The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao Tzu argued that the wise man should refrain from action, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount also told us not to bother ourselves overmuch: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not.’ For Christ,
It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a biography, nor a work of musicology. As an extended historical essay it is patchy and selective. It is partly about pianos and pianism, but would disappoint serious students of that genre. It is not quite
It’s almost impossible to imagine the President praising a book or a person or an idea, or really anything, that hasn’t been approved by a lot of people.
Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual overproduced r&b pop schlock. What used to be called ‘indie’ singer-songwriters are always moaning about how utterly useless they are, taking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ as a kind of self-flagellating worldview. Chart
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute that boasts two highly original features; it’s five hours long and must be performed by a badger. Though it took me only five minutes to write, my opus one is guaranteed to get through to
The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar
The president may be averse to the arts, but he’s hardly shaking the republic to its core.
You know the feeling. One minute, you’re an oversexed adman, strolling the streets of Paris and propositioning every woman you pass. The next, you’ve walked into a lamp post, and knocked yourself unconscious. You wake up in the same Paris, but now the sex roles are reversed, and the hierarchies of power and values too. … Read more
You’ve probably heard that we’re in a boom time for the art business, breaking sales records as fast as we can make them. This might seem strange, in a time of such political uncertainty, but look closer: the art world is a fascinating canary in our cultural/social/economic coal mine, an odd liminal zone where profound … Read more
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple of agents to spy out ancient Jericho. There they were sheltered by the madam of the local brothel. All three are heroes in Israel today. Generals and politicians have always needed secret information to track
Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover more. Both groups will be surprised. The newcomers especially will be disabused of any belief that Tibetans were always non-violent, deeply spiritual and unworldly. Tibetanists and advanced students will learn that, decades after the Chinese
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was 1902 and Tesla was broke. ‘Am I backed by the greatest financier of all time? And shall I lose great triumphs and an immense fortune because I need a sum of money? Are you going
The director recognises Trump’s startling originality and willingness to look beyond the taken-for-granted modus operandi of the Washington Establishment.
This is a golden age for documentaries, if you have time to view them. Digital film and editing have reduced the cost of making a documentary, and online streaming has resolved the problem of distribution. The result is a glut of documentaries, generally well-made, and generally too long. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist comes … Read more
‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the table outside a café in Highgate. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ It turns out the girlfriend is no longer the girlfriend. ‘You broke up? You know, that happens. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet somebody else.’ He pauses
In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States each year displaying sword-swallowers, human-headed spiders, snake-charmers and fire-eaters to a marvelling/cynical public. Sideshows, as Fontaine writes, ‘are where people come to see public displays of their private fears’, and to probe their disgust reflexes
We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a
I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and an impermeable membrane between invention and reality — the novel, that is, being a box from which nothing can leap out, and into which nothing, except what the author has chosen to put there, can
In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become, lies civility. Keith Thomas’s marvellous new book addresses the subject of ideal behaviour. It shows the way that early modern England formed notions of civilisation and proper conduct, in contrast to what was termed ‘the
Conrad Black explains how the President consistently and hilariously outplays his enemies, provoking and then exploiting the friction between him and them to raise himself to ever greater heights.
This new collection of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories comes across the pond as one of four handsomely packaged volumes from Canongate. Little known in this country, he towers large in his native States; a MacArthur Genius fellow, a PEN/Faulkner Award winner twice, winner of the Prix Femina Etranger last year, endorsed by Richard Ford
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Columbia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever, bold, earnest and sometimes maddening, it is chiefly an account of the author’s alcohol addiction and the various stages of her recovery. It is also an examination of the lives and works, in so far
In the 13th century, having overrun and terrorised Europe as far as Budapest, and in the process possibly bringing with them the flea which caused the Black Death, the heirs to Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde had also conquered territory to the east as far as the Korean peninsular. The assiduous Swiss scholar and
Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the Harlem Renaissance. ‘Harlemania’ took off in jazz-age New York, as white thrill-seekers danced to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and enthused over so-called primitive art. Hurston made a ‘black splash’ of her own in 1920s Harlem.
Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack … Read more
Niall Ferguson’s decision to disengage with students and their politics is wrong. While such a statement may bring glee to those on the left and may displease Ferguson himself, Ferguson’s reaction to his admitted bad judgement involving Stanford students is deeply problematic. Specifically, after being caught suggesting some fairly unethical behaviour regarding his engagement with … Read more
Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the
‘The rule in our household is: if a TV series hasn’t got subtitles, it’s not worth watching,’ a friend told me the other day. Once this approach would have been both extremely limiting and insufferably pompous. In the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime, though, it makes a lot of sense. There’s something about English-speaking
Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing