The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t. The problem is particularly acute if, like the Royal Opera’s Oliver Mears, you believe in staging Handel’s concert works as if they were operas. Broadly speaking, Handel’s oratorios affirm the moral and political consensus of
We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not ‘customers’; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do
Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the steps of a football stadium where they race through an effortful series of dance routines accompanied by flashy lights and thumping tunes. It’s more a drama-school showcase than an epic human tragedy. There are no
Though I’d never read any books about Oasis before this one, I’d have bet it would be impossible to write boringly about the band – for two reasons: namely Noel and Liam Gallagher. As the most entertaining men in music, the former could be talking to a goldfish and still end up riffing in an
Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, who as a Jewish journalist and a communist had been barred from publishing, found her sleep wracked by nightmares that unmistakably reenacted the terrors of the Nazi regime. Deprived of her regular employment, her own dream experiences prompted the subversive if dangerous idea of recording
Should you search for someone who has disappeared seemingly of their own volition? David Whitehouse, the author of novels that scooped the Betty Trask and Jerwood prizes and were shortlisted for the Gordon Burn and CWA Golden Dagger awards, happened upon a real-life mystery. Having his hair cut in Margate, he was told about a
Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: ‘They may not mean to, but they do.’ In My Sister and
When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, the chef Olia Hercules lost the will to cook. With food so deeply connected to pleasure and to her Ukrainian roots, it somehow felt like an unbearable frivolity to be thinking about recipes while family members were under fire. ‘How,’ she asked, ‘can I cook while my brother
Sarah Byrne is covering her first war and, after a slow start, things are finally picking up. Sweating in her flak jacket and undersized helmet, the twentysomething British freelancer is aiming for a scoop. One of her contacts might be persuaded to arrange a visit to ‘terror tunnels’, the headquarters of a Palestinian network whose
The Möbius Book has been variously described as ‘a hybrid work that is both fiction and non-fiction’ and a ‘memoir-cum-novel’. Catherine Lacey herself asserts that it is a work of non-fiction, but with a qualifying ‘however’. It comprises two narratives, first- and third-person, and is published to be flipped 180 degrees. Ali Smith’s How to
The sea, as you might expect, looms large in Benjamin Wood’s finely tuned novella Seascraper. Thomas Flett – one of the most touching protagonists I’ve encountered in recent years – is barely out of his teens, but he’s already battered by toil. His days are spent shanking – gathering shrimps on the beach – with
Although Gordon M. Williams died as recently as 2017, his heyday was the Wilson/Heath era of the late 1960s and 1970s. During that time he managed to appear on the inaugural Booker shortlist, dash off a ten-day potboiler, The Siege of Trenchard’s Farm, that would be filmed by Sam Peckinpah, and continue to file a
Pub quiz masters with a taste for William Shakespeare are spoiled for choice when it comes to red letter years. The playwright’s birth and death, the building and burning down of the Globe, and the publication of the First Folio (1564, 1616, 1599, 1613, 1623) are all dates that sit dustily in the corners of
Sometime after the Long Parliament met in November 1640, a seamstress living in London called Katherine Chidley decided that she didn’t much like the way that a man was telling her how to do her Puritanism. So, taking advantage of the recent collapse in traditional censorship controls, she published a pamphlet, The Justification of the
If you’re looking for an early example of Tom Stuart-Smith’s work, you’d have to go to a car park to find it. The now world-famous landscape designer started his career doing ‘awful supermarket projects’ where ‘landscape was perceived as just something they kind of had to do’. This was in the 1980s: today, if you
Grade: D– There’s some scholarly research to be done, I fancy, on the strange psychological appeal of boringness in videogames. These gaudy things could be non-stop excitement, and yet many of the most successful are mega boring. ‘Grinding’ – repetitive tasks undertaken for incremental rewards – is a matter of pride and pleasure for serious
There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be faked or fudged. No lofty exposition, no pleading discourse, no mitigating circumstance, no ifs, buts or boo-hoo back story can bend a piece of so-so music into a great pop song. We simply know one
Everyone who wasn’t at Glastonbury this year knows exactly what it was like: a seething mass of hatred and rabid leftiness, characterised by an angry punk duo named Bob Vylan calling for the death of the IDF. But that’s just the tabloid hysteria talking – betraying also maybe a hint of envy towards those lucky
Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and on it went, a flurry of paint marks and brush strokes, yellow, green and occasionally blue, like a cornfield at harvest time. By the time we got to the end some seven metres of it
Midway through Jurassic World Rebirth the scientist character played by Jonathan Bailey, whom we can all immediately spot as a scientist (he wears glasses), tells us that intelligence is not especially useful for a species. Look at dinosaurs, he continues, ‘who are dumb but survived for 165 million years’. These Jurassic films have been going
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a dream-like tragedy by Eugene O’Neill set on a barren farm in Connecticut. Phil Hogan and his daughter Josie have worked the rocky soil for 20 years and they’ve come up with a joke. ‘If cows could eat stones this would be a grand dairy farm.’ Phil is a
It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler’s Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several
Marge Simpson is dead. But does anyone care? I’ve written loads of pieces over the years about the genius of The Simpsons – how extraordinarily prescient it is (most famously when, in 2000, it predicted a Trump presidency), how delightful the subplots are, how it works on so many levels – but I’m now beginning
King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score is so luminous that it’s easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto’s references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out
There isn’t another actor alive whom I’d rather watch than Michael Douglas. Just as Pauline Kael once said that the thought of Cary Grant makes us smile, so the thought of Michael Douglas makes me grin, smirk, nod, wink, cackle, cheer – and walk a little taller, too. Even his anti-heroes are heroic in their
In this age of lies and delusions, the trickster may seem to be a peculiarly modern creature, but he or she is almost as old as literature itself. Long before phishing or fake news, stories about cunning foxes, Loki, Anansi the Spider-Man and Odysseus brought delight; Puck, Tom Ripley and Sarah Waters’s fingersmith Sue Trinder
Nathalia Holt’s book begins irresistibly. The year is 1928. Two sons of Theodore Roosevelt called Ted and Kermit – yes I know we’re thinking it’s a Wes Anderson movie – have smoothed a map out on the table in front of them. Let’s imagine the setting is a bit like the Explorers’ Club in New
The Boys, the entertaining debut novel by the literary critic Leo Robson, is set in Swiss Cottage during the 2012 London Olympics. Johnny Voghel is ‘methodically lying about’, home on leave from an admin job in the West Midlands and grieving both for his mother, who died the previous year, and – by extension –
It’s hard to classify this thought-provoking book – part memoir, part philosophical exploration, but mostly a deeply researched family history. And what a history that is. Tim Franks, born in 1968, has been a BBC reporter for almost two decades, and now presents Newshour on the World Service. So he knows how to tell stories