The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
How very odd of Radio 4 not only to release The Ratline as a podcast before broadcasting it on the schedule in the conventional manner, but also to give its network listeners an edited-down version. It’s as if the podcast of Philippe Sands’s programme, which investigates war crimes by the Nazis, fuelled by his own
There is a new book out about the sun — the bright thing in the sky, not the newspaper. It sounds very interesting. ‘Science Museum The Sun — One Thousand Years of Scientific Imagery’. You can get it from that place ‘Science Museum’, which I seemed to remember was once called the National Science Museum
Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the Camera degli Sposi. Around a great trompe l’oeil oculus, apparently open to the sky, assorted gawpers and cherubs lean nosily over the parapet: ‘What’s going on down there, then?’ Only the Duke and Duchess of
When Soft Cell first appeared on Top of the Pops in summer 1981, miming along to their version of Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’, it felt like a moment of palpable newness. Well, it certainly did if you were prepubescent and really had no idea what sex actually was. Romantic love — in either its glory
William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest. Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After
The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with
This version of A Star Is Born, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, is the fourth iteration (Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, 1937; Judy Garland and James Mason, 1954; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, 1976). So it’s a remake of a remake of a remake and overly familiar, you would think. Oh God, not another
Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced
It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like
The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre feels like the inauguration of a godhead. And it’s not easy to separate the work from the reverence that surrounds it. Pinter One consists of sketches and playlets written
I was surprised and delighted to find Morten Morland’s wonderful imitation of a photograph of Margaret Thatcher peering through the curtains of Number Ten on The Spectator’s cover. It reminded me of one of my memorable experiences as a photographer with the ‘Iron Lady’. I was a staff photographer at the Times for about 15 years covering some
‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about
A reflection on still water was perhaps the first picture that Homo sapiens ever encountered. The importance of mirrors in the history of art has been underestimated. Alberti, Vasari and Leonardo recommended them as a tool for painters. Van Eyck delighted in them. Caravaggio had one in his studio. And they haven’t stopped fascinating artists.
‘Ballet is woman’ insisted George Balanchine, but ballet can also be a big man in a dress as any fan of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo will testify. The Trocks began life in 1974, dancing for a select few in pop-up performance spaces in Manhattan, but the troupe’s irresistible blend of low comedy and
What a load of utter tripe Bodyguard (BBC1, Sundays) was. Admittedly, I came to it late having missed all the sex scenes with Keeley Hawes and Robb Stark, which may have dazzled me in the way they seem to have dazzled many impressionable viewers. Sex scenes in TV drama are a bit like the chaff
Sylvia, the Old Vic’s musical about the Pankhurst clan, has had a troubled nativity. Illness struck the cast during rehearsals. Press night was postponed by a week. On the evening of the delayed performance, the show was cancelled just before curtain-up. We were told that a ‘concert version’ would be presented with understudies filling certain
At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it
The Wife is an adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel (2003) and stars Glenn Close. Her performance is better than the film, but it’s such a magnificent performance that it more than carries the day. She is stunning. Close plays Joan Castleman, wife of Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a literary giant who has always been
The writer Angela Carter (born in 1940) grew up listening to the wireless, her love of stories, magic and the supernatural fed by Children’s Hour, and especially a strange, frightening and yet captivating dramatisation of John Masefield’s novel Box of Delights. In the introduction to Sunday’s Drama on Three, which gave us two of her
This article was originally published on Spectator USA. It has been several decades since the art world – that swirling miasma of idealism, virtuosity, pretense and money – has recognised the men of the New York School, also known as the Abstract Expressionists, as truly great artists. Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and
I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and unpredictable. Like his plays, where the hyper-banal surfaces — the synthetic memories and false nostalgia of Old Times, the aural drivel of Rose in The Room, the bogus familial warmth of The Homecoming — are
Last year my wife and I were wandering around the backstreets of Salamanca when we were confronted by a minor miracle. The iron gates of the convent of the Agustinas Descalzas — generally chained and padlocked — were ajar. Quickly we slipped through before they closed again. Inside was a vast 17th-century church, slightly dusty
The first world war paintings of Paul Nash are so vivid and emotive that they have come to embody, as readily as any photograph, the horrendous, bitter misery of the trenches. His blighted landscapes represent the destruction of a generation of soldiers, men who were blasted apart as carelessly as the bomb-shattered mud in ‘The
After the England football team beat Tunisia at this summer’s World Cup, they celebrated with a swimming-pool race on inflatable unicorns. Purple hooves, rainbow manes, cutesy eyes, yellow horns like upended Cornetto cones. The millennial unicorn is unrecognisable from the medieval. The proud unicorns of bestiaries and courtly romances have become the twinkling Bambis of
I was delighted to see Claire Foy win an Emmy award for her portrayal of the Queen in the fine Netflix series The Crown. It may have helped assuage her annoyance at initially being paid £200,000 less than her co-star, Matt Smith, who did a fairly good impersonation of a young, brooding Duke of Edinburgh.
After the all-conquering success of Fleabag — her brilliant dark comedy about a smart but rudderless young woman in London — Phoebe Waller-Bridge could presumably have done whatever she wanted for her next TV project. And what she wanted to do next, it now turns out, is very odd indeed. Killing Eve (BBC1, Saturday) —
Faces Places is a documentary directed by Agnès Varda in collaboration with JR, the famous Parisian photographer and muralist (although, if you’re as shallow as I am, your first thought may also have been: how is this possible now that Larry Hagman is dead?). The pair visit small towns in France, meeting ordinary people, taking
