The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Scholars who want to accuse others of ignorant obscurantism have long taunted them with the phrase lucus a non lucendo. This is supposed to exemplify the stupidest kind of concocted etymology, and here it is in Book XVII of Isidore’s stout old compilation: ‘A “sacred grove” (lucus) is a dense thicket of trees that lets
Born in 1965, Howard Sounes was scarcely out of short trousers by the time that Margaret Thatcher took power and kicked us out of the mire of complacent consensus and began to crush the tyranny of the unions. Perhaps his vivacious and enjoyable new book about the culture of the Seventies does romanticise ‘a low
First and most importantly, Hugh Thomson is a good thing. It takes a rare combination of scholarly focus and Boys’ Own derring-do to write books about adventuring in Peru (this is his third) which consistently rise above the level of backpackers’ companions, and convey not only Thomson’s great knowledge of the ancient civilisations of the
You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its
Europe thinks ‘that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists… Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through [it]… the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich
Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when
Novels narrated in the first person by dysfunctional adolescent boys are no rare thing. Nor is there a yawning gap in the market for novels detailing the squalor and eccentricity and thwarted dreams of life in 20th-century Ireland. I opened Carry Me Down, therefore, with a sense of weariness in advance. But I found that
It was Peter Fleming who noted a principal difficulty for the traveller in the 20th century. There were no journeys to be made, he said, that had not been made already, and he knew that in anything he chose to do, ‘other, better, men’ would have gone before. Under such circumstances, ‘only the born tourist
Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of
In an interview with David Frost only three years ago, Trevor Nunn said that the highlight of his career was doing Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in 1980. Now, 26 years later, Chichester Festival Theatre has revived the play, with Jonathan Church and Philip Franks directing. The original staging ran
Summer Festival Time: when the music-loving British populace flocks or straggles to concerts in a variety of unsuitable venues, all the way from mighty monuments like (dare one say) St Paul’s or the Albert Hall to Little Bethel and the Quaker Meeting House, the Old Forge, the Stately Home, ex-quaysides and industrial structures, parks, squares,
Even though Rudyard Kipling died 70 years ago, listeners to Plain Tales from the Hills are sure to gain the beloved storyteller some new followers. I’m certainly joining the fan club. Never engrossed by ‘Gunga Din’, ‘If’ or ‘the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River’, I was astounded how quickly I became hooked on these stories
Anthony Powell’s centenary last year was rightly celebrated; not much notice, I think, was taken of C. P. Snow’s. This was hardly surprising. Shares in ‘Snow Preferred’ are, in Wodehouse’s phrase, ‘down in the cellar with no takers’. I would guess that very few under the age of, say, 50 have read the 11 volumes
‘Do you pronounce it Sowthy or Suthy?’ asked a friend when I mentioned I was reviewing this book. Today, that small controversy probably marks the limit of public curiosity as to this remarkably prolific but not otherwise exceptional poet, novelist, historian, critic and political commentator, who flourished as a radical alongside his friend Coleridge in
Sex, Afghanistan without the risk of death, Nepalese temple bells; more sex, India when it wasn’t deforested and covered in a cloud of smog; yet more sex and a lot more drugs: yes, I can quite see why travel-writer Rory MacLean wishes that he’d been old enough to have done the Hippie Trail in its
Within the expanding aquatic metropolis that is Istanbul, two late-20th-century bridges straddle the continents of Europe and Asia. These traffic-laden steel bridges, spanning high above the ferries and other boats which ply the busy waters of the Bosphorus below, are visibly useful links between two civilisations. They are also symbols, perhaps, of the noble dream
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is one of the great figures of Modernism, a pioneer of abstraction, whose works are known in this country mostly from reproduction. The Tate has now gathered some 60 key paintings from important international collections (a significant portion come from Kandinsky’s native Russia) and put together a superb exhibition which it’s difficult
The enlarged, updated and now undivided Sainsbury Centre has reopened with the most comprehensive selection of Polynesian art ever assembled; and yet, shamefully, it has received not a single review. It would be a waste of space to wonder why, better to state that the stunning Pacific Encounters, curated by Dr Steven Hooper of the
PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want
On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of
Glorious, bloodless, last, perhaps all of those things, but the revolution of 1688 was hardly a revolution at all. It was the neat solution to a succession crisis: how to keep the throne of England secure against a Roman Catholic successor to the Roman Catholic James II. The essential ingredients were the resolve of James’s
Compared with the romance and legend of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the ’15 is, as Daniel Szechi ruefully concedes, ‘a dowdier bird’. It has been ill-served by history, just as the Jacobites as a whole have been neglected by historians of the 18th century in favour of the broader trend of Britain’s march of
In the Brisbane Botanical Gardens,Walking the avenue of weeping figs,You can see exuded latex stain the barkLike adolescent sperm. A metamorphosis:The trunks must be full of randy boys. At home, the Java willowsWhen planted alongside a watercourseWere said to stem the breeding of mosquitoes.Here, they have nothing else to doExcept to stand there looking elegantIn
Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us
I sat behind the bicycle shed of Winchester’s Historic Resources Centre, holding a fragment from what was probably the coffin of the greatest of all our monarchs, the king who founded our nation and gave it a moral purpose and direction: Alfred, surnamed by posterity the Great. Labled ‘HA99 22041’, the fragment was visually unimpressive:
The highlights of Brecht’s Life of Galileo are packed into the opening hour. As the astronomer glimpses new worlds through his telescope, we get a palpable sense of his wonder and astonishment. The effect of these revelations on the mediaeval mind comes through in simple, thundering utterances. ‘The moon has no light of its own.’
Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would
Ah Oxford! Welcome to the City of Dreadful Spite, otherwise known as Malice Springs, the permanent Number One on the Bitch List. Not since the vituperative pamphleteers of the English Civil War has there been a community so dedicated to character assassination as the dons of Oxford. Living on the same staircase, dining side by
Some people’s lives drive you into a rage. Alan Turing’s is one. In The Man Who Knew Too Much David Leavitt unexpectedly compares him to Alec Guinness playing Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit. Like Stratton, who invented a suit that would never wear out, Turing was a brilliant scientific deviant, interested