Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

The amazing story of the blind photographer

Radio

Perhaps the news that Radio 5 live will be the only BBC station (under the new broadcasting rights agreements) to broadcast ‘live’ golf will ensure that its audience stays above the six million listeners now dreamt of by its controller Jonathan Wall as the magic number he needs for the network to stay buoyant. (Figures

Results

More from Books

The school holidays in the final furlong and the next new phase and term in clear sight. This is when the thousands receive their plain envelopes informing them whether they have made the grade, precisely. And we look on, remembering or not remembering a future built on hopes and inadequacy, not knowing what is right

Spectator competition: ‘I really like Ed Miliband. Am I normal?’ Agony uncle Dan Brown responds (plus: a Samuel Pepys’-eye view of 21st-century London)

The Japanese novelist-turned-agony uncle Haruki Murakami is currently dishing out advice to fans on topics that range from cats and hate speech to parenting and infidelity. The call to cast a well-known writer, living or dead, in a similar role was an opportunity to check out the counselling skills of other literary greats — and

The art of Coke

Arts feature

In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was premièred, Henry Ford manufactured his millionth Model-T (‘a million of anything is a lot’, he said), Kafka’s Metamorphosis was published and so, too, was one of Einstein’s critical contributions to his own general theory of relativity. Mixed into this modernist cocktail of extreme achievement and harrowing

Marlene Dumas at Tate Modern reviewed: ‘remarkable’

Exhibitions

‘Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting,’ Henri Matisse once advised, ‘should begin by cutting out his own tongue.’ Marlene Dumas — whose work is the subject of a big new retrospective at Tate Modern — has not gone quite that far (and neither, of course, did Matisse). On the other hand, she does not

Selma review: rich, nuanced, heartbreaking

Cinema

Selma, the civil rights film that stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, undoubtedly contains the best and most powerful performance of the year as not nominated for an Oscar. Oyelowo has said this is because Hollywood prefers black actors when they play ‘subservient roles’ and aren’t ‘the centre of their own narrative, driving it

Why we should say farewell to the ENO

Opera

It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it had no name, it had no fixed address, it didn’t really know who it was or what it was doing. You’d find it at schools, at weddings, at political functions. It was an artistic whore

Approaching America

More from Books

Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly where I am to within a metre. This is the same way we track our missiles and drones. You stare for a moment and say oh. Then remembering your manners add thank you for showing

Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Met Opera Live, review: ‘superlative’

Les Contes d’Hoffmann Met Opera Live This was another excellent performance from the Met, though that house’s addiction to enormously elaborate scenery – most of which could be sold off to Las Vegas – reaches lunatic proportions, robbing the work of its dream-like or hallucinatory quality, though that must surely have been a large part

Steerpike

Chris Bryant: I am not James Blunt’s sex toy

After Mr S revealed that Chris Bryant has broken two ribs getting out of bed, speculation is rife that his nemesis James Blunt could be to blame for the incident. The duo fell out after the Labour MP claimed that British culture should not be dominated by the likes of privately educated crooners such as Blunt.

How Japan became a pop culture superpower

Arts feature

There is an island nation, just off the main body of a continent. It gained an empire from the force of its military and the finesse of its trading contracts. The empire withered, as they all do, under the gaze of history. But that didn’t finish the island nation off. It simply took over the

No. 347

Puzzles

White to play. This is a variation from Carlsen-Aronian, Wijk aan Zee 2015. Black has just played his bishop to a3, uncovering an attack on the white queen while also threatening the c1-rook. How can White respond to this double attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 3 February or via email to

Study

Poems

I’d tell you I came back here, that I’m writing in this room, if you had not found another and are happy, I presume. I’d tell you I returned and I have walked to you know where, if it were not to disturb you for so little, seems unfair. I’d tell you I have chosen

Could it be that Wolf Hall is actually the teeniest bit dull?

Television

In January 1958, the British government began working on the significantly titled Operation Hope Not: its plans for what to do when Winston Churchill died. The plans, it turned out, wouldn’t be needed until January 1965 — but the intervening seven years were obviously well spent, because, as Churchill: A Nation’s Farewell (BBC1, Wednesday) made

The man who discovered Ebola

Radio

By some quirk of fate, just as news reached the papers that the Scottish nurse who had contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was now recovered, the guest on that Radio 4 staple Desert Island Discs was the scientist who first identified the virus. This gave a programme that can seem rather outdated and

An artistic crime is committed at the Royal Festival Hall

Opera

In one of the more peculiar concerts that I have been to at the Royal Festival Hall, Vladimir Jurowski conducted excerpts from Das Rheingold in the first half of the programme, and Rachmaninov’s little-known opera The Miserly Knight in the second half. The idea, I gleaned from a pre-concert chat by the conductor and others,