The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the
I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and
Grade: B+ War, as we all know, is hell. But if it involves small squeaky annelids blowing each-other up with bazookas, it is also hella fun. And so to the newest installment in the long-running turn-based strategy series Worms. Can it be a coincidence that Worms Across Worlds arrives on Apple Arcade just in time
The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work.
When Winston Churchill dined with the crème de la crème of American finance in New York on 28 October 1929, a facetious toast was made to ‘friends and former millionaires’. Despite a 13 per cent drop in the Dow after another day of market turmoil, the assembled banking titans felt they wouldn’t just survive the
When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was: Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort of deliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your
December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no
In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book
In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French
For a newly independent Georgia, the 1990s were a dark time literally and figuratively, as civil war raged, criminality flourished and the power stayed off. The Lack of Light, Nino Haratischwili’s fourth novel to be translated into English, turns that darkness into a gripping story about the power and pitfalls of female friendship that seeks
By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the
‘I have had more direct clinical experience than almost any other forensic psychiatrist of assessing and managing lone-actor perpetrators of massacres,’ writes Paul Mullen, professor emeritus at Monash University in Australia, in his introduction to Running Amok. He’s got non-clinical experience, too. In 1990, when he lived near Aramoana in New Zealand, he was disturbed
Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young Mick Hucknall being interviewed. What he wanted, he said, was to be a great singer. Usually, that’s the cue for a gag about fate having other plans. Not this time. He’s 65 now, and he
Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling
Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the
Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack
Thomas Pynchon is so well known for being out of the public eye that he often seems to be hiding in plain sight, much like Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘purloined letter’. He is famous for avoiding the camera and the few extant photos of him – especially one from his high school yearbook – are paraded
‘What is he talking about?’ Marine Baudrillard would sigh whenever she read her husband’s work. Anyone who has studied for an arts or a social-science degree over the past few decades will know what irked her. A sociologist-cum-philosopher’s prose is to thought what mud is to a windscreen. ‘There is no more hope for meaning,’
I wonder how many people appreciate what a remarkably capable army we had for the first three decades of this book’s range – and how incapable that army has become. Forward defence in Germany during the Cold War (56,000 troops); keeping the peace in Northern Ireland; bringing Rhodesia/Zimbabwe back into the fold; liberating the hostages
Stephanie Burt is a Harvard professor of English, a poet and a literary critic who recently created and taught a course on ‘Taylor Swift and Her World’. This not only attracted an unusually high degree of student engagement but also international media attention, with, one suspects, greater measurable benefits for Burt and Harvard than for
Esther Walker, an established journalist and writer of non-fiction, opens her debut novel in the business world but segues into the concerns of balancing children and career. It’s a page-turner, silly yet serious; and, as with many good comedies, the humour comes from pain. Mairéad Alexander is a childless 44-year-old social media exec in London,
John Hemming is the doyen of historians of South America. In his previous books he has revealed the tragic history of the Incan empire (The Conquest of the Incas); the impact of the arrival of Europeans on the Brazilian Indians (Red Gold); and the story of the Amazon (Tree of Rivers). Now he has produced
When most people start screaming that the sky is falling, they can safely be ignored. But Eliezer Yudkowsky is not most people. He was one of the first to take the idea of superintelligent AI – artificial intelligence that greatly surpasses humanity – seriously. He played a role in introducing the founders of Google DeepMind
Klaus Kinski was one of Germany’s most celebrated postwar actors. Although he appeared in more than 130 films, including five for the director Werner Herzog, he began his career on the stage, returning in 1971 to perform a monologue, Jesus Christus Erlöser, before an audience of 6,000 in West Berlin. Benjamin Myers has long been
In 1949, aged 26, the bright, well-connected Judy Montagu (first cousin of Mary Churchill and friend of Princess Margaret) criss-crossed the United States on a Greyhound bus. The Greyhound Diary is a vivid and often humorous account of the three months she spent on the road. Montagu’s life, like her diary, reflects a specific time,
Here’s a patriotic thought for you: baroque opera, as we now know it, was made in Britain. Sure, there are your Vivaldis and Cavallis; there’s always someone (usually French) trying to make Rameau stick and a few years back Opera North – bless them – even tried to exhume an opera by Reinhard Keiser. But
When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes
Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they could not stop – but they did have a jolly good try’. What happened? It isn’t clear; there are teases that it revealed too much, which is anyway a good ploy for attracting listeners. ‘Subversive’
At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out
