The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It is a measure of Lady Thatcher’s standing that her death has been followed not only by the mealy-mouthed compliments from political opponents which are normally forthcoming on such occasions but also by robust denunciations. Nobody would have sung ‘Ding, dong, the Wizard is dead!’ after the deaths of Jim Callaghan, John Major or Alec
Recalling being taken as a teenager on repeated outings to see Chatsworth, Roy Hattersley disarmingly confesses that in those days ‘I was impressed by neither the pictures nor the furniture’. Over the past three years, while working in the Chatsworth archives on this history of its owners, the Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire, Hattersley would break
Largely unheard since their original performances or BBC broadcasts between 1939 and 2011, these readings of 12 short stories by their authors are a treasure trove. * E.M.Forster’s 1948 reading definitely conjures up a past era. His philosophical debate in ‘Mr Andrews’ concerning two souls in ‘interspace’ — of a righteous Englishman and a Turk
With the publication of this year’s Proms brochure it is clear that what was already large has just become larger; and what was already a smooth production has just got smoother. Whether this is sustainable growth, or even desirable growth, are questions for the future; but I think I’ve discerned one of the main reasons
Maria Miller, the new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, indicated in her first speech on culture that when she hears that word she reaches for her calculator. ‘When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact’ is already a candidate for inclusion in a Dictionary of Political
What do you do if you wake up to discover your colleagues implying that you have it easy? If you’re Benedict Cumberbatch, you just stick to your Star Trek script and carry on trying to destroy the world. Benedict Cumberbatch (educated at Harrow) was in the crossfire when Downton Abbey’s Rob James-Collier (Stockport working class
Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed
Congratulations to the Guardian for being one fortnight behind the news. The paper’s website reports that a deceased thief returned 1,400 stolen books to Lambeth Palace’s library. The citizens of King’s Place are trying to pass this wonderful story off as news; but attentive readers will know that it first appeared in the Spectator’s spring books
The weekend press offered some rave reviews of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography. Craig Brown, who is not given to hyperbole, compared Moore’s book to a work of art, while the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley praised Moore’s ‘multi-dimensional portrait’ of the person we know as Mrs Thatcher. There were, however, some reservations. Rawnsley, brave man that he
‘It was a lover and his lass’ from As You Like It It was a lover and his lass With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, That o’er the green cornfield did pass In springtime, the only pretty ring-time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding Sweet lovers love the
Evgeny Morozov is an iconoclast. He believes that technology, if abused or misused, has the potential to make society less free. His latest book, To Save Everything , Click Here, builds on his acclaimed polemic The Net Delusion (about which he spoke to the Spectator last year) to challenge those who suggest that technology is
Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed to be shut for three years — the taste for colourless voids has come and, please God, is going. Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the designer behind the
‘Everybody faces rejection,’ the portrait artist Aaron Shikler said. He should know, having had three official White House portraits of former President Ronald Reagan rejected — one was too large, one was too casual and one ‘they just didn’t like it’. The commission finally was given to a different artist. Don’t feel too sorry for
Most of us like to look at a view, though not all are fortunate enough to live with one, in which case art can offer an alternative, a window on the world. Landscape is a great solace, and particularly refreshing for the tired urban spirit, but we want more than holiday snaps of foreign places
The Philippines: An Archipelago of Exchange at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris (until 24 July) brings together an impressive range of objects that demonstrate the fluidity of ideas and forms dispersed through exploration, trade and the blood of battle. The exhibition focuses on the fertile interactions between Filipino tribes and naval traders preceding the
Front Row is one of those Radio 4 programmes that it’s too easy to take for granted. It’s on every weekday, all year round, at the same peak listening time (after The Archers), with a team of presenters, John Wilson, Mark Lawson and Kirsty Lang, who have become such a reliable fixture they’re almost like
There are two American Dreams — the one that happens in real life and is experienced by people such as Barack Obama, and the one that happens on screens, both silver and small, shared by millions across the world. BBC2’s The United States of Television: America in Primetime (Saturday) traces the history of the latter,
The Look of Love is the biopic of Paul Raymond and although it wants to be a tragedy — I could feel it straining at the leash to go in that direction — it never quite pulls it off, so to speak. Visually, it’s fantastic, with more retro kitsch than you can shake a stick
They’re back. Howard Davies and his translator Andrew Upton had a well-deserved hit in 2007 with Gorky’s Philistines at the Lyttelton. Children of the Sun, which Gorky wrote in jail in 1905, is a prophetic allegory that foretells the destruction of Russia’s weak, idle and pretentious upper classes. We’re in a country mansion where a
The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no personal acquaintance with him, and don’t know much more about his life than can be gleaned from Wikipedia, I did attend his operatic performances from
When we describe music as ‘sublime’, what do we mean? For the Romans, sublimis signified greatness beyond measure. In the 18th century, Englishmen looked to The Spectator for clarification. Joseph Addison, in his Essay No. 339 of 1712, suggests that the sublime often achieves greatness without stirring up ‘pathetick’ human passions. The example he gives
‘The Firs’, ‘Hillcrest’, ‘Innisfree’ I An aerial view. A brochure maps it out And full possession guaranteed Within the year: time for the prefab plots to sprout Before the moves and backyards turn to seed. II Look, engines pushing upwards, shovels plough Until the hill is taken, then a kerb Whitewashed, colonial style, now caps
for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison.
The first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher was published on Tuesday. Since Lady Thatcher had stipulated that the book could appear only after her death, we were, in principle, ready. But it is still a huge undertaking to finish correcting a 900-page book on a Tuesday (the day before the funeral), and get
She divided us in life, she’s dividing us in death. Baroness Thatcher was so controversial that a single letter in a single word in the subtitle of a book that someone else has written about her and is being published after her funeral can get people’s backs up. Charles Moore’s biography is, according to its
Master your disappointment. The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice (Hale, £9.99) is as far from the fantasy-relocation genre of hapless writer transposed to sunny European idyll with cast of gurning locals and comic anecdotes involving insects as Prospero’s unnamed island was from Stratford. Mercifully, Polly Coles stuck to a year’s tenancy; she and
Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi leader in Switzerland, who was shot dead in his Davos apartment by a Croatian Jewish medical student in 1936. Hitler at the ensuing state funeral promised that Gustloff would remain ‘immortal’ under the Third Reich. But his name is now only remembered because it was bestowed on a ship which
‘One afternoon in September 1942,’ Edward Stourton opens this important and rewarding book, ‘a young man and a young woman could be seen sitting on the back steps of a farmhouse in south west France, looking up at the Pyrenees.’ It is like the first image in an album packed with snapshots set against this
The following novel re-assessment is typical of Andrew Lambirth: Although Eileen Agar exhibited with Miro, Magritte and Ernst, she was never a ‘card-carrying surrealist’. The origins of her work were rooted in ‘the great English Romantic tradition’ — medieval illumination, William Blake, Edward Lear. Lambirth approaches painters and paintings not through the prism of current