The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Occasionally, one stumbles across something delightfully quirky on Radio Four that one knows would never be aired anywhere else; such was the case with The Reichsmarschall’s Table, produced by Dennis Sewell and tucked away on Monday evening last week. The table in question was for the Nazi general Hermann Goering in the 1930s and 40s
Richard Harries reflects on how Christ’s crucifixion has been depicted over the ages The first depiction of Jesus on the cross, on a small ivory panel in the British Museum dating from 420, shows him upright, arms outstretched, eyes open and very much alive. This is Jesus victorious on the cross. The Western Church never
In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty
The English don’t read German literature. This is not, I suggest, because of our vulgar prejudice towards the Germans for being the people they are and having the history they do. That over-repeated Fawlty Towers episode, those ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ commercials and endless how-we-won-World-War-II documentaries keep such unselective loathing robustly alive, but in the case
Same rubbish, new wrapper. This is the criticism usually levelled at those big bad soccer clubs who put out a new kit every season with minor alterations. Where the clubs lead, the publishers follow. David Winner, the author of this rambling and incoherent discussion of the national game, is a theoriser so prolific that he
The title of this charming book refers to the last summer the author spent in her native city of Belgrade in 1986, just before she married an Englishman and emigrated to London. Twenty-four-year-old Vesna Bjelogrlic, as she then was, picked berries in the hills near her home to make jam. Nearly two decades later, when
Betsy Blair was born Elizabeth Boger in 1923 into a middle-class episcopalian family in New Jersey, her mother a teacher, her father an insurance broker. By the age of 12, this prodigiously confident child performer was dancing before Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. At the age of 16 she came to audition at Billy Rose’s Manhattan
Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to
Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment,
This sensitive, outspoken diary begins during the dark last days of the ‘dead little, red little army’, the British Expeditionary Force which bolstered the French left flank in Flanders from mid-August 1914. With the desperate defence of Ypres, through Hallowe’en into December, when the Germans were repeatedly beaten off, began the stalemate of trench warfare.
Dorothy Whipple was once a highly regarded bestselling novelist and it is typical of the excellent Persephone books that they have restored her glory within their elegant silver jackets and distinctive floral end papers. In They Were Sisters, with its, surely intentional, Chekhovian undertones, Whipple explores the fortunes of three sisters: Lucy, Charlotte and Vera.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is rarely dull in print and this book is no exception. It is a rattling good read, although more because of its knowledge of insiders’ gossip, its pithy judgments of both men and measures and the rhythm of its prose than because of the force of its central thesis. His judgments of men
Fox Talbot invented his ‘photogenic drawing’ process in 1834 and ten years later published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. There is nothing like Elisabeth Vellacott’s drawings to make you impatient with Fox Talbot’s terms. Photography, which freezes an instant in an instant, is neither nature’s pencil nor any
When Henry Moore wanted to make clear that he thought Eric Gill’s sculpture dull and unadventurous, he compared it to knitting. Times have changed, and knitting has become worryingly fashionable, hence the Crafts Council’s delightful exhibition Knit 2 Together. There is, however, a strange feeling of déjà vu about all this. Remember the barefoot California
On the whole, Radio Four has had some good controllers over the years, the better ones being those who introduced gradual change. The two who were the least successful in my view both tried to rearrange the furniture after moving in; I’m thinking of Ian McIntyre in the late 1970s who, one felt, wanted to
John Virtue (born 1947) is the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. A great deal of fuss is being made of the exhibition which marks his two-year period in residence in a basement studio. On display are the 11 new paintings he has made, several of them vast, and the show spills out from the Sunley
A book on Waterloo as short as this (the text proper is 100 pages, small format) tempts a rush to judgment; it has certainly been widely acclaimed already. Paul Johnson’s dust-jacket puff says that the battle ‘is both one of the most decisive in history and the most difficult to describe’. Decisiveness is important: Waterloo
Tom Maschler, son of a distinguished Jewish publisher, was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to England with his parents in 1939. After Leighton Park School, having turned down a place at Oxford, he worked on a kibbutz and as a tour guide, hitch-hiked round America and did a brief stint of National Service
All of a sudden, there is a buzz about Cynthia Ozick. Although respected for many years as a writer of fiction and criticism, no one ever seemed to expect her to reach a wide audience. Now, together with more famous luminaries, she has been announced as a contender for the first Man Booker International Prize:
The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the
This book is a goldmine of once highly secret intelligence material: the diary kept, night by night, by the head of the counter-espionage branch of the security service, MI5. Diaries were forbidden to British combatants (though, luckily for historians, the chief of the general staff, among others, broke his own rule, and kept a long
For once the publisher’s blurb has it right. This is a ‘sweepingly ambitious’ project, written by a ‘towering and often provocative figure in musicology’, ‘an accomplished performer as well as scholar’ who, while achieving numberless other things, contributed ‘160 articles on Russian composers’ to the New Grove. I can personally vouch for his toweringness, his
‘This book,’ notes Roméo Dallaire in his account of the 100 days of genocidal killing in Rwanda in 1994, ‘is long overdue, and I sincerely regret that I did not write it earlier.’ With the continuing massacres in Darfur, however, Shake Hands with the Devil could hardly be more timely. Dallaire was a highly respected
‘The Colosseum is the most famous and instantly recognisable monument to have survived from the classical world.’ In the 19th century the thing to do when in Rome was to visit the Colosseum by moonlight, and quote Byron. This is no longer possible. The ruin is closed at dusk, and anyway the moon will have
Monteverdi’s last and greatest secular masterpiece, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an opera we get far too few chances to see. The last time it was performed on stage in London was in the largely brilliant ENO production of 2000, which has never been revived. That does have the consequence, however, that one is always pleasurably
The Flight of the Phoenix rises from the ashes. Remember the original? James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Ernest Borgnine, Peter Finch, Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Hardy Kr
Unlike Giselle, Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the romantic ballet La Sylphide does not boast a memorable score. Neither the music, composed by Schneitzhoeffer for the original 1832 Parisian version, nor that composed by Lovenskjold for Auguste Bournonville’s 1836 Danish staging — arguably, the best-known today — have the luscious musical
A good many years ago I wrote a short article about the recent work of an artist (who shall remain nameless), and characterised it — in a very positive way — as ‘decorative’. This did not go down at all well, and I was asked to change what I had written and remove this offending
Apart from its size, perhaps, there’s nothing much about the house to distinguish it from its neighbours — one of the countless, vaguely Gothic, Victorian seaside villas that fringe the coast of the Isle of Wight. Even its name, Dimbola Lodge, seems like that of a respectable boarding house, which, indeed, was what it became