Culture

Culture

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

The best (and worst) of ballet and dance over Christmas

The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, until 4 Jan *** The Little Match Girl, Lilian Baylis Studio, until 4 Jan ***** Edward Scissorhands, Sadler’s Wells, until 11 Jan *** Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet, until 16 Jan ** The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, Linbury Studio Theatre, until 17 Jan ** Amazing, the change in the dance weather this Christmas. Where usually there is snow, fairies, tinkly celestas, a

Does Hollywood need bullies?

There have always been bullies in Hollywood; it’s institutionalised, like a form of hazing, but the key difference between the film business and the Marine Corps is that bullying in Hollywood is not meant to inculcate esprit de corps; its purpose, for the bully, anyway, is to provide confirmation that the hierarchy is working in his

Melanie McDonagh

Why Frozen is a fabulously irritating film

For a film I’ve never seen, I really, really hate Frozen. For those who don’t have children and don’t look into shop windows and don’t buy toys and are oblivious to merchandise, it’s the blockbuster, Academy award-winning Disney film, the most successful animation of all time and apparently the source of unending annoyance in car

Climate change, Bruegel-style

Arts feature

It is cold, but not in a cheery, robin-redbreast kind of way. The sky is slate blue; the sun, a red ball, is slipping below the horizon, figures carrying heavy burdens trudge across the frozen water. Yet this far- from-festive painting, ‘The Census at Bethlehem’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is one of the earliest

Snow – art’s biggest challenge

Arts feature

In owning a flock of artificial sheep, Joseph Farquharson must have been unusual among Highland lairds a century ago. His Aberdeenshire estate covered 20,000 acres — surely enough to support the modest local ovine needs. But Farquharson was a painter, the fake sheep artist’s models. For cleanliness and biddability, few grazing ewes can match a

Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?

Arts feature

The French for French-bashing is le French bashing. This verbally costive nation is at it once again, torpidly borrowing an approximately English expression rather than coining its own. Such bashing is not an exclusively Anglo-Saxon practice. There is indigenous bashing. At least there is Éric Zemmour, whose salutary Le Suicide français was published a couple

From the archive: Sound of the season

Features

Some songs are hits — No. 1 for a couple of weeks. Some songs are standards — they endure decade after decade. And a few very rare songs reach way beyond either category, to embed themselves so deeply in the collective consciousness they become part of the soundtrack of society. They start off the same

If you like bland films full of blondes, you’ll love Kon-Tiki

Cinema

Kon-Tiki is a dramatisation of Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,300-mile, 101-day journey across the Pacific by balsa-wood raft, which took place in 1947, and was a remarkable achievement, unlike this film, which so isn’t. True, it does what it says on the tin. There’s an ocean, and it’s traversed. There is jeopardy, most notably in the form

In the Emergency School

More from Books

We were registered as a form, and for the first day Left unsupervised alone in a distant room With empty desks to organise our own war. Using books and inkwells was the easy way Of creating bombardments — conkers and apple-cores came In useful also, and in the master’s drawer There were sheets of exercise-paper

Sunset Hails a Rising

More from Books

O lente, lente currite noctis equi! — Marlowe, after Ovid.   La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée. —Valéry.   Dying by inches, I can hear the sound Of all the fine words for the flow of things The poets and philosophers have used To mark the path into the killing ground. Perhaps their one aim

Damian Thompson

Sex, lies and El Sistema

Arts feature

The two trendiest words in classical music are ‘El Sistema’. That’s the name for the high-intensity programme of instrumental coaching that turned kids from the slums of Venezuela into the thrilling Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (SBYO), conducted by hot young maestro Gustavo Dudamel before he was poached by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Or so the

The death of the life class

Exhibitions

‘Love of the human form’, writes the painter John Lessore, ‘must be the origin of that peculiar concept, the Life Room.’ Then he goes on to exclaim on the loveliness of that name. It is indeed a venerable institution with a delightful description: a place devoted to looking at life — or, at any rate,

Into the Night

Poems

You fling yourself out the door into the wind and start to row yourself down the steep hill with your standard issue steel stick, working it along the dark path, clickety-click, clickety-click. It’s a path you would know with your eyes closed, the old Richmond Hill you cycled up and down as a boy, in

Why you have to listen to this year’s Reith Lectures

Radio

Each year the Reith Lectures come round as Radio 4’s annual assertion of intellectual authority, fulfilling the BBC’s original aspiration to inform and educate (although not always to also entertain). Each year, though, it’s hard not to feel a certain resistance to Lord Reith’s lofty legacy. Radio might be the perfect format for delivering a

The perils of being a posh boy on the telly

Features

The first time it happened was at the cinema. I was queuing for my ticket-for-one when the woman behind me exploded. ‘Omigod I saw you on television!’ ‘Oh, er, yes,’ I mumbled. The next time was in the cinema, as I squeezed down the row: ‘Sorry, but I have to say, I saw you on