Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Chewing it over

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Listing page content here I spent many of my school holidays with a kind great-aunt, a deeply religious maiden, most of whose friends were nuns. Beside my bed, as well as Lives of the Saints there was always her favourite book, Jottings from a Gentlewoman’s Garden. Not ideal reading for a nine-year-old, but how glad

A rather unBritish achievement

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Listing page content here Who would have thought that the British, of all unexotic peoples, would turn out to be good at ballet; both at dancing and choreographing it? One minute they could do next to nothing of either. The next the world knew about Britain and ballet was that this damp, dour island off

Who done it in Boston?

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Listing page content here I’m so glad I came to this book fresh, my mind open and unsullied by all that had gone before. As it was, I could sit back and enjoy the labyrinthine plot with all its platitudinous twists and unexpected turns as a real beginner without one preconceived idea in my head.

Welcome, little strangers

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Listing page content here Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read? No more than that! many readers will exclaim

Pioneering vision

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Listing page content here Here are more than 300 works in yet another mammoth exhibition at Tate Modern. Perhaps the sheer size of it puts people off, though many of those I have spoken to on my travels through the art world hardly knew the show was on. Perhaps the Bauhaus tag puts people off,

Shaken or stirred?

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Listing page content here Completism has become a maddening obsession these days with the BBC’s Radio Three. Every crotchet of Beethoven given in a week, every demisemiquaver of Webern encompassed within hours, two weeks of wall-to-wall Bach before Christmas, and, most recently, Wagner’s Ring spun into a single day. What’s wrong is that good music

Feel the force

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Listing page content here It’s a great relief to see Scottish Opera back on stage again, even if their season consists of only a handful of performances of a couple of operas. I hadn’t realised how sentimental I was until I found my eyes brimming with tears at being in the dress circle of Glasgow’s

Medicine and letters | 13 May 2006

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‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ ‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells

Ill-considered imperial gestures

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Listing page content here During 1956 three major powers made dramatic efforts to prop up their position by the use of armed force. The British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to overthrow its dictator and regain the Suez Canal; their attempt failed within a few hours. The Soviet Union used its tanks

Missing the middle path

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Listing page content here Reading David Mitchell’s fourth novel, which is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, reminded me why girls have little or no interest in the contents of boys’ heads until they are well out of their teens. It’s horrible in there. Thirteen-year-old boys, in particular, are revolting concoctions of fear

The master and the loyal retainer

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Listing page content here It was not easy to be an attendant at the court of King Pablo, for Picasso, ‘with his fringe of white hair round the back of his head, his never tiring black eyes, his red shirt, is always the centre of everyone’s thoughts, especially as everyone else’s movements depend on his

Toby Young

Beyond belief

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Listing page content here At the matinée performance of Donkeys’ Years I attended, Michael Frayn was seated in the row behind me. Seeing this revival of a sex farce he wrote in 1977 must have been an odd experience for him, not least because he more or less single-handedly killed off the genre with Noises

James Delingpole

Building on success

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Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked. He still is a friend, up to

No end of a lesson

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Listing page content here ‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ Kipling’s re- proof, in ‘The Lesson’, on the conduct of the Boer war would serve well as the subtitle of this impressive review of the mess that is the Iraq intervention. The authors are the chief military correspondent of

Public skool monkey business

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Listing page content here I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second

The book that didn’t make the short list

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Listing page content here The councils of the early Christian Church were not always agreeable occasions. The bishops quarrelled terribly, at times getting so angry with one another as to clash in frenzied battles of ripped clothes, flying fists, blood and broken noses on the council chamber floor. Of all the issues that most inflamed

Humanity makes all plain

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Listing page content here The title of this well edited and interesting book is misleading. First it suggests a complete collection, which would, if it were ever accomplished, require several volumes. Second, the letters, though mostly written by Pepys, include a considerable number of those written to him and even occasional papers which are not

Comfortless aesthetic

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The classic Modernist interior familiar to us all is a white cube, minimally furnished and adorned, the clean geometric lines of the architecture given prominence at the expense of fittings and fixtures. As the visitor steps into the V&A’s homage to Modernism, it’s at once clear that the design of the show will not mirror

Charcoal mastery

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In his foreword to the catalogue of John Hubbard’s Spirit of Trees, Duncan Robinson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, invokes John Constable. Indeed if Constable were alive today he might be John Hubbard. Although Hubbard is American, he has lived in Dorset for 45 years and although his paintings are far more abstract than

Honours and rebels

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With the government and the opposition flogging peerages to raise money for party funds, Radio Four decided to look back at the 1920s master of this practice, the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, and J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, the crook he used to negotiate prices (The Man Who Sold Peerages, Easter Saturday). Matthew

The most sinful of the seven

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Michael Dyson is Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of 12 previous books, and an ordained Baptist minister. Pride is his own contribution to a series of linked lectures and books on the seven deadly sins. There is no doubting the

Songs of prayer and praise

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The Church of Scotland has recently published a new edition of its hymnary, the first for 30 years. A committee of ministers had the difficult task of deciding which of the old hymns to reject in order to make room for the new songs — many of them from Africa and South America — which

Swansong at twilight

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It is, if you stop to think about it, an important literary question: what, exactly, is the point of short stories? They so often can — to this reader at least — be dismissed merely as stunted or early-aborted novels, a single idea gestated in the writer’s imagination that has inescapably failed to divide, multiply

Missing the happiness boat

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‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take

Portable and to the point

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An old biographer friend of mine, having churned out several lives of the great over the years, eventually told me over a boozy and depressing lunch that he had had enough, and that he wouldn’t be writing another one ‘for as long as I live’. As it happens he didn’t live that long, but you