The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
At the core of Paul Carlucci’s debut novel is a protracted medical experiment conducted by one human on another. Set on the Canadian frontier of the 1830s and inspired by historical record, the book takes the strange case of Dr William Beaumont’s tests on Alexis St Martin’s digestive system and spins a marvellously dark yarn
Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it,
Michael Tanner, who died yesterday at the age of 88, lived two parallel lives. To many Spectator readers, he was the magazine’s peerless opera critic: wise, passionate, thrillingly disputatious, intensely funny, extremely generous with the Semtex. Essential reading. He wrote The Spectator’s weekly opera column from 1996 to 2014 and continued to review – and raze to the ground where
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first, in 2022, surveyed the work of Vivian Maier, who at her death left behind a vast quantity of prints and negatives: evidence of a hidden life unsuspected even by those in whose household she lived
The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious
Sensible prog-rock bands try to ensure no one ever realises they play prog. What happens when you are deemed a prog band is that you are condemned to the margins – little radio airtime, few TV appearances, barely any coverage in the mainstream press – because it has been decided you exist solely for the
Carmen and Frankenstein are without a doubt two of the most over-worked tropes in our culture, the myths of the evasively seductive gypsy and the human monster machine being lazily recycled and plundered and vulgarised in various forms to the point at which their authentic primal power has been altogether deflated. So it was with
If you’ve heard good reports about MJ the Musical, believe them all and multiply everything by a hundred. As a music-and-dance spectacular, the show is as exhilarating as any Jackson produced while he was alive. The sets, the costumes, the choreography and the live band deliver an amazing collective punch. When he removes his black
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight was last seen on British television giving us his frankly deranged adaptation of Great Expectations. Happily, he’s now returned to form with a show that, while not a retread exactly, is definitely Peaky-adjacent. In This
Here’s a fun thought experiment: instead of entrusting the future of American democracy to one of two old men, what if you put it in the hands of 500 teenage girls? Girls State, the sister documentary to Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s award-winning 2020 film Boys State, follows the events of a week-long civic engagement
Grade: A+ Carter is a useful surname to have if you’re making a country album. So it is with Beyoncé: she married into the name when she got hitched to Jay-Z, but he is from New York, not Poor Valley, VA. Helps if you’re from Texas too – just to convince folks that this bit
You have to love a book about the end of the world in which the first two references are to Saul Bellow’s Herzog and the HBO series The White Lotus, a high/low combo that preps us for authorial omniscience. In the next few paragraphs we get Marc Maron, Sally Rooney and Frank Kermode. Buckle up,
Telling the story of Sir Roger Casement’s life is a challenge for any biographer. In the land of his birth, he is remembered as a national hero. His remains lie in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin beside the graves of Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. He is there because he was hanged in Pentonville
Formula 1 is having a moment. Its global popularity is soaring off the back of a wildly successful Netflix docuseries, Drive to Survive, and the launch of glitzy races in Miami and Las Vegas. It is even drawing attention away from other sports. The most significant move of European football’s January transfer window was Lewis
Lucy Sante concludes her thoughtful and occasionally poetic memoir with the words: ‘Now I have been made whole.’ Before transitioning at the age of 66 she had lived her life as a deeply divided man. This is an affecting book that could help move the trans debate forward from its currently undignified state of abuse
Behold rat. Behold the magnificent, clever creature as it runs from the bin you have just opened or disappears into the nearest bush. Behold rat as it is cut open or drugged or injected to improve your health in the name of science, as many millions of its peers have been. Behold rat – though
As Nicolas Padamsee’s thrilling debut novel England is Mine hurtles towards its climax, its principal character, David, readies himself for an important mission. A teenage victim of bullying, he has been slowly drawn into a world of online extremism. After making a purchase through the dark web, he is determined to become a hero in
On one blissful, cloudless day during the summer holidays of 1972, Charles Spencer, who had just turned eight, surveyed the scene in his mother’s garden in Sussex. He’d spent the morning cycling and swimming, and a barbecue was being prepared. He remembers thinking: ‘This is too good to last.’ And he was right. A date
So you’d like to borrow half-a-billion dollars? It’s a tribute to the epic ambitions of this novel that the reader swallows questions like this without blinking. In a sense that’s fair enough because City in Ruins is the third book of a trilogy loosely modelled on the great poems of the classical world, particularly the
Easter is by far the most rock and roll religious holiday. Christmas might be the time when the pop vultures circle, plucking from the bones of garish sentiment, but the wham-bam narrative mic-drops of Holy Week are of a different order. Easter has provided a dramatic template for every rock opera, concept album, heroic comeback and combustible band dynamic
Always make your redundancy announcement when the people at the receiving end of it are on a high. This seems to be the favoured method of today’s managing executives, who perhaps imagine that adrenalin will somehow anaesthetise the blow of getting the sack. For the Cambridge student choir St John’s Voices, the news of its
When dining in France, it is considered rude to finish the bread before the main course has been served, and ruder still to slice the bread with a knife, lest the crumbs land in a lady’s décolletage. In China, you should never place your chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice, and in Bangladesh you
Faith Healer is a classic Oirish wrist-slasher about three sponging half-wits caught in a downward spiral of penury, booze, squalor, sexual repression, bad healthcare, murderous violence and non-stop drizzle. The mood of grinding despair never lets up for a second as the healer, Frank Hardy, along with his moaning wife and their Cockney sidekick, motors
Mothers’ Instinct is a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain and it is one of those over-ripe, camp melodramas that, back in the day, would have almost certainly starred Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Or Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak, if we are going to be Hitchcockian about it. Either way, it’s a
‘In some curious way, the practice of art and the awareness of the imminence of death are connected,’ Frank Auerbach said in 2012. ‘Otherwise, we would not find it necessary to do the work art finally does – to pin something down and take it out of time.’ There’s no sense of the imminence of
My feelings about the genius of Kenneth MacMillan have always been volatile, but in the course of the Royal Ballet’s current triple bill, they veered even more wildly than usual between uncomplicated delight, awed reverence and embarrassment. A revival of his early Danses Concertantes, firing off Stravinsky at his most effervescent and designed with exuberantly
Guy Ritchie only does one thing but he does it very well: slick, violent, sweary, black comedy capers about the unlikely intersection between toffs and the criminal underworld, invariably starring ex-footballer Vinnie Jones as a loveable tweed-wearing thug. If you were hoping for something different from The Gentlemen, prepare to be disappointed. If, on the
A tale of two opera companies from the Land of Song. After its distinctly gamey new Cosi fan tutte, Welsh National Opera has sprung dazzlingly back to form with a new production of Benajmin Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice. It’s directed by Olivia Fuchs, in collaboration with the circus artists of NoFit State, and
Should you visit Malta this spring, you may notice something decidedly weird is afoot. Across the public squares of its capital, Valletta, performance artists are blocking busy thoroughfares and causing havoc on packed café terraces. The Hospitaller and British military forts that dominate the capital’s famous harbour, meanwhile, are full of dysfunctional installation work, while