The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to
Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor. His first collection of short stories ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’ was published in the United States in 1973. It was another nine years before his first novel ‘The Busconductor Hines appeared. Kelman has received several
After tying the knot with her toyboy lover Aaron Johnson, 22, in June, it seems the artist-turned-movie director Sam Taylor Wood, 45, is doing little to dispel the dominant old woman image. The cast list for the upcoming adaptation Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley has a new name on it: ‘Aaron Taylor Johnson’. It seems
Whatever Mitt might think, if there’s one thing that makes us proud to be British, it’s the fact we’re not American. Alright, it’s true we don’t have a black president but we still think we’re cooler: less brash, more sarcastic and ready to give Tim Berners-Lee a starring role in the Olympic show. The differences
An easy, sure-fire way of generating a bit of publicity is picking a fight with a provocative public intellectual. Rather than criticising Bernard-Henri Lévy’s blow-dry, or kicking David Starkey in either of his legs, Pankaj Mishra memorably attacked Niall Ferguson in his review of Civilisation in the LRB last November. So the threat of a lawsuit from
The jewel in the crown of Sir Michael Boyd’s decade as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company was his 2007–8 staging of the major Shakespeare Histories from Richard II, through Henry IV, V and VI, to Richard III. For a short, alas too short, period, the entire sequence of eight plays could be seen over
Thomas Heatherwick (born 1970) is one of our most exciting and inventive designers, so it is somewhat unfortunate that he is much associated in the public mind with a project that failed, the memorably named ‘B of the Bang’. This was a sculpture commissioned to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games held in Manchester, and the
If the River of Music put you in the mood for stimulating sounds on the banks of the Thames, next week’s Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, also part of the London 2012 Festival, is well-timed. Meltdown’s later-than-usual slot should earn it a little reflected Olympic glory, though it’s hard to imagine anyone less suggestive of
Who would have thought 15 years ago that not only would the BBC still be spending money on radio coverage of the London Olympics but that there’d also be a dedicated digital station? High definition TV, with its crystal-clear images of every pimple, tattoo and six-pack, should by rights have seen off its poor sound-only
Must we? All of us? This is the perfect storm, the tempest, the ultimate crisis for non-sport fans. But TV, with all its kaleidoscopic variety, was invented for just such an eventuality, surely? And together with some assistance from our faithful old friends, the tinnies in the fridge, the next few weeks might pass quite
A timely show at the Finborough takes us into the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s terror state. Zoe Lafferty’s verbatim piece gathers evidence from activists and torture victims and flings it straight at us. The result is utterly gruesome and utterly compelling. A fractured, blood-stained snapshot of an ancient monstrosity blundering towards its own funeral. Syria,
The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme
In the late 1960s, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter is signed to a record label after two Motown producers see him performing in a seedy Detroit dive called The Sewer. He delivers two albums, which receive rave reviews (he is compared to Bob Dylan; some say he is better than Bob Dylan), but nobody buys them, so
Not many beekeepers ferry so many black bin liners in and out of their tower block that the local council suspect them of running a crack den (the same council who have missed the real crack den in the basement). Not many beekeepers transport their hives in a decommissioned London taxi, narrowly avoiding disaster when
A re-telling of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal’s debut The Innocents (Chatto, £14.99) takes the action to contemporary Golders Green. The daily minutiae of Jewish life are documented, from eating challah at Shabbat to the moments preceding a circumcision, alongside more sweeping statements: ‘For a people whose history is one of exodus
As a subject for literature, virtue and its celebration is fairly unfashionable. This is particularly true in Britain, where we like to maintain ironic detachment. This perhaps explains why Robert B. Parker and his private eye, Spenser, have never found their way into regular dinner-party chat on this side of the Atlantic. In America, as
In the middle of last summer’s riots, Mash, a member of a South London gang I have befriended, phoned me. He was standing outside a shop that was being looted. ‘It’s the funniest thing, Harry man,’ he declared. ‘This day I can go anywhere in London and there is no beef.’ Mash is usually confined
Impressed by Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965), which describes the close relations between Benjamin Haydon, the Carlyles and the Brownings in the summer of 1846, Hugh Macdonald has written a similarly ‘horizontal’ and highly readable biography of intersecting musicians in 1853. His theme is the relations, not
Niall Ferguson, in his impressive and exuberant book Civilization, published last year, sought to explain why Western civilisation triumphed in the centuries after the Renaissance with reference to six factors. He identified them as competition, science, property, medicine consumption and work, or a particular work ethic. These historical tours d’horizon are never without their critics,
This book, by the architectural historian Richard Davies, is remarkable in many ways — for the importance of its subject matter, for the excellence and variety of the many photographs, and for the imaginative choice of the accompanying texts. The fruit of ten years of long and difficult journeys in the far north of European
Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee. He moved to London in 1984 to work as a jazz musician, and eventually began to write poetry. In 1993, Faber published his debut collection, Nil Nil, which won the Forward prize. In total, he’s published seven collections and three books of aphorisms. Paterson has won the
Boris will recite an ode in honour of the Olympics – of course he is. He commissioned Dr Armand D’Angour, an Oxford Greats don, to compose the ode in the style of Pindar. Peter Jones, our Ancient and Modern columnist, wrote about Boris’ enterprise in this week’s issue of the magazine. We reproduce it here:
Is there any chance that you might, at any point in the next three weeks, be talking to anyone? About anything, in any setting, for any length of time? Then you’d better get a copy of The British Olympics by Martin Polley. Because it won’t matter what the primary purpose of your conversation is supposed
Here is the Booker longlist, announced earlier this afternoon: The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre) Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker) The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books) Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel
Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright is on this week’s Shelf Life. She tells us which book qualifies as the first satisfying satire on the Irish boom, gives us a long list of the parties in literature she would like to have attended and reveals which is the only book by Norman
Authors are getting cross. Generally a polite bunch, authors are alarmed at the ongoing, serious threats to libraries (which they continue to campaign against) and also the knock-on effect for the lowest-earning authors. The Government is encouraging libraries to replace paid staff with volunteers. Such “community libraries” currently account for less than 1 per cent
‘In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising?’ Thus spoke Carrie Bradshaw. Such knowledge suggests that I have passed her tipping point; my compromises have compromised me. But, then again, one can’t dissent from Robert Louis Stevenson’s view that ‘compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer’, especially when it comes to relationships.
London doesn’t really have a literary hipster scene, but if it did, Ned Beauman would be centre stage. The 27-year-old novelist may look like he’s crawled out of an evolution of man diagram, but he’s very clever and very trendy and, despite having gone to Cambridge, knows a lot about ketamine. His show-offy but energetic
Epigram 7 from The letting of humours blood in the head-vaine ‘Speak gentlemen, what shall we do to day? Drink some brave health upon the Dutch carouse? Or shall we to the Globe and see a play? Or visit Shoreditch for a bawdy house? Let’s call for cards or dice, and have a game. To