The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Every family has its folklore. Apparently, as a five-year-old, I was on the floor playing when I looked up at my grandmother and told her matter-of-factly that she ‘was not the kind of granny I had been expecting’. I’m not quite sure what my foetal presumptions had been, but she is far from the hackneyed
The Fear, a memoir by the author and artist Christiana Spens, opens with an account of the most Parisian of existential crises. A ‘newly heartbroken philosophy graduate’ in ‘the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir’, she is too depressed to get out of bed: ‘It was as if standing was falling, too pointless even to
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) produced what his biographer Hugh Brogan called ‘the greatest book ever written on the United States’. Among the most remarkable things about this work – Brogan was referring to the first volume of Democracy in America, not the more abstract second volume – is that Tocqueville’s journey to the United States
The German composer Max Reger, born 150 years ago next week, is mostly remembered today for countless elephantine fugues and one piece of lavatory humour. When he was savaged by the Munich critic Rudolf Louis, he wrote back to him: ‘Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review
Further than the Furthest Thing is an allegorical play set on a remote island populated by English-speakers from all over the world. Dialect experts will have a ball unscrambling the set-up. First we meet Auntie Mill, a white Scotswoman whose husband, Uncle Bill, is a black fisherman with a West Country accent. Their nephew, Francis,
There are several reasons why Young Fathers currently feel like the most exciting live band in Britain, but for now let’s concentrate on effect rather than cause. The Edinburgh trio have somehow managed to dispense with all the froth and blather of concert-making – gratuitous chat; choreographed audience interaction; the fat and gristle – to
One of the lesser-known schools of modern philosophy is the Philosophy of Moomin. Like Cynicism or Epicureanism, it is difficult to pin down precisely, but subscribers speak of the importance of the individual, of liberalism and acceptance, and of the life-affirming joy of feeling. In the words of Moominpappa: ‘Just think, never to be glad
The death last week at the age of 83 of the sublime Lynn Seymour – muse to Ashton and MacMillan, the creator of roles in Romeo and Juliet and A Month in the Country among many others – set me thinking gloomily about the current dearth of ballerinas with her questioning intelligence and free spirit.
Allelujah, based on the stage play by Alan Bennett, is set in a geriatric ward in a Yorkshire hospital and has a stellar cast: Jennifer Saunders, Derek Jacobi, David Bradley, Julia McKenzie, Lorraine Ashbourne, Dame Judi Dench – but not Dame Maggie Smith, inexplicably. Maybe she missed the call. It’s directed by Richard Eyre and
Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in
Lucie Rie had no time for high-flown talk about the art of ceramics. ‘I like to make pots – but I do not like to talk about them,’ she’d say. ‘I am not a thinker, I am not an art historian, I just do.’ It was her profession, she would maintain. Rie’s work is astonishingly
I am on the Inspector Morse walking tour in Oxford, which is led by a donnish man called Alastair. We look like the funeral cortege of a man whose death is under investigation. Oxford is a major character in Morse. I think of it as the antagonist. There is something very cold about the city,
Public readings by James Ellroy would tend to begin like this: Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, demon dog of American literature, the foul owl with the death growl, the white night of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. My books are written
It’s been two months since 14-year-old Orla’s mother died of cancer, and the girl isn’t coping. Neither is her father. While he self-medicates with booze, she plots her escape, to her aunt’s in Northern Ireland, where her mum is buried: I am sad to go but it is time now and there is no point
Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole. First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series. It’s a humble orphan girl,
Bibi is back. Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to the prime ministership of Israel two years after a motley coalition of his many enemies banded together to topple him. With him removed from power and facing trial on corruption charges, many assumed that the Netanyahu era was over. They under-estimated the wiliest politician in the Middle
In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself. On New Year’s Eve he was taken
Perhaps Percival Everett’s The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, made readers realise what an astonishing writer he is. But there is certainly a great backlist. I am particularly fond of Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and American Desert in his satirical vein; and Suder, Walk Me to the Distance and
People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to
According to the census, there are more Christians in the UK than there are atheists and agnostics – yet the churches are empty. These Christians, it seems, don’t take their faith too seriously. Nor, I fear, does Nicholas Spencer, who has written a big book arguing that science and religion are fundamentally compatible. He’s wrong;
‘In the prison of his days,’ W.H. Auden wrote, ‘teach the free man how to praise.’ Noël Coward’s last performance, possessing, like so much of his work, a scene-stealing quality, was in the 1969 film The Italian Job. He plays the gangster Mr Bridger, masterminding a gold robbery in Turin from his prison cell. In
Thirty years ago, in the days when friendships were sustained not by email but by air mail, a friend of mine was spending time in some exotic faraway place. He would send me beautiful, florid accounts of his travels and I would read out the most hilarious passages to the flatmates I was living with
Hector Berlioz dismissed Handel as ‘that tub of pork and beer’ but it wasn’t always like that. Picture a younger, sexier Handel, rocking into Rome aged 22 and challenging Scarlatti to a keyboard duel. The Italian elite couldn’t get enough of Il caro Sassone, ‘the darling Saxon’, and he repaid them with 80-odd short Italian
Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television,’ he told them. ‘We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days.’ Thirty-three years on, it’s a
Rupert Goold’s new show, Women, Beware the Devil, has great costumes, sumptuous sets and an intriguing chessboard stage like a Vermeer painting. Impressive to look at but that’s where the good news ends. Dramatist Lulu Raczka should have thought twice before writing a script about witchcraft, which was bound to invite comparisons with The Crucible,
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking the family piano with a woodman’s axe. Seeing the anxious look on my face, my father assured me there was nothing to be afraid of. The axe-wielding man was, he explained, an ‘artist’ who was
Champions is an underdog sports movie starring Woody Harrelson as a baseball coach forced to take on a team with intellectual disabilities. But the main thing you need to know is it is so formulaic I could have written it, you could have written it, it could have written itself. Heck, it’s so predictable it
Russia is not the only country erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Ukraine itself has been demolishing its own public statues and murals for years. Before the war, in 2015, our parliament passed legislation that criminalised communist propaganda. ‘Decommunisation’ was a deceptively simple idea: it started with the removal of our 1,300 Lenins and a few other
In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for the three windows in a lower room, at the Queen’s building next to the park (where the Dutch painters work’). Willem van de Velde and his son, also called Willem, would have preferred a studio