The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the
Online life is no life at all
In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the
‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to Dalia Grinkeviciute’s memoir. The author was 14 in 1941, when the Soviets deported her with her mother and brother from their native Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city. In 1949, the women escaped from Siberia and
It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s originality as a thinker, when he described him as ‘an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier’. Britain’s greatest natural scientist was indeed a keeper of fowl, with pigeons among his favourites. The habit arose from Darwin’s
‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has read it. Dante’s midlife crisis in the dark wood, his journey down the circles of hell, up the ledges of Purgatory and into the arms of Beatrice is mother’s milk to Italian schoolchildren. Today lines
The former British Shadow Chancellor’s new documentary is more favourable of Trumpsters than anyone at the BBC could have ever imagined.
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering Technicolor Oz. When Howard Carter leans over Tutankhamun’s open sarcophagus (1922), he does so in the glare of pharaonic gold. A photograph of fallen American soldiers on the Gettysburg battlefield (1863) shocks the more when
A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession:
Russia has always attracted a certain breed of foreigner: adventurers, drawn to the country’s vastness and emptiness; chancers, seeking fortunes and new beginnings in the Russian rough and tumble. Romantics, all of them, men and women in search of soulfulness and authenticity — the experience of life lived on and beyond the edge of the
The furore around the Teeth author’s latest short story shows the risk of keeping your politics slightly to yourself.
The New York Times critic has nothing to apologise for. Yet he has apologised.
Mission Impossible: Fallout reviewed.
In which our correspondent strikes out for the territory.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric
Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the film which Lee made just before his death in 1973 at the age of 32, and that would in turn seal his worldwide stardom. There, on one side, stands Lee himself. There, on the other,
The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts,
Since the 17th century, a ‘humourist’ has been a witty person, and especially someone skilled in literary comedy. In 1871, the Athenaeum said that Swift had been ‘an inimitable humourist’. But in modern usage the term seems to describe a specifically American job title: someone who specialises in writing short prose pieces whose only purpose
Paws for thought
Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be
When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech. But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which
‘Much of what I say may turn out not to be true.’ Hardly the ideal beginning to a guided tour. But Alex Kerr is not your typical tour guide, briskly selling a place to a time-pressed group via a few must-snap essentials — the glint of the sun off Kyoto’s Golden Temple and its still
All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have an additional challenge, however, of combining all this with boring technical detail. How to explain the mechanical stuff without being either too dry or too simple? What’s the reader’s likely level of knowledge? These questions
It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence of James Joyce, struggling to have their first novels published in the late 1930s. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man in the grip of profound indolence, was published in
Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. It must vex him, as it does most of us with A-levels, to witness the distressingly ignorant, chaotic and unprincipled way in which the government, run by the party of which he is a member,
The Canadian rapper’s response to Pusha-T on his new album is nimble and reasonable.
There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart,
The former New York Times reviewer’s study of truth reveals how she’s been driven to outrage by the erosion of cultural and critical values.
The disgraced movie producer reached out to Taki with a ‘world exclusive’ about Rose McGowan and Asia Argento
