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Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 January 2015

Home Party leaders mercilessly launched 100 days of campaigning before the general election on 7 May. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said he would reduce the annual maximum household receipt of welfare to £23,000 from the current limit of £26,000. Ed Miliband announced a ten-year plan for the National Health Service, but Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, said: ‘You’ve got a pale imitation actually of the 1992 general election campaign and maybe it will have the same outcome.’ Amjad Bashir, a Ukip MEP, switched to the Conservative party, upon which Ukip said he was being investigated over ‘unanswered financial and employment questions’, allegations he denied. Peers dropped an

Thursday

Deborah Ross

A Most Violent Year, review: mesmerising performances – and coats

A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what it actually is. (What’s new?) Set in New York City in 1981, against the improbable background that is the heating oil business (it’s sexier than you’d think), this isn’t quite a gangster film and it isn’t quite a thriller and it isn’t quite a morality play and it isn’t quite an exploration of the American Dream and it isn’t one of those parables about the evils of capitalism either. This is discombobulating, initially. We are used to the familiarity of well-defined genres. ‘Where is this going?’ you will keep asking

Thursday

Ian Thomson

What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers

‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ Groucho Marx wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1961 on receiving from him a signed studio portrait. The Missouri-born Eliot was the Marx Brothers’ devoted fan; three years later, in June 1964, Groucho called on the 75-year-old poet at his home in London. Eliot was interested in the Marx Brothers’ first undisputed film masterpiece, Animal Crackers (1930), while Groucho wanted only to quote from ‘The Waste Land’; however, the men agreed that they shared a love of cats and fine cigars. Winston Churchill was another who admired the Marxes and their deliciously mad repartee. During an air attack on London in May 1941

Thursday

Ismene Brown

An American in Paris: a zingy new Wheeldon dance-musical that you won’t want to miss

A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places, I’d urge you to resolve to dust off the private jet and get to Paris quick this weekend hoping to find a ticket somehow for the last Châtelet performances of An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s s’wonderful, s’marvellous new staging of the Gershwin/Minnelli musical film. Or book for New York in March when the show moves to its second home on Broadway. But surely there must be a UK run soon. It’s the first big dance-musical of the Royal Ballet’s favourite son, which is why we should pay attention. The

Thursday

Taki

Another New York institution bites the dust

Except for sickness in one’s family or the loss of a life, is there anything sadder than to see a bookstore shut its doors? I used to live on a street that had three bookstores within 50 yards of each other. All three are now boutiques selling expensive bric-à-brac, or whatever the junk that tarts wear is called. Browsing in a bookstore has to be every bibliophile’s wet dream, a perfect way to stand upright, in a correct posture, and lose weight while reading blurbs. Excelsior! It is every frustrated or unsuccessful writer’s dream to own and operate a bookstore, but nowadays it’s like selling sunlamps to Australians: there are

Simon Berry

At last, trendy gins are tasting like gin again

I blame my mother. Although gin wasn’t her ruin, I have to admit, she did enjoy a gin and tonic. And as any student of the spirits industry will tell you, you never drink what your parents drink. The problem, I now realise, was that gin in the 1970s wasn’t very good. Tonic water was even worse: the primary aim of even the best known (Ssssssh — you know who you are) being to disguise the roughness of the gin. And vice versa, I suppose. Gin was dying on its feet, being replaced by the infinitely cooler vodka, which clever advertising in the 1970s had transformed from the equivalent of

Thursday

Taki

Once upon a time, when a poor farmer came to the big city he put on his only suit

The leaves are falling non-stop, like names dropped in Hollywood, and it has suddenly turned colder than the look I got from a very pretty girl at a downtown restaurant. I was dining with the writer Gay Talese and had gone outside for a cigarette. Two men and a lady came out looking for a cab. The scene was straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story: ‘I love you, I’ll take you home,’ said one of the young men. ‘I love you more, let me take you home,’ said the other. Both were well dressed and spoke proper English. There was nothing else to do but to butt in,

Monday

Anne Jolis

Boris’s dilemma: relinquish his US passport or pay American tax

When in doubt, blame wealthy foreigners for any political problems. That goes for pols in the US and the UK alike, and even the dual-national Mayor of London is not immune. Boris Johnson opposes blanket non-dom and mansion taxes, but wants councils to ‘whack up’ local levies on empty homes and advocates closing stamp-duty loopholes exploited by ‘mainly but not exclusively non-doms’.  Through these, he explained in one Telegraph column, and with ‘the agency of some clever lawyers, they avoid a tax that is paid by virtually everyone else’. So it is with great interest – and some sympathy, on the part of yours truly – that we expatriates in London learn of Johnson’s dispute with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Speaking

Thursday

Taki

Snobbery, sneering and secret sniggers: the sad truth about the so-called ‘special relationship’

To the grand Herrera house on the upper east side of Manhattan for lunch in honour of Lord and Lady Linley. David Linley is over here to receive an award for his designs, which even a rube like myself where furniture is concerned finds wonderful. Princess Margaret’s son is talented, but he’s also a very nice man. His parents must have done something right, because he’s lived a scandal-free life (as has his sister) — something other British royals cannot claim. He also earns his own living, as rare among royals as a neoconservative marine. Our hostess Carolina Herrera is the best fashion designer in America, by far. She and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Norman Mailer’s wife comes out of the shadows

‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading the first chapters of a novel she wrote in the 1970s. It took her decades to recover from this accolade and the book remained unpublished until 2000. Here’s a two-handed drama she drafted in the 1980s. The setting is a New York strip joint. A social anthropologist finds a girl in a booth and hires her to describe her daily life. He feeds her banknotes through a slot, like a zoo-keeper giving peanuts to a caged marmoset, and she prattles away at him earning a dollar every 60 seconds. She

Philip Hensher

Stefan Zweig: the tragedy of a great bad writer

Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of the intellectuals of the German speaking world during the decades before 1940, in which Zweig gathered a colossal and adoring public both in German and in multiple translations. It was like a password among the sophisticated. Zweig might please the simple reader; but a true intellectual would recognise his own peers by a shared contempt for this middlebrow bestseller. The novelist Kurt Tucholsky has a devastating sketch of a German equivalent of E.F. Benson’s Lucia: Mrs Steiner was from Frankfurt, not terribly young, alone and with black hair. She wore

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic soloists in flamenco and Indian kathak, the front-page news of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement, and, even more astonishingly, English National Ballet’s announcement of its new Giselle next year by Akram Khan. Consequently I have to short-change some of the highlights (note for next year’s diaries, folks — October is invariably the dance month of the year), including the liberation of ice-skating by the Canadians of Le Patin Libre, who made Alexandra Palace rink feel like a frozen field with their casual pyrotechnics (ice-o-technics?). And then there was the compellingly odd flamenco

Nicky Haslam

The genius of Cecil Beaton’s interiors

The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was effete, pink-and-white pretty, theatrical and mother-adored, with a stodgy brother (but a couple of compliant sisters) —a cliché of post-Edwardian sniffiness, a leer through raised lorgnettes. A humdrum early education followed by Harrow might have formed him into a pliant carbon of his timber-merchant father, but Cecil escaped this. His personality, energy and burgeoning bravery led him far and wide, and often delightfully astray. It took just a few years for him to trample those early 20th-century taboos under his winged heel, and forge his curiosity-fuelled career. Armed with a

Thursday

Colin Maccabe

To call this offering a book is an abuse of language

I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world war when New York supplanted Paris as the cultural capital of the world? One thinks of the Beats, of Dylan and Greenwich Village, of Sontag and Trilling. Well think again, for none of the above feature in this book at all. Indeed the first thing to be said is that to call this offering from Thames & Hudson a book is a real abuse of language. It has covers and inside those covers one finds text and image but the three essays that cover visual art, architecture and design and

Thursday

Fisun Güner

How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction

Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in any ‘formalist’ sense. If a critic called him a ‘colourist’, he would bristle; if they admired his sense of composition, he would complain that this was not what he was about at all. His was an art of deep content, his subject an invocation of the religious, the tragic, the mythic. ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ he once famously said. ‘And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss

Tuesday

Anne Jolis

My generation can’t afford to buy a house in London; so what?

The UK Land Registry today released its latest report on house prises, showing the ticket-cost of an average home in England and Wales down 2.2 per cent to £177,299 in September from a peak of £181,324 in November 2007. No, that still doesn’t mean that underpaid Westminster interns can afford to buy a home in central London. Per the Land Registry, average house prices in the capital rose 18.4 per cent since this time last year. Cue the New York Times with an opinion article composed by a young writer, cavilling about the matter: ‘Without capital, those of us who do not own property resign ourselves to running in an

Thursday

Taki

The battle for decency has been lost

An intelligent letter from a reader, Stanislas Yassukovich CBE, warms my heart. It’s nice to know there are others as appalled as I am by today’s so-called elite’s ghastly manners. Good manners, a rarity these days, are not a superficial activity. They serve a moral purpose, that of an inner unselfishness, a readiness to put others first. They are the opposite of brute force, concealing man’s natural belligerence. After the Titanic went down, it was revealed that first-class passengers had died in disproportionate numbers because they had queued in an orderly manner for a lifeboat. Forget the movie, that was Hollywood bullshit; Astor and Guggenheim, the two richest on board,

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Is New York ready for Cydney the spaniel (and her Facebook friends)?

As the maître d’ ushered me into the packed restaurant, I leaned in close and intoned softly, so as not to be heard by the elegant lady sitting nearby who was obviously my date, ‘I’m here to meet…’. And I nodded towards her as I said the name of my New York publisher. Yes, that’s right. New York. I’ve had fancy conference calls and everything. A lot of very bright Americans say a lot of lovely things to me down a phone line with a two second delay and I say ‘um’, and ‘oh, right’. And they sound confused that I don’t sound more excited by the prospect of a

Monday

Julie Bindel

Why I love this feminist who hit nuns and shot Andy Warhol

Just as I was feeling frustrated about the lack of robust books on feminism I spot a real corker: Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). Solanas, for those of you who have never had the para-sexual pleasure of reading her work, was not your fun feminist. Solanas, who died in 1988 aged 52, did not write comforting screeds about how women can break through the glass ceiling or how to cope with motherhood. She railed against men, blaming them entirely for her miserable life and for the hell that women suffer under patriarchy. Solanas, as the biography brilliantly highlights, made herself

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The camera always lies

Everyone knows about architecture being frozen music. The source of that conceit may be debated, but its validity is timeless and certain. For all its weightiness, architecture plays with ethereal proportion, harmony, resonance and delight: the stuff of music. But architecture is more fundamentally about the management of light and space. Or, at least, that’s how architects see it. So photography makes better sense of architecture than any other medium does: there is something congruent between the fixed optical geometry of a camera and the way we perceive buildings. And because images are more readily accessible than travel to remote sites, everyone’s experience of world architecture is, at least initially,