The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The intimate acoustic show can denote many things for an established artist. One is that, in the infamous euphemism coined by Spinal Tap, their audience has become more ‘selective’. Attempting to make the best of a bad job, the artist shifts down a gear while aiming upmarket, much in the manner of a balding man
The Miracle Club, which is about a group of Irish women who travel to Lourdes, has a magnificent cast – Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Laura Linney – and it inspired me to pray. ‘Dear God,’ I found myself praying mid-way through, ‘let this be over soon.’ The film’s stars make it just about watchable but
Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from being terrified and brainwashed into submission by Big Brother, the populace would embrace the all-seeing eye as their route to fame, prosperity and freedom. Some of the populace, at any rate. We met 16 of
‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these people… I think that if Her Highness could govern in her own way, everything would turn out very happily.’ The ‘princess’ in question was Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain and regent of the Spanish
A heavily made-up Iranian woman in bra and knickers is dancing seductively before me. We’re in some vast warehouse, and she’s swaying barefoot. But then I look around. All the other men here are in military uniforms and leaning against walls or sitting at desks, smoking and looking at her impassively. I slowly realise we
Seamus Heaney wrote letters everywhere – waiting for his car to be repaired at a country garage, sitting over a glass or more of Paddy late at night, and above all in aeroplanes, ‘pacing the pages against the pilot as he takes us in to Heathrow or Shannon’, as he wrote to a friend in
The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon wrote: ‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair.’ This historical novel is about him and his use of it. The way up is long, intricate and difficult; downwards there is nothing to ‘slow his fall’. His antagonist in his ascent to worldly power was the lawyer
If you run an organisation, there are some reporters you definitely don’t want around: Ronan Farrow asking for comment; Madison Marriage or Dan McCrum with a couple of questions; Michael Wolff hanging out on a sofa taking notes. Michael Lewis is not one of those reporters. If he wants to spend time with you, you
It needs a big personality to answer a big question: why is so much new building so very bad; why are our cities so ugly? Thomas Heatherwick is that big personality. He is the Jamie Oliver of architecture and design: personable, blokeish, smart, tele-genic, extremely successful, nearly demented with ambition, and, one suspects, inclined to
Sandra Newman’s Juliahas a connoisseur’s nose for body odour. When she gets close to another person or animal, she almost always notices their smell – manly, dusty, dungy, a hint of talcum powder. When she suppresses emotion, she sweats. She sprains her wrist and tears rise ‘of themselves like sweat’. In a pivotal scene, she
The middle story in this compassionate collection follows disparate folk loosely linked by a set of steps. Among them, there’s the mother who climbs them first thing in the morning, the girl who descends them at two in the afternoon and the screenwriter who lives at the foot of them, and who stays home nearly
Robyn Davidson never set out to become a writer. ‘It did not form my identity,’ she tells us early on in her memoir Unfinished Woman. ‘In my own mind I had simply pulled another rabbit out of a hat. As I had done all my life with everything.’ The rabbit, in this case, is the
Writers dealing with that knottiest of problems in fiction – to what extent can they describe cultures and societies not their own without appropriation, an insulting level of ignorance and/or launching a social media storm – are going about it in different ways. The latest novel by Sebastian Faulks is set in the future (where,
Islands always intrigue, hovering on the horizons of our imaginations – seen, according to your lights, as territories to be taken, ancient redoubts, repositories of secrets, even loci of lands of youth. Where there are no islands, we often imagine them – Plato’s Atlantis, the Celts’ Avalon, the Irish Hy-Brasil, Zeno’s Friseland, Columbus’s Antillia –
If both players in a game of draughts stick to their optimal moves, the game will always end in a draw. You or I might have guessed that anecdotally. But being a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy knows it for sure. The calculations that proved it took 200 desktop computers 18 years to perform. The Prussian
Adam Sisman is sensitive to the charge that a book about an author’s unknown mistresses is simply an exercise in prurience. ‘I am not one of those who believes sex explains everything,’ he declares defensively. An affair with the wife of a close friend led to the ménage depicted in The Naive and Sentimental Lover
‘The boy Stirling is quite mad, quite, quite mad. However, in a war there is often a place for mad people.’ Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was referring to David Stirling, the man largely credited with raising the Special Air Service (SAS) in the summer of 1941. Myth has always surrounded the formation of the SAS
Born in Tsarist Kyiv in 1898, Golda Meir grew up with what she called a ‘pogrom complex’. That perhaps explained why later, as Israeli prime minister, she had such harsh words for Palestinians and Arabs. But then she had harsh words for a lot of people. Moses, she complained, ‘took us 40 years through the
If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one. You could also argue that, in contrast to most of its characters, it didn’t really bring much to the party. And yet, in a rare challenge to the law of diminishing returns, the more it
It sounds like a barking-mad student sketch but the final product is marinated in wisdom and maturity. It’s Headed Straight Towards Us is a mellow riot of a play. The setting is a rocky glacier in Iceland during the filming of a corny sci-fi movie. Hugh (Sam West) is a cerebral thesp who specialises in
Over the past few years, the National have become the most important band in modern rock music. The strange thing is that this has happened at a point when their own work has perhaps lost a little of its earlier intensity. They’ve become important because they have come to represent something to other artists: a
While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive connection. Her works are large drawings (sometimes very large – one reclining figure is more than two-and-a-half metres wide), and each one zooms in on a single figure seen in close-up, often larger than life-size.
Opera North has launched a ‘Green Season’, which means (among other things) that the sets and costumes for its new Falstaff are recycled. On one level, that’s nothing new: this eternally underfunded company has been performing miracles of sustainability for years now, and there’s usually at least one production each season that looks like it’s
‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls posed this question on their feminist poster, the answer suggested by the Royal Academy’s Marina Abramovic retrospective – touted as the first solo show by a woman artist in the main galleries – is: ‘They
The story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is hammered into us all from an early age. But its moral lessons obscure its more literal advice about building: skimping on materials is a false economy. It’s a lesson learned too late for schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac). Who would’ve predicted that concrete made
Who are you without memory? This is the question that sits at the heart of The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, best known for her 1988 novella Kitchen, which was a smash hit in Japan and adapted for film. The Premonition is a similarly slender work and one that casts a delicate spell. Nineteen-year-old Yayoi has
Simon Heffer is the supreme Stakhanovite among British writers. Where the original Stakhanov moved 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift, within the past decade Heffer has produced four massive volumes of modern British history, each little less than 1,000 pages. Alongside them he has edited three equally voluminous diaries of the waspish socialite
When you think of a collector you might imagine, say, Sir John Soane, Henry Wellcome, Charles Saatchi or Peggy Guggenheim, the fabulously wealthy, amassing their statuary, paintings and penis gourds in order to furnish their Xanadu palaces or display their good taste and fortune for the benefit of the nation. But there are other kinds
Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have
