The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Ebullient, articulate and eminently sensible, Rosie Kay never wanted to be a martyr to the culture wars. A modern dance choreographer with an impressive track record – including 5 Soldiers, an award-winning exploration of army life, contributions to the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics and a fellowship at Oxford – she would rather be
When the Ballets Russes first presented Fokine’s Polovtsian Dances at Covent Garden in 1911, such was its orgiastic savagery that ladies in the audience were said to be genuinely terrified that its grease-painted warriors were about to leap off the stage and ravish them. The Mongol Khan, a great hit imported from Ulan Bator, may
Choose your weapon. Artists are closely defined in the public imagination by their instrument of choice. Though the most untamed and transgressive progenitors of rock’n’roll – Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – were piano pounders, and despite the later efforts of Elton John, over time the instrument has come to be associated with restraint
Hair combed and slicked, Mike Graham sits at his big shiny desk and waits on his cue. When his guest goes rogue backstage and starts swearing at a minion, it barely registers. He remains placid. Unruffled. It’s only his second week doing TV but Mike is in the zone. Three, two, one, zero. ‘Welcome to
The sensuality of the light in John Craxton’s painting ‘Two Figures and Setting Sun’ (1952-67) has to be seen to be believed. Viewing this large work in Pallant House, you feel its full force. Craxton was concerned with a scene’s essence, rather than simply its appearance and here he achieves not merely an effect but
Major spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know the ending of The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, skip the next paragraph. Still with me? Good. The answer is no, Richard III did not order the killing of the two princes. That was just Tudor propaganda. Both boys, the sons of Edward IV,
In Stratford-upon-Avon, the wolves are running. And if you’re old enough to feel a little thrill of wintery excitement at those words, you’ll have questions of your own about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Box of Delights. Questions about talking rats and flying cars, and whether time and tide and buttered eggs still wait for
Backstairs Billy is a biographical comedy about William Tallon, who worked as the Queen Mother’s chief footman for years following the death of George VI in 1952. Tallon was an enthusiastic gay cottager whom the tabloids suggestively dubbed ‘backstairs Billy’ during the 1970s when attitudes to homosexuality were growing more enlightened. The show, directed by
Anne McElvoy is on the road again, exploring the state of modern Europe. Following her Radio 4 programme, The Reinvention of Germany in April, the Politico journalist has travelled to Padua, in northern Italy, where reactions to the rise of the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni appear to vary. Is the 46-year-old PM a breath of
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, has a running time of two hours and 40 minutes, which is scant by today’s standards, but don’t worry: a four hour-plus director’s cut is on its way. So this is Scott’s Napoleon Abridged, you could say, and it does have the feel of a film that’s been scissored
The director of the National Theatre will be stepping down in 2025. I’ve written to the chairman offering a new vision for Britain’s leading playhouse. Dear Sir Damon Buffini, I’m a reviewer of plays and a part-time theatre producer. In the past 20 years I’ve seen more than 2,000 shows, hundreds of them at your
The subject that Sarah Ditum addresses in Toxic is why the early part of this century was ‘such a monstrous time to be famous and female. It’s about how the concept of privacy came undone and why that was a catastrophe for women’. The concept of privacy was actually undone by a judge in Tulsa,
I rather bristle at newspaper column collections. They strike me as a bit lazy, a cheat’s way of getting another book under the belt, often just in time for the gift-giving season. When it comes to Rachel Cooke’s Kitchen Person, however, I have to eat my words. It draws from the 14 years of monthly
The sirens sound in the street. The lockdown order comes. The images on the television are of chaos and illness, total societal collapse. The apocalypse is here, and where are the rich? Already holed up in their survival compounds, ready to ride out the end of the world before emerging to take control of what’s
Once a King is trumpeted as ‘game-changing’, a ‘trove of never-before-seen papers which shed fresh light on the maligned Duke of Windsor’ and will ‘turn on its head long-accepted stereotypes’ about him. These are bold claims, but do they stack up? ‘The lost memoir of Edward Vlll’ actually consists of an early draft of the
Would readers approaching this novel (although novel might not be precisely the right word) without any indication as to the authorship recognise it as the work of Jonathan Lethem? It doesn’t have kangaroo gangsters packing heat, or sentient miniature black holes, or marine drills converted into nuclear-powered limos. It is not set on an alien
I have been reviewing books for nearly four decades – starting in this very magazine – and over the years I have encountered some real stinkers. But this is the first time I can recall being reluctant to pick up the book because of actual physical nausea. Intellectual nausea I’ve had plenty of times. Give
Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas first met in a gallery at the Louvre. Degas was standing, etching plate in hand, copying a picture. How audacious, Manet exclaimed, to work without a preliminary drawing. ‘I would not dare to do the same.’ And thus he revealed the essential difference between the two. Degas was a supreme
What a relief to find ourselves in a non-faddy cook book year. We are not being encouraged to chew only plants, ferment everything, grow burgers in labs or devour insects. It’s not that I don’t look for answers to how we should eat to survive the future, but I know a thing or two about
One Saturday in 1953, the six-year-old Reggie Dwight of 55 Pinner Hill Road went to his first football match with his perennially gloomy father, Stanley. ‘Emerging from the Tube station,’ writes John Preston, ‘Stanley reached down and took his son’s hand.’ Reggie was enchanted by Stanley’s sudden happiness. The only place the two would ever
It’s nearly a quarter of a century since Michael Nunn and William Trevitt bravely left their safe haven at the Royal Ballet to set up BalletBoyz, a company aimed at developing the underused potential of male dancers and exploiting Nunn and Trevitt’s passion for film technology. At the time this seemed like a useful mission
A while ago, a therapist advised me to go out less and stay in and watch TV more. Having avoided the world of block-streaming until then, I took her advice and immediately found great pleasure in my new pastime. There was so much to watch, and it was all so absorbing and pleasantly addictive. The
If chicken soup is balm for the soul, then James McBride’s eighth book, set in 1930s Chicken Hill, a neighbourhood in a small town in Pennsylvania that is home to Jewish, black and other immigrant people, is its literary equivalent. There is something nourishing about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a warm story about
There’s a photograph in Nicole Eisenman’s Whitechapel exhibition of the 28-year-old artist, in 1993, sitting at her easel with a big bow in her hair and a bevy of studio assistants – a feminist piss-take of the trope of the heroic male artist surrounded by adoring acolytes. Her resemblance in the photo to stand-up comic
The ‘ordinary academic mind’, William James wrote, struggles to recognise things which ‘present themselves as wild facts with no stall or pigeonhole’. The Yale professor Carlos Eire has a passion for them. His erudite, wilfully eccentric study of baroque Catholicism glories in the supernatural powers of holy persons. He showcases two kinds of miracles they
The twin poles of the modern imaginarium about technology and society can be represented by two masterpieces of popular culture. In James Cameron’s film The Terminator (1984) and its sequels, a global computer system called Skynet becomes sentient and proceeds to try to exterminate the human race by means of time-travelling Austrian bodybuilders. In Iain
Perhaps unfairly, Marcel Theroux does rather bring to mind Dannii Minogue. Not only does he look very similar to his more famous sibling, but when not writing (pretty good) novels, he’s in the same line of work: like Louis, he makes TV documentaries that feature much brow-furrowing. His latest was a neat fit for ITV1’s
Even if you are suffering from eat-the-rich fatigue (see The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, The Lesson, Parasite, Bait, The White Lotus, Succession etc.) and can no longer work up much of an appetite for wealthy folk being dreadful you must make an exception for the psychological thriller Saltburn. It’s by Emerald Fennell and it’s not
The reason conspiracy theories are so resilient, reproducing themselves from one generation to another, is that they are unfalsifiable. Evidence against them, however solid, has obviously been faked. Anyone who tries to demonstrate that Americans did land on the moon or that J.F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald is obviously in the pay