Drake’s soft centre makes him a new type of hip-hop role model
The Canadian rapper’s response to Pusha-T on his new album is nimble and reasonable.
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
July 17, 2018
The real reason Scarlett Johansson abandoned her ‘trans role’
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,
July 16, 2018
Meet Michiko Kakutani, the conservative
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.
July 13, 2018
My chat with Harvey Weinstein
The disgraced movie producer reached out to Taki with a ‘world exclusive’ about Rose McGowan and Asia Argento
July 12, 2018
Cease to strive! Now!
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,
Chopin’s Piano is an eclectic trip through 19th-century romanticism
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
July 10, 2018
Donald Trump’s fixation on celebrity is what makes him so…American
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.
July 5, 2018
Ignore Lily Allen’s sub-adolescent politics – her new album is brilliant
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
The virtuoso virtue-signallers of classical music
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
Why the Romanovs were doomed
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
July 3, 2018
Sure, Donald Trump is uncultured – but is that such a bad thing?
The president may be averse to the arts, but he’s hardly shaking the republic to its core.
July 1, 2018
Freaky Friday for the sex wars: Netflix’s I Am Not an Easy Man reviewed
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
June 29, 2018
The obscenity of the art world
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
June 28, 2018
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
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
Has Tibet finally lost out to China?
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
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
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
June 26, 2018
David Lynch and the new Trumpian counter culture
The director recognises Trump’s startling originality and willingness to look beyond the taken-for-granted modus operandi of the Washington Establishment.
June 24, 2018
Film review: Westwood – Punk, Icon, Activist
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
June 21, 2018
‘I think The Kinks could have found a better frontman’: Ray Davies interviewed
‘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
Death-defying acts and the dark side of the circus
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
A Shout in the Ruins is a panorama of the Civil War and beyond
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
From Don Quixote to My Struggle — a survey of the novel in 160 pages
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
The short step from good manners to lofty imperialism
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
June 20, 2018
The comic masterpiece of Donald J. Trump
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.
June 14, 2018
American Histories, by John Edgar Wideman, reviewed
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
It’s the wreckage of alcoholism, not the road to recovery, that makes for enthralling reading
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
Russia’s obsession with securing a warm-water port changed the history of Central Asia
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
The story of the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade is a high adventure
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.
June 10, 2018
Ocean’s Eight: the women star, but the ethnics still do the dirty work
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
