The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Hubris is followed by nemesis, and the idea that the English-speaking peoples (that is, those who speak English as their native language) exert an economic, political, moral and cultural hegemony in the world strikes me as distinctly hubristic. Whether it is true, or if true desirable, is another question. Andrew Roberts’ history is rather old-fashioned,
In more than half a century of television viewing nothing has haunted me so much as what was transmitted on the evening of 15 April 1984. ‘Thanks, love,’ said Tommy Cooper, in mid-turn, to the dancer who had fastened his cloak. Then he clutched his chest and, as if in slow motion, collapsed on to
In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough
With almost 30 novels to his name, Graham Greene was a prolific chronicler of human faith and wretchedness. A writer of his stature requires a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Greene had found him in Norman Sherry, a Joseph Conrad expert based in Texas. Sherry set to work in 1976,
Another biography of Thomas Hardy, and, it seems a good one, by Claire Tomalin. But what is it about Hardy that so attracts biographers? There have been a good few of them, even in the last quarter century. Indeed Hardy (‘little Tommy Hardy’, as Henry James unkindly and not very sensibly called him) has survived
‘It’s a potential social menace of the first magnitude,’ declared John Reith, founding father of the BBC, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967. He was horrified by the way that his single broadcasting station, set up in 1922 by a group of techie engineers who were looking for ways to market their newly
Right, here is a quiz for you. As I have said, again and again, I’m fed up with doing everything around here and, as no one at The Spectator has offered to help in any way at all, I think it’s only fair that you, the readers, do some of the work. Ready? Let’s go,
‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case. Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in
It is a tribute to various things, primarily to Janacek’s genius, that the new production of Jenufa by ENO is a triumph, an overwhelming experience, despite having some fundamental weaknesses. It is of the essence of the work that it takes place in a tightly knit, highly structured and small community, and that there is
The word ‘flâneur’ — from the French ‘flâner’, to stroll — is enjoying a comeback among a new generation of artists attracted to the idea that art is more about looking than doing. It was Baudelaire who first used it to describe the modern artist with his finger on the urban pulse — a ‘botanist
‘Hello, anybody here?’ The gate into Antony Gormley’s studio had slid mysteriously open as I approached, but there was no one behind it — just a courtyard, a row of trees and two metal figures. ‘Hello, hello?’ I walked across the yard up to a vast warehouse, and peered in through the double doors. Still
What do you find at the world’s great antiques fairs these days? The answer, increasingly, is modern and contemporary art. Few will lament the disappearance of doleful, second-rate period furniture in favour of Art Deco and post-war design, or the introduction of major international art galleries offering the work of 20th-century masters. But as growing
There was a time when Chinese artists walked on eggshells for fear of offending the old men of power in Beijing. Now here, in the China Pavilion that is part of the Liverpool Biennale Fringe (until 26 November), one artist, Weng Peijun (pronounced Weng Fen), is building installations from eggshells. His satirical work ‘The Triumphal
Roger Hilton (1911–75) is one of our greatest abstract painters, an artist associated with the St Ives School (he lived in Cornwall for the last 10 years of his life, and visited regularly for a decade before that) whose work overleaps constraining categories. Abstract yes, but also profoundly figurative — he was one of the
I know that just now people are queuing up to propose new policies to the leader of the opposition — wind turbines, green taxes and what not — but even so I have a modest proposal for the David Cameron reform agenda. Now that he has encouraged the hugging of hoodies and smiled on single-sex
It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s famous opening is used by Gilda O’Neill as an epigraph to her delightful foray through 19th-century murder and mayhem, but in truth, as she shows in The Good Old Days, the past is our native country. Things were not different then:
According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes
The second volume of this superb biography opens in 1939, as William Empson returns to London after two years of high adventure and real privation in a China up against Japanese invasion. Resolved to do his bit against Hitler, he drops poetry and literary criticism to join the BBC’s propaganda operation, where he put his
It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good
‘Suspicion is a shifting shade,’ Mark tells the police lieutenant who’s questioning him, and no one appreciates the tensions of suspicion better than Thomas H. Cook. Cook remains relatively unknown, though he’s garnered numerous crime-writing awards, including an Edgar for The Chatham School Affair. Places in the Dark and last year’s Red Leaves rank among
If you had a friend who was an actress, and she was on the brink of a nervous collapse, what would you do to cheer her up? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? I bet you wouldn’t take her to New York to visit a mutual friend, another actress, who was starring on Broadway —
Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the
Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989) by Jimmy Stewart The most intriguing thing about this book is its title. Ernest Hemingway and His Novel by Ernest Hemingway would not work. Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield wouldn’t either. Poems by Jimmy Stewart would be ridiculous, as if he were pretending to be
For the scales at which we live — the buildings we inhabit, the vehicles we drive, the sports we play — classical physics is a useful, highly accurate and reassuringly comprehensible system. But at scales we never personally encounter, at immense velocities, infinitesimal sizes or cosmic distances, things are not so simple. In these worlds,
In a taped diary entry for April 2003, David Blunkett describes a terrible dream: ‘a dream that had all the undertones of being on the outside, of being alienated, of being given the cold shoulder, of being friendless and leaning on a stick, having fallen out with Tony Blair and then having challenged him in
It’s difficult to believe that the golden boy of British art — as David Hockney remained for so many years — now has more than half a century of work behind him, or that he will celebrate his 70th birthday next summer. His technical versatility and immense skilfulness have seen him through many different guises
Earlier this year, a book appeared celebrating the first ten years of the Stirling Prize for architecture. Back in 1996, recession was only just ending and the National Lottery just beginning. It was the end of a bleak time for architects, doubly afflicted by the criticisms of the Prince of Wales. One unexpected benefit of
‘Museums are the new United Nations.’ So says Jack Loman, the director of the Museum of London. He is one of many professionals, and increasingly policymakers, calling on cultural institutions to act as instruments of foreign policy. Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is enthusiastic about this mission and is currently