London

Thursday

Michael Henderson

Anarchy in the EU

It is 40 years since the band in which Paul Cook banged the drums, the Sex Pistols, detonated a bomb called punk in post-war Britain. The shards are still visible. ‘We didn’t have a manifesto, but we wanted to shake things up,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know how much we would shake things up. Music, art, design, films, books. Punk is part of our social and cultural history.’ We’ve come a long way from 1976, when Johnny Rotten and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ put the pestilential Pistols on the front pages, and a prime-time television exchange with Bill Grundy, the celebrated ‘fucking rotter’ interview, kept them there. The band were

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Round-up of new opera

A mixed year so far for new opera. A few really dismal things have appeared from people who should know better. Did the world really need an operatic treatment of Dante’s Divine Comedy for orchestra and chorus? Louis Andriessen thought so; his La Commedia (2004–8) luckily only reared its drab head for one night at the Barbican. If you’re going to splurge as much money as opera often has to splurge, you have to ask yourself why. If you don’t, you create a situation in which operas come about merely because they can, often just to continue the tradition in the most inoffensive way possible. ‘Don’t mind me!’ says this

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Sell the London Stock Exchange? OK, but not to the Germans

The London Stock Exchange is no longer the red-hot crucible it once was, given the multifarious ways by which shares, bonds and derivatives now change hands. But the prospect of the LSE passing into the control of Deutsche Börse — in what was announced as a ‘merger of equals’, but with the Germans holding the larger stake and the top job — is a mighty provocation to Brexit campaigners. The Express claims it would reduce the London market ‘to an insignificant regional afterthought’. Brexit or not, there’s logic to a pan-European trading platform with shared technologies and harmonised listing rules: but who can doubt that the German agenda must be to hoover

Friday

Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith promises to be ‘pansexual’ for London

As Zac Goldsmith fights to be the next Mayor of London against Labour’s Sadiq Khan, he is striving to appeal to all Londoners. Alas, somewhere in the process of doing this, he appears to have got a bit confused. In an interview with Pink News — the news website aimed at the LGBT community, Goldsmith said that he wanted to be a mayor for everyone, employing the term ‘pansexual’ to try and make his point: Pink News: Would you like to be the mayor for everyone? ZG: I would use the term pansexual here, if my understanding is correct. https://vine.co/v/iXa9lEB5Jrx While Mr S suspects that Goldsmith means that he wants to appeal

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Easy to swallow

Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of Lambeth by the railway arches. This makes it look, inevitably, like the set of The Bill, but with a painting of Damien Hirst on a nearby wall, which would surely confuse the Bill. Pharmacy 1 was, for five years until 2003, in Notting Hill. So we are already doing better. It is said that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain complained about Pharmacy 1, and worried it would confuse people looking for a real pharmacy, but I do not know if this was true. If it was, they were too stupid

Emily Rhodes

Who steals books?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsangryamerica/media.mp3″ title=”Emily Rhodes talks to Isabel Hardman about book thieves” startat=1139] Listen [/audioplayer] Notoriously, during the riots in London five years ago, Waterstones was the only high-street shop that wasn’t looted. But that depressing lack of book-pinching belied a thriving -tendency. Think of a bookshop and you think of a musty, hushed spot where people browse and whisper. In fact, it is thick with thieves. As a bookseller, I’ve encountered many a thief over the years. Most dramatic was the Mr Men thief, who used to steal a whole shelf of these tiny children’s books every couple of months. One afternoon I emerged from the stockroom to find the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Better that the Americans take over the London Stock Exchange

The London Stock Exchange is no longer the red-hot crucible it once was, given the multifarious ways by which shares, bonds and derivatives now change hands. But the prospect of the LSE passing into the control of Deutsche Börse — in what was announced as a ‘merger of equals’, but with the Germans holding the larger stake and the top job — is a mighty provocation to Brexit campaigners. The Express claims it would reduce the London market ‘to an insignificant regional afterthought’. Brexit or not, there’s logic to a pan-European trading platform with shared technologies and harmonised listing rules: but who can doubt that the German agenda must be

Paul Levy

Strangers in their native land

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly happy marriage, Their Promised Land by Ian Buruma has a deeper purpose. The cache of letters to and from Winifred (‘Win’) and Bernard (‘Bun’) Schlesinger is the pre-email, daily correspondence of two people who could not bear to be apart, yet were separated for years at a time by both world wars. Although his grandparents died in 1984 and 1986, this artful volume reveals a good deal about the world we live in today. Born and brought up in posh Hampstead comfort, with plenty of servants, before moving to a

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

You’ve been framed

‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at St John, the Smithfield restaurant. Parr is Britain’s best-known photographer, but he is no acolyte of celebrity. Like the Italian anti-designers, his Seventies contemporaries who wanted to dull the sheen of modernism by elevating the mundane (or valorising crap, as I would put it), he is a devotee of the ordinary. But is he celebrating the everyday or mocking it? He never quite answers, although he does say, ‘I enjoy the banal.’ Ask me and I’d say the banal is what we want to avoid. Since 2014, Martin Parr has

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 25 February 2016

Q. Former colleagues, with whom I got on very well in the context of the office, are buying a house near my own and say they are depending on me and my husband to introduce them to ‘all’ our friends in this area. This has been giving me nightmares. Like us, our friends down here are busy with jobs and children and would not thank us for foisting on to them new neighbours who would not be on the same wavelength. It’s a sense of humour thing. We are so tired we just want to relax when socialising. But I don’t want to be unneighbourly. How can I tactfully dispel

Harry Mount

Diary – 25 February 2016

The Prime Minister is pretty angry with Boris. But the idea that they’ve competed with each other since school is wrong. Boris is two years older than Cameron — and differences in age are like dog years when you’re young. When I was 13, 15-year-olds seemed like grown-ups, 6ft tall with three days’ growth. When I interviewed Cameron last year, he said he’d hardly known Boris at Eton because he was in College — the scholars’ house — and two years above him. Cameron did remember Boris on the rugby field because he was so dishevelled and ferocious. And he watched him in a few debates at the Oxford Union.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The City says it’s for staying in but I wonder what the big beasts think

‘The City is in no doubt that staying in Europe is the only way ahead,’ declared Mark Boleat for the City of London Corporation. Likewise Chris Cummings of the lobby group TheCityUK praised David Cameron for delivering ‘a really special deal’. The official Square Mile is squarely for ‘remain’, confident that the Prime Minister has secured safeguards to let the UK keep control of a thriving financial sector in a multi–currency EU. But with all due respect, I wonder what the real players think. The economists Gerard Lyons and Ruth Lea are two other respected City voices, and they warn that those safeguards won’t be worth much as Paris, Frankfurt

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 18 February 2016

My upstairs neighbours are terribly nice, but too naive to be allowed to renovate their flat in peace. The two brothers in their twenties bought the apartment together and are doing it up, I suppose, because they hope to sell and divide the spoils so they can buy one flat each. Such are the struggles of the younger generation to get on the housing ladder, and their efforts are laudable. They are young, idealistic and full of enthusiasm. However, it would be much easier for all of us if they would listen to me when I try to explain to them that doom lies around every corner and nothing is

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Italian cuts

Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear is your compulsion — Bill Nighy walked past me as I searched for Sartoria; I had walked, obliquely, into his film and I was not dressed for it. But when am I ever? I wore Gap to the Valentino couture show in Paris, out of sheer spite. Sartoria — a preening name which I dislike — wafts on reams of praise. Male critics love it; and it is a masculine restaurant. It is long and wide, with dark woods, expensive lamps and what here are called ‘neutral colours’. There is a

Ivan Hewett

Could a piece with no singing be the future of opera?

Nowhere are human beings so magnificently self-assertive as in opera.  Everything about operatic characters is outsize; their bodies, their flowing gowns and capacious cloaks, and their desires. No sooner has the hero set his eyes on the leading lady than he trumpets his desire to possess her; when the villain spots his victim, he tells us how he longs to send him to hell. All this fervent emotion is channelled through those great ringing voices, aided and abetted by the orchestra’s surges and swells. It’s exhilarating to behold, partly because we envy these creatures their unbuttoned emotional life. We, by contrast, are held back by a thousand scruples and doubts.

Wednesday

Steerpike

Is Russell Brand thinking about going to university?

During Russell Brand’s brief foray into politics, the comedian struggled to be taken seriously by members of the establishment. On one such occasion, Peter Hitchens hit out at the BBC for inviting the comedian to discuss drugs policy on an episode of Newsnight. The incident irked Brand so much that he later asked for the scene to be omitted from a documentary charting his career. So Mr S is intrigued to learn that Brand may be taking steps to bolster his academic credentials. Word reaches Steerpike that Brand has been spied looking around the School of Oriental and African Studies — part of the University of London — which counts Aung San Suu Kyi among its almuni. A student

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Household incomes are rising – but are Londoners really reaping the benefits?

Household incomes have finally topped the levels they were at just after the financial crash. The average household in Britain now earns £24,300 a year, above the last peak in 2009. The picture looks rosy, with rising employment and low inflation helping income growth rise. But is there more to it than meets the eye?  It certainly seems that way if you live in London. Although those in the capital have enjoyed a healthy rise of nearly three per cent in their household incomes since the downturn, when you factor in housing costs, most Londoners are actually still losing out, according to the figures put out today by the Resolution

Thursday

Koos Couvée

The gangs of north London

I covered another stabbing the other day, a particularly nasty one this time. An 18-year-old was repeatedly knifed in the stomach and beaten over the head with a baseball bat. Witnesses told me he’d been outside his mum’s tower-block flat in Islington, north London, when he was rushed by a group of about ten or 15 boys. He suffered serious head injuries and multiple stab wounds and was soon in hospital in a medically induced coma. By some miracle, he survived. Who would have committed such a brutal and pointless crime? A source told me police believed the attackers to be from two London gangs: the Hoxton N1 gang, whose

Tuesday

Henry Williams

Move over Royal Family. London’s oligarchs are the new tourist attraction

‘And if you look to your left you will see a house once linked to Rakhat Aliyev, Kazakhstan’s former intelligence chief, who died in police custody in Austria while awaiting charges of corruption, torture and murder.’ These apartments form the final stop in London’s new unmissable attraction, the London Kleptocracy Tour. The tour is a Beverley Hills-type guide around the houses of the colourful oligarchs of the Former Soviet Union who have bought up London’s super super prime properties with the help of the capital’s lawyers, estate agents and PR firms. The tour takes in such obvious classics as One Hyde Park, Kensington Palace Gardens (the oligarchs apparently love the received kudos from

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Public offence

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3″ title=”Stephen Bayley and Posy Metz from Historic England discuss public artwork” startat=1206] Listen [/audioplayer]There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’ — you can find a version in Victoria Tower Gardens — is somewhat collectivist in subject matter.) But there are certainly abundant monuments to the committee mentality, the bureaucratic spirit and art-world groupthink. That is what most contemporary ‘public art’ amounts to. You will have seen ‘public art’ if you wander through developments of luxury apartments on, say, the southbank Thames littoral between Lambeth and Battersea. Or on a progressive university campus anywhere. Sometimes public