The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Over a year ago my six-year-old grandson Henry Flynn rushed home from his multi-ethnic south London school playground in Streatham with a solemn but urgent question for his father, an art historian, as it happens. So far as is known, incidentally, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic blood flows in young Henry’s veins. ‘Am I a Muslim,
After a family quarrel in 1717, George I ordered his son and heir’s imprisonment in the Tower. His ministers had to explain that in England not even a king could dispense with habeas corpus. The King considered bundling the future George II on to a man-of-war bound for the West Indian plantations, but reluctantly conceded
Proust is rapidly becoming the Mozart of the novel, one of those artistic figures before whom, from time to time, we delight to abase ourselves in various not always dignified postures of idolatrous adoration. One acquaintance of mine, for example, currently devotes his leisure hours to marking up A la recherche du temps perdu in
There are a lot of travel writers these days setting off ‘in the footsteps of’ someone else, gathering clues and arguing with ghosts. This is partly pragmatism: there are so few untouched trails around that you might as well make a virtue of necessity, lend your narrative some historical backbone and a point of comparison.
Val McDermid is probably best known for her series of sharply contemporary thrillers featuring a criminal profiler. But some of her standalone novels, in particular the superb A Place of Execution and The Distant Echo, have narrative sections that hark back to a generation earlier; and their plots turn upon the long shadows thrown forward
The acrimonious debate over the Elgin Marbles, housed in the British Museum since 1816, provides the catalyst for this new book. Ever since Lord Byron libelled Lord Elgin in verse as, ‘the last, the worst, dull spoiler,’ plundering the temple where ‘Pallas lingered,’ homegrown restitutionists have quoted Childe Harold to support the arguments for their
The etymologists of the Oxford English Dictionary should be alerted that Steven Poole has coined a new word. First used as the title for his book, published in 2006, ‘unspeak’ is a noun for a ‘mode of speech that persuades by stealth’. How, it might be asked, does this differ from ‘spin’? Poole contends that
There are some people who do one distinct thing in their life — only one — but it is enough, just, to confer immortality on them. Such a person was Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), the Victorian poet. This gifted and sensitive man was a product of Dr Arnold’s superb teaching at Rugby and won a
Christopher Lloyd died on 27 January. Not since the deaths of Gertrude Jekyll in 1932, William Robinson in 1935 and Vita Sackville-West in 1962 has so much homage been paid in the broadsheets to the memory of a gardener. In the nation at large, more people mourned the deaths of Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton,
Andrew Lambirth on Maggi Hambling’s forceful seascapes and Rose Wylie’s quirky art Let me at once state an interest: I have just written a book with Maggi Hambling about her life and works, currently available from all good booksellers. But long and intimate knowledge of an artist’s oeuvre should not disqualify the critic from writing
William Thornhill, convict, is spending his first night in a mud hut in the penal colony of New South Wales. He’s in Sydney, but this is 1806, and Sydney is little more than a huddle of such huts. Beside him, his wife Sal and their children sleep. Beyond is darkness, the ‘vast fact of the
One of life’s longed-for little twists comes when the nice guy finally asserts himself and reveals a darker side to his personality. Alan Alda, celebrated for having played Hawkeye for 11 years in the television series M*A*S*H* and an actor who always seemed slightly too eager to ingratiate, had his moment of revelation as the
Following the success of his first memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has written a second one, with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel. The Sailor in the Wardrobe is the story of his rite of passage from restricted late boyhood in Dublin to independent young manhood adrift abroad. The
Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of ‘futuristic’ fiction. Most such fiction — Forster’s The Machine Stops, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice — describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time when it was written. However, in The Eagle’s Throne the fact
It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from
Decayed gentility and a feckless father. These make the springiest springboard for the angry artist. Dickens, Picasso, Joyce, Shaw, Francis Bacon all enjoyed these unsung advantages in life. So did Samuel Langhorne Clemens who called himself Mark Twain, after the cry of the leadsmen sounding the depths in the treacherous waters of the Mississippi (twain=two
It’s been 44 years since Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made its debut on Broadway, but it still seems extraordinarily fresh. Why? The obvious answer is that the subject matter — the battle of the sexes — is timeless. Anyone in a heterosexual relationship will experience a shudder of recognition at certain points
‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’ the heroic Claire Fox asked on Question Time (BBC1, Thursday) last week, and the question was so shocking that the pinkos, class warriors and terrorist-sympathisers who comprise the majority of your typical QT audience weren’t sure whether to clap or hiss. The point the Fox Goddess (what
I promise I’m going to come up with some hot musical recommendations this issue, but I must thank those Spectator readers who wrote about last month’s column in which I announced my intention to stop smoking. The letters — all from reformed smokers — were full of kindness, sympathy and practical suggestions, and they have
It seemed a curious place for one of the grimmest of Victorian institutions, tucked under manicured downs, surrounded by handsome villas with flowering gardens and cosy cottages. But when the Guildford Union Workhouse was built in 1905, it was positioned on the edge of the town in order not to offend the susceptibilities of the
Andrew Lambirth is entranced by the central purity of Dan Flavin’s installations Many artists are involved to a greater or lesser degree with the depiction of light, but Dan Flavin (1933–96) made it his exclusive subject, and in the process was responsible for the apotheosis of the humble fluorescent tube. As an artist, Flavin was
Dr Johnson talks somewhere of a Reverend Dr Campbell whom he calls the ‘richest man ever to graze the pasture of literature’. If his riches derived from his books, he was surely outgrossed by John Fowles, whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman topped all the bestseller lists, and remained on the New York Times list
I feel I ought to start this review by letting the authors know that I will not enter into correspondence with them. However much they might loathe what I am about to say and wish to bombard me with emails ridiculing my reasoning, I regret to tell them that I will be far too busy
Brian Power’s book, like the best Chinese paintings, contains a lot of empty space. You can either concentrate on what you see, or you can let your mind and imagination glide over into what might have been there. I have a silk-screen of a painting by the Song dynasty master Liang Kai (13th century) on
Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in south- west Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she
John Tenniel’s name means little today, but everyone knows his work. Tenniel was the artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, creating those unforgettable images of the little girl in the Alice band who shrinks and grows so alarmingly. The cartoons which Tenniel drew each week for Punch have survived as well. Thanks to
Albert Camus was an exceptional man who lived in interest- ing times. His parents were pieds-noirs — French settlers in Algeria. His father died at the battle of the Marne and he was raised by his mother, an illiterate cleaning lady. Encouraged by inspired teachers, he won scholarships to a lycée and then university in
An unkind thought keeps coming to mind as you read this book: perhaps Henry Ford was right, after all. It is unkind because so much of Guy Arnold’s great opus is admirable. As an account of the main political events that have taken place in Africa since 1960, it is awe-inspiring, some might even say
The man christened Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, in a mining town in Switzerland in the last decade of the 15th century, has been more mythologised than described: as a Faust, a Prometheus, a holy fool, a eunuch, a necromancer. It is not hard to see why he was attractive to the Romantic poets and