The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The latest issue of the Spectator is out today and it asks a question we’ve been pondering on the Book Blog: why are there so many Titanic books?Melanie McDonagh explains that ‘the Titanic offered any number of moral dilemmas to ponder in 1912. It still does.’ The disaster prompts us to ask how we and
It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday and what could be a more thoughtful present for one’s mum than a good book? Especially a book that features a happy relationship between a mother and her child. Surely it beats an overpriced, overcrowded Sunday brunch out somewhere, or a bunch of panic-bought, petrol-station flowers? With this in mind,
It is, of course, entirely appropriate that the estate of Bram Stoker should choose to mark the 100th anniversary of the author’s death this year with a series of events, such as the publication of Bram Stoker’s Lost Journal, and a special edition of Dracula. With other writers you might decide to commemorate their
A last minute cancellation by Adrian Mole meant that Sue Townsend had to step in to answer this week’s Shelf Life questions. She tells us which books she read as a child and what she would title her own memoirs. Her latest book, The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year, is out now.
The political battle over library closures has intensified. Earlier this morning, shadow culture secretary Dan Jarvis chastised libraries minister Ed Vaizey for being the ‘Dr Beeching of libraries’. Jarvis said that Vaizey should not be so ‘short-sighted’ as to permit 600 libraries to shut in England. He urged the government to intervene to save these ‘vital assets’,
As the publishing industry comes to terms with the latest reports that the book is dead — this time at the hands of a digital revolution — we can count Penguin’s illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland among the reasons to be optimistic for its future. This latest version of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, for
From ‘Prothalamion’ There in a meadow by the river’s side A flock of nymphs I chancéd to espy, All lovely daughters of the flood thereby, With goodly greenish locks all loose untied As each had been a bride; And each one had a little wicker basket Made of fine twigs, entrailéd curiously. In which they
It is literary festival season, and there seem to be more than ever. In the next three months, there will be gatherings at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Swindon, Oxford, Cambridge, Hay, Glasgow — I could go on and on and on. The second wave of festivals comes in the high summer, before the final and long hurrah in
Jeffrey Archer is a menace. His books should be pulped and an Act of Parliament passed to ban their sale. They are the Maltesers of publishing. Once you’ve started one you can’t finish until you’ve scoffed the whole lot. And that can be very troubling. I missed stations, was late for meetings and kept the
The British Museum’s latest exhibition Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam (until 15 April) sets out to explain the mysteries of this annual pilgrimage. Last year, a total of 2,927,719 pilgrims went to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, something that all Muslims should try to do at least once in their lifetime. Such huge numbers are
The fashion for museum-quality exhibitions in commercial galleries continues apace with two notable shows in Mayfair: Cy Twombly at Eykyn Maclean, and Julio González at Ordovas. Both galleries specialise in this kind of display, which must be more to do with impressing potential clients than with generating income, given that both are loan shows. I
William Cook believes that the British cannot really understand the artist until they’ve been to Antwerp In a quiet corner of Tate Britain there is a little exhibition that sheds fresh light on an artist whom the British have never really learned to love. Rubens & Britain (until 6 May) is a fascinating show, documenting
From an early Transatlantic Session. I think you’ll find it speaks for itself. How could it fail when it’s got Emmylou, Rufus, Kate and Anna? Simple but pretty nifty.
Let’s not waste more millions ‘saving’ Old Masters Last week the National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland proudly announced that they had jointly raised £45 million to buy Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ from the Duke of Sutherland, thereby ‘saving it for the nation’. A few days before, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced
I’m told that the new production of Dvorˇák’s Rusalka at the Royal Opera House is controversial. There were boos at the first night and reports of audience members walking out in disgust. I too walked out in disgust. Mine, however, had nothing to do with what was happening on stage. It was prompted by the
The Choirbook for the Queen, which has recently been launched, is a remarkable initiative, involving most of the leading Church musicians of our day and many philanthropists besides. The idea behind it is simple enough: to put together a collection of anthems (I use the word precisely) to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the
There can be no doubting the nobility of John Adams’s intentions in writing The Death of Klinghoffer to a text by Alice Goodman, nor ENO’s courage in putting it on, though they do have a captive audience for minimalist and near-minimalist operas. The work is conceived, as all commentaries tirelessly tell us, in the spirit
Jackie Mason, the New York stand-up, looks very strange. It’s as if somebody shrank Tony Bennett and microwaved him for two hours. Mason is short, dark, troll-like, densely built, with shining bulbous lips and a twinkly expression of diabolical mischief. His hair gathers over his head in a wave of red-brown crinkliness. For his solo
Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it —
Paula Milne’s drama serial White Heat (BBC2, Thursday) starts in 1965 which to some of us might seem like yesterday, but is equidistant between the end of the first world war and now. So to most people it’s ancient history. Various students in London are looking for accommodation, which is strange since Churchill died in
What took them so long? For weeks and weeks he’d been limping into the farmhouse whining about how cold he is, how tired, how he’s had enough of Tom gadding about Borsetshire selling his gruesome-sounding pork meatballs while he’s stuck on the farm trimming leeks and getting up at the crack of dawn to do
The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed. ‘Of the folly
One of the pleasures of Alan Judd’s books is their sheer variety. His work includes biographies of Ford Madox Ford and Sir Mansfield Cummings, the first head of what became MI6, as well as nine novels, many of which have little in common with each other apart from unflashy but elegant prose. The Devil’s Own
The mighty convulsion that was the French Revolution has stirred the blood of historians from Thomas Carlyle to Simon Schama and consideration of it still inflames opinions. At its centre stood Maximilien Robespierre — 5’ 3”, stern, unaffacted in manner or dress, Spartan in his domestic habits — deified by his followers as the ‘Incorruptible’
In l958, my hero in life, the person I most wanted to be, was Keith Dewhurst. I had arrived on the Manchester Evening Chronicle straight from Durham as a graduate trainee reporter, which was a laugh, as they did no training. Keith was the paper’s Manchester United reporter, knew all the players, went to all
‘Very, very, very sexy’, a field-researcher scratches in his Antarctic notebook. He is describing a meteorite the size of a £1 coin that he has just picked up off the ice. The episode, recounted in Gabrielle Walker’s hugely informative book, reveals the passion of intrepid polar scientists. From the enthusiasm and diligence on display in
Hmm. Of the 30-plus characters in this novel, not one is both black and British. Odd, since it’s set in 2007-8, in south London. An early passage shows us a Polish builder listening to a ‘crowd of black kids’ on the Northern Line: ‘You never—’ ‘He never—’ ‘Batty man—’ And that’s it: six words in
The blurb on the front of Grace McCleen’s debut novel (from Room author Emma Donoghue) proclaims it to be ‘extraordinary’, and goes on to praise it as ‘brutally real’, commending its mixture of ‘social observation and crazy mysticism, held together by a tale of parent-child love’. Unusually for a blurb, this is all accurate. McCleen’s
Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of course, especially his son David, archetype of the boy sent crying home from school, who wrote a brilliant book about it, Bringing the House Down
