The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of a critical appreciation of 75 years of TV, filmed at Bafta and presented by one of the BBC’s pre-eminent house luvvies. As an antidote I had to switch over to ITV2 to watch Love Island.
Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need for trainers, an umpire, or a scoreboard. No need for rules at all. After Wimbledon, the tea-and-jam, grass-stained, Sunday-afternoon scenario from A Room with a View is the only one to emulate. In 1908, when
The Vaults at Waterloo are gallantly trying to pose as the party spot for hipsters in the world’s coolest city. Brickwork alone may frustrate this goal. The venue is half-buried in a warren of arches beneath the western approaches to the terminus. The foyer is scruffy, poorly lit, and its dank air is scented with
Boy is she fat, and getting fatter. I realise this is something we’re not meant to mention when talking about Beth — but it’s kinda the elephant in the room. Literally. And I worry about the lass. These days she makes Mama Cass look like Edie Sedgwick. Of course, we should accept her as she
Mitridate, re di Ponto was Mozart’s fifth opera, written and first produced when he was 14 years old. Absolutely amazing. Now we’ve got that out of the way, what about the work? Is it worth reviving, and if so how? The Royal Opera evidently thinks so, since it is reviving for the second time Graham
Antony Gormley is not amused. The artist who has installed hundreds of life-sized, cast-iron sculptures of his naked body in cities all over the world is affronted with the way a mysterious member of the British public has responded to one of the artworks. The piece in question, which could be known as ‘Narcissism’ but
Last week the exhibition Painting India by the late Howard Hodgkin opened at the Hepworth Wakefield. Hodgkin started collecting Indian miniatures as a schoolboy at Eton and first visited the subcontinent in 1964, travelling with Robert Skelton, the then assistant keeper of the Indian collection at the V&A. Hodgkin would return there many times during
It was most odd. Four decades after I’d walked into the Sun to start my first shift as a news sub editor, I was sitting in a small theatre in the heart of La La Labour-land (the Almeida in Corbyn’s Islington) watching a play where I knew all the characters, as I both worked with
Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental Victorians and the modern man of government; shark art dealers and the ‘atrocious’ Royal Academy; compilers of honours lists and editors of literary reviews; thin flapper girls and the fat ‘Belgian bumpkins’ of Peter Paul
Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether the viewer shares the artist’s beliefs. But whatever you think of Richard M. Nixon, it would be hard not to enjoy Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of him and his cronies at Hauser & Wirth, Savile
If you want to see an opera director kicking a genius when they’re down — and I mean really sticking the knife in and giving it a good old twist around — Fidelio is usually a safe bet. It’s one of Beethoven’s few undisputed masterpieces in which he’s not in absolute command of his medium;
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is an action, heist, car-chase film that is said to reinvent the action, heist, car-chase film. But as you can’t have an action, heist, car-chase film without action, heists and car chases, you may wish to ask yourself: how much do I like action, heist, car-chase films in the first instance?
Hand it to the Americans. They know how to hype a young talent to death. The latest to be asphyxiated by the literary establishment is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He’s written six off-Broadway plays (one adapted from a script by Boucicault), and won a ton of awards and prize money. Most of the English ‘critics’, if one
As Kraftwerk took their 3D show around Britain last week, a document from 2013 surfaced online, purporting to be their requirements for car transportation while on tour, necessitated by ‘rather bad driving experiences in the recent past in various parts of the world’. Kraftwerk, it said, should only be driven by ‘suave gear changers (if
Amid the general political turmoil, a flutter of hope has greeted the arrival of Sir Nicholas Serota as chairman of Arts Council England, an organisation of fading relevance. Sir Nick, grand impresario of the Tate galleries, started life as an Arts Council gofer in 1969, taught to hang pictures by the flamboyant David Sylvester, friend
How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work and 350 hours of interviews — with survivors and perpetrators, saviours and collaborators, historians and bystanders — is considered one of the greatest films ever made. For decades, director Claude Lanzmann kept returning to the
When friends from overseas with the slightest interest in music ask for recommendations about what to see in London, I always come up trumps. Boastful but true. In fact, even friends who’ve lived in London all their lives are impressed when I suggest a night of opera at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre.
Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue and made Swiss Cottage, say. On the other hand, maybe you did have it coming, especially as I once overheard one mother say to another in the Coffee Cup: ‘James? He had so much homework
Much though I loved it at the time, not a great deal of lasting worth came out of that fervid punk upheaval between 1976 and 1978. In terms of bands you would voluntarily listen to again, there was just The Clash and The Only Ones, in my book. The latter enjoyed no commercial success, despite
In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable is combined in his greatest work with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of emotion. It is this delicacy that may finally convince us that we are indeed in the presence of that rarest of
‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado — except, unlike the doomed early 1990s soap opera in which Tony Holland attempted to recreate the success of EastEnders on the Costa del Sol, it has at least been glamorously relocated to Nice, Monaco,
‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He was taking us on a trip of about 150 miles, from Sibiu to Targu Jiu, to see the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi. Taking the faster route, we set off a little after 9 a.m. and
Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on a stage that resembles a grey dungeon while sad events unfold around them. The first woman gets pregnant. The second takes heroin. The third argues with a lesbian about a fish. Their lives span several
This week’s column is dedicated to my mother who loved her radio and encouraged us to be listeners. Without her, I would not be qualified to do this. My earliest memories are of sitting under the table while my mother sewed and the theme tune of Listen with Mother echoed through the house. The radio,
Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer of Gerald Barry can be that he wasn’t pulling my leg. While showing him round a museum, a guide pointed out said floor-covering. Whereupon — Barry being Barry — he was overcome by an urge
Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but
Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics and art historians. While we were admiring the Raphael frescoes that fill these private apartments of the Renaissance popes, Matthias Wivel, curator of the Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition at the National Gallery, made the most