The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The competition between news-led podcasts is nearing boiling point. If you tuned in to The Media Show on Radio 4 last Wednesday, you’d have felt the tension between the podcasters leading the guard: Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics, Jon Sopel of The News Agents, plus his executive producer, Dino Sofos, Nosheen Iqbal of
At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just that. Carefully arranged on a wooden tabletop, the collected objects are in conversation, the nubby curves of the shells echoing the ribbed neck of the stone vase, their dusky and rosy hues matching the open
Two thousand years ago, a young Cilician named Oppian, wanting to rehabilitate his disgraced father, decided to write Halieutica, an account of the world of fishes, as a gift for Marcus Aurelius. It was a mixture of possible fact and definite fiction – if only there were octopuses that climb trees and fishes that fancy
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator, a Norwegian novelist, and her Italian husband live in Milan. ‘Ti amo,’ they frequently tell each other. Easier to say ‘I love you’, than for him to say he’s dying, and her to say she
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by the heroine of Elizabeth Fair’s last novel. More than 60 years after its author consigned the typescript to a black tin trunk, following her literary agent’s failure to find a publisher for this, her seventh
In that dark world the air pulsed with the melancholy clangour of bells. If, as legend has it, the chimes of St Mary-le-Bow told Dick Whittington to turn again, then what were they saying to all the other medieval Londoners, dwelling in houses so crowded on fouled streets that the sun could not break through?
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there are tante Italie – many Italys. ‘Mine is different to hers, which is different to my mother’s, which is different to my father’s, and so on down the queue,’ she writes. These Italys – of
On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just one? It’s estimated that there are nearly a million in the Scottish hills and around 60,000 are culled every year. So why write about a single kill? But in Hindsight Jenna Watt goes far deeper
This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and begins with the famous court case after John Ruskin accused James Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. But Michael Bird does not limit his perspective to a single artist or
‘Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all?’ When ‘Chips’ Channon strolled into the House of Commons tea room in 1951, this was the chant with which encircling drunken Labour MPs mocked him. Politically, he was inessential they thought, and epicene. He admitted to being the best-dressed of MPs, but reckoned
The Forgiven is based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne and stars Ralph Fiennes (terrific) and Jessica Chastain (ditto) as a wealthy British-American couple driving to a weekend-long party in a luxurious Moroccan desert villa when they hit and kill a young local boy on the road. Oops. What the film adds up to, I
House of the Dragon got off to a pretty uninspirational start, I thought: no major characters brought to a shocking and premature end; no bone-chilling spookiness like that White Walker opening scene in the frozen woods; far too much dreary, half-inaudible talking round long tables in ill-lit halls. If this hadn’t been the long-awaited prequel
Finance in screen fiction is a realm of monsters. From Gordon Gekko in Wall Street and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to the crazed party animals of The Wolf of Wall Street, the arena of deal-making is portrayed – particularly in America – as winner-take-all without trace of empathy or redemption. Industry – the British-made
‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music festival in Darmstadt, the correspondent mentioned only one première of the two dozen on offer: ‘The most important achievement was the scenic cantata Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, a piece that would have been impossible
The American Whine is one of the key vocal registers in rock and roll. You can trace that thin disaffected quaver through the decades from the Shangri-Las to Lou Reed, from Jonathan Richman to Neil Young. Inveigling, needy, smart-assed, it’s as vital a part of the DNA of the medium as a black leather jacket
In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college, teaching classical music like some kind of square. He picks out a melody on the piano: ‘Whom was this written by?’ ‘By Caesar Frank!’ chorus the students. ‘Pronounce it Fronk,’ he corrects them; and the
The Angel of Prisons dramatises the life of the penal reformer Elizabeth Fry, who lived near Canning Town. She married a wealthy Quaker, Joseph Fry, who encouraged her philanthropic work which she managed to pursue while raising 12 children. Early in life, Fry had been a party girl who loved dancing, and this production shows
Every country has an origin story but none has ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject is inseparable from myth. In this impressive and deeply immersive book, the author sets out to reveal Russia’s history, its people’s perception of their past and the manifold ways in which those in power
William Orbit is an electronic musician living a jazz life. ‘I like to make it up as I go along,’ he says. ‘It’s one long improv session.’ For most of his 65 years, the music skipped along well enough. In the late Nineties, Orbit was the man with lightning at his fingertips. He co-produced (and
Beast is, the blurb tells us, a ‘pulse-pounding thriller about a father and his daughters who find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the savannah has but one apex predator’. Whether this was ever intended to be a serious film, I cannot say, but it’s fun in its schlocky, gory,
At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang. He was then arrested for sexually assaulting a minor on what proved to be the word of a drug addict with a history of making false accusations. The trouble for Gambaccini, though, was that this
Who doesn’t love Eurovision? All that razzmatazz. The ghastly frocks and gloopy pop songs, the false bonhomie and bare-faced bias when the voting comes around. It’s an irresistible annual event, guaranteed to put a smile on your face and provide the pretence that we are all one happy European family. But all that showbiz comes
One learns the strangest things at festivals. That, for instance, this summer has been a bit of a blackcurrant disaster in the UK because the extreme heat caused all the different varieties to ripen at the same time and fall from the bushes before they could be properly harvested. That fact came from a retired
Southwark Playhouse has a reputation for small musicals with big ambitions. Tasting Notes is set in a wine bar run by a reckless entrepreneur, LJ, whose business bears her name. In real life, LJ’s bar would go bust within weeks. It serves vintage wines to a clientele of wealthy tipplers who chug back large tureens
With the major companies largely on their summer breaks, the Edinburgh International Festival struggles to programme a high standard of dance (though, having said that, I have memories of being taken in short trousers to the 1967 festival and seeing New York City Ballet during its glorious prime). The dearth tends to be masked by
Until the invention of photography war reportage depended on old-fashioned illustration, and even after that the illustrated press took a while to catch up. Photographic reproduction didn’t work on cheap newsprint, which demanded a crispness of definition that early photography couldn’t provide. So reports on the American Civil War in the new illustrated periodicals aimed
‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too much truth.’ I nodded and she laughed and we drank more wine, but that sentence stayed with me in all its aphoristic glory. When she died, this was the first thing I remembered: our conspiratorial
During my gap year in 1981, I worked on the 24th floor of Birmingham’s Alpha Tower for the Regional Manpower Intelligence Unit. The city below, with its express ways racing past the Venetian Gothic of Joseph Chamberlain’s house and the Roman Revival of the town hall, were the realisation of the city planner Herbert Manzoni’s
There can be no clearer illustration of the central role that great cathedrals continue to play in a nation’s life than the outpouring of grief that greeted the catastrophic blaze in Notre-Dame in 2019. President Macron described the building as ‘our history, our literature, our imagination, the place where we experienced all our greatest moments’.