s practical guide to movie-making and one of the points he makes repeatedly is that films shouldn’t have any fat on them. The film may, perhaps, be likened to a boxer. He is going to have
The appearance of this volume is an important publishing event. It is the first book in ten years from one of the outstanding historians of our age. Its brevity and unflamboyant presentation are deceptive. Those who have admired Norman Stone’s work in the past will not be disappointed — it is full of surprises and
There’s a theory, no doubt implausible and based on selective evidence, that alone among the peoples of Europe the English are somehow immune from those fits of mass hysteria which break out with murderous effect elsewhere. It must be nonsense, but it’s very easy to find instances in English history where what looks like the
‘Hello, Gavin. Have you got the sackbuts with you?’ Administrative magician Rebecca Rickard is dealing with what is, for her, a fairly ordinary sort of phone call in the greater scheme of things. As it turns out, Gavin (Henderson) has indeed got no fewer than three sackbuts, and is planning to bring them with him
If we must have frequent Impressionist exhibitions, and it’s clear from the public’s insatiable appetite for them that we must, then at least let’s have good ones. The current show at the Academy is a well-conceived and enjoyable expedition into a theme. All too often themed shows seem forced — the art selected to illustrate
According to an Hellenic historian, Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the 6th century BC to make his wife, who was from a mountainous region of Iran, feel at home. In fact, he and other rulers of Mesopotamia before him (the first such gardens were probably at Nineveh) were seeking to impress a
L’Amore dei tre Re; Macbeth Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre Re has had a puzzling history. It was first performed at La Scala in 1913 and was quite successful; far more successful under Toscanini at the New York Met, until after the second world war, and a fair number of performances elsewhere, often as a vehicle
A strange night at the Soho. Before curtain-up the place was crowded with people excitedly conversing with each other yet there was practically no noise. They were deaf. Signed conversation requires full and constant eye contact, which makes it more intense, intimate and animated than our conversation, and as I watched the deaf exchanging their