The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nicholas Fearn has arrayed before us in his latest book a procession of Western philosophers, dead and alive, hailing from the dawn of rational thought in the ancient world to the present day. In the manner of a polite and cultivated ringmaster he impartially introduces, compares and sums up, giving all his characters a say,
Late November 1950: United Nations forces commanded by the legendary General Douglas MacArthur are approaching the North Korean frontier when Chinese forces suddenly strike, an overwhelming onslaught precipitating a devastating retreat. At a presidential press conference held on 30 November, Harry Truman is pressed by journalists whether the atomic bomb might now be used to
I can’t remember a Christmas where I watched so little Christmas TV as this one, which is a shame in a way, because I do think that mammoth sessions in front of the box are the key to feeling truly Christmassy. Going to church helps, too, obviously, but it’s never quite enough. The only way
In a recent article in the Times, Matthew Parris wrote stirringly about the inspiration which may come from listening to buskers: ‘Amazing how a snatch of music heard in passing can lift the imagination and spirit.’ To him the essence of this snatch is hummable or whistle-able melody, and we are told that the ‘superior’
It’s the morning of 2 January as I write, and I’m gloomily contemplating my New Year’s resolutions. Actually, gloomily is hardly the mot juste. I’m having a complete jelly-livered panic attack about them. It’s our family custom to go to the Pilot Boat pub in Lyme Regis for lunch on New Year’s Eve, and to
Andrew Lambirth on the splendour of the Canaletto exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery Magnet for tourists as it is, Buckingham Palace is the perfect setting for Canaletto in Venice, an exhibition devoted to the grandest producer of tourist art of the 18th century focusing exclusively on a city which had already become one of the
Bernard-Henri Lévy is possessed of a large fortune, great intelligence and film-star good looks (if now a little ageing). He therefore had the wherewithal to go through life like a hot knife through butter, but yet has chosen many times to expose himself to great danger in the continuing wars of torrid zones. Why? In
Harry Thompson’s death last year cut short a rampantly successful television career and a budding literary one. He will not be remembered for his fiction, but his only novel is strong-limbed, clean-cut and robustly hearty. It bravely makes straight for the most torturing of Victorian questions, the challenge to religious faith by the brash self-confidence
Recently an auction house in Swindon sold for more than £11,000 a cracked tooth of Napoleon’s, extracted during his exile on St Helena. Although Napoleon did little except talk, write and dig and garden, his final six years have been the subject of more books than any other period of his life. It was recently
A phrase often used in praise of comics artists is that they ‘transcend the limitations of the medium’. The apologetic subtext to that phrase tells you a lot. Even as we praise the greats of comics, we tend to do so as if their achievements are in spite of, rather than because of, their chosen
The good end-of-year news was that Home Truths on Radio Four (Saturdays) is to be taken off the air in the spring. Unfortunately, it seems likely to be replaced by something similar. The new show, says Mark Damazer, the network controller, ‘will continue to feature the sometimes extraordinary experiences of its listeners’. Damazer explained that
Memory Lane circa 1900, revisited by moonlight without cars, let alone speed cameras: not since Thorsten Rasch’s hommage to late-romantic/early-modern idioms admiringly described in this column a couple of years ago have I encountered so thoroughgoing an exercise in pastiche as the gigantic string quartet that occupied most of a recent evening on Radio Three.
Although it was set up as a contest between a flagrant outsider and a more traditional intimist there was little doubt that Michel Houellebecq would lose out in the Goncourt stakes. His sulphurous vision and unapologetic rule-breaking were too much for the reading public, not to mention the Goncourt judges, who took little pleasure in
Until reading this stimulating and sumptuous study from the archives of Country Life I had only associated the name Edward Knoblock, an American-born dramatist, with one of the best-known anecdotes about John Gielgud’s gaffes. You remember the scene: Gielgud and Knoblock are lunching at the Ivy when Johnny absent-mindedly describes someone as ‘nearly as boring
Though the relentlessness of its attack is kept up almost to the end, nothing in Mother’s Milk is quite so funny as its second chapter. This finds the Melrose family — 40-something barrister Patrick, wife Mary, five-year-old Robert and newly born Thomas — hiding in the guest bedroom of old Mrs Melrose’s house in the
Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can
In 1967 Claude-Anne Lopez brought out a perfectly delightful book, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris. It described Benjamin Frank- lin’s eight years as the infant United States’ first ambassador to France from the slightly oblique angle of his relations with his French women friends. The book was amusing, subtle, beautifully written
Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some
Oh joy, oh bliss, it is Nutcracker season again! Hordes of overdressed and overexcited children invade our theatres, much to the despair of those who know that the kids’ excitement and attention will fade as soon as they realise that neither the Mouse King nor the Sugar Plum Fairy can be incinerated by one of
On Ego is a lecture that turns into a nightmare. An amiable young neurologist, Alex, strolls on stage and addresses us on the subject of mind. He has a lab technician Derek (Robin Soans wearing a white coat and a lost gaze), who presents him with a bucket containing a brain. Alex picks up the
English National Opera’s production of Billy Budd originated in Wales seven years ago, and is also shared with Opera Australia. Neil Armfield is the producer, and the set design is by Brian Thomson. It is an hydraulic platform, which in Cardiff occupied the whole stage, but at the Coliseum leaves a lot of surrounding space
Each year the same thing happens. Each year we’re expected to suspend for a month the exercise of sound musical judgment as we’re engulfed, willingly or otherwise, in a deluge of Christmas Music. All of a sudden, banality in various guises becomes completely acceptable. Every church in the land that hasn’t descended to the satanic
A Christmas spirit hovers over Art of the Middle Ages at Sam Fogg (15d Clifford Street, W1, until 12 January), visible particularly in the Three Kings bearing gifts in the tiny 14th-century French ivory diptych, and in the green-winged stained-glass angel probably from the glazier who worked at Sées Cathedral, Orne in Normandy, around 1270–80.
Most readers probably remember the name Guy Liddell, if at all, as the Fifth Man. Or possibly the Fourth, since we remember the first three, Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but cannot remember the next one, since the name kept on changing between Straight, Hollis and others. Liddell’s death in 1958 was largely un- noticed. He
with a foreword by David Hockney and an introduction by Lucinda Lambton It is a well-known fact that artists love dachshunds. Bonnard had Poucette, Picasso Frika, Andy Warhol Archie, and Hockney his Stanley and Boodge. Less often noted is the attraction these adorable creatures have always had for royalty. But simply turn to the magisterial
One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the
Paul Foot, the ‘campaigning’ journalist who died last year and whose funeral attracted a crowd of 2,000 mourners, was a Cornish nonconformist who retrained as a Marxist revolutionary. Had he lived a century ago he would have made a stalwart Liberal member for West Cornwall, savaging the tinmasters. But Foot was condemned by the ideology
‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ It could be a fanciful tryst between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, but it is something far more auspicious: the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, John Watson, MD, in 1881. Their friendship spawned many things: worldwide societies, sightseeing tours, commemorative deerstalkers (though Holmes
Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied