Elderly pop tunes, as we all know, have a tendency to remind you of things you may not wish to remember. Wings’ ‘Band on the Run’, for example, gives me the taste of cold beef, chips and beans in the Nag’s Head in Oxford circa 1978. It was on the jukebox there, I was an
‘I know it sounds arrogant but I think it’s undeniable that it has become fixed in the culture like a stately home,’ says Mark Haddon of his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Arrogant or not, he is probably right. Haddon’s novel about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve the
It took Ian Fleming just eight weeks to write his first James Bond novel but the legacy of his eponymous spy has been far less fleeting. Fifty years after 007 first made it on to the big screen in Dr No (see Sean Connery, above) a Barbican exhibition is celebrating with a stunning display of
Michael Frayn is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the English Channel. When he’s at home he writes traditional West End farces with amusing titles and plenty of jokes. When he sits at his European desk he comes up with dour, static, talk-heavy historical dramas with boring titles and no jokes at all. Democracy, written
There are two places in Le Nozze di Figaro where the music undergoes a brief but potent change, which indicates how much deeper the undercurrents are than the busy actions we are witnessing. If either of these is short-changed or mismanaged, the whole work is rendered less moving and serious than it really is. The
Unless I have slept through another of the year’s once-in-a-lifetime experiences — which is rather more likely than possible — the days since the Wimbledon final have passed without call for bunting, cheering, spangling or any other kind of cross-gartered preparedness. We seem to occupy a lacuna; to have swum into the eye of the
For those of you who scan speedily to the bottom of reviews to see if a film is worth seeing — don’t worry; I always do it myself — I thought I would do you a favour and put the last paragraph first, as follows: Is Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike worth seeing? Yes. But also
‘Oddly enough,’ declared the actor John Hurt on the Today programme last Friday, ‘radio is closely linked with film.’ This grabbed my attention over tea and porridge. Radio like film? It’s not at first an obvious comparison. Radio deals in images, but surely only those we create in our minds. Hurt went on to explain:
