The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This time next week, we’ll hold the third Spectator School Revolution conference, and it’s our best-ever lineup. If any CoffeeHousers are in the world of education, or know anyone who is, then I’d strongly recommend coming (more for details can be found by visiting spectator.co.uk/schools). The keynote speaker is Michael Gove, the education secretary, who
The most obvious — but far from the only — author to read when in Madrid must be Ernest Hemingway. For a man so fond of the laconic line, his rambling, enduring presence in the city is at once ironic and misplaced. It’s not only the guidebooks which are directing me to his erstwhile favourite
The fuss stirred up by the mere suggestion that poetry might be part of the school curriculum was extremely suspicious. Just as George Osborne quietly announced his u-turn on the charities tax during the less soporific sections of Leveson, the proposal that children should have to learn poetry off by heart smacked of a smoke
Although it’s over seventy years since his death, the attitude quoted under the OED entry for ‘Joycean’ from Eric Partridge’s World of Words still persists: ‘Joyceans are artificial, but, except at the cost of a highly gymnastic cerebration, unintelligible’. This ‘Bloomsday’, an annual celebration on the day the novel is set, Radio 4 decided their
Imagine you had £20 million to spare, burning a big hole in your pocket. What would you spend it on? You could buy a stately home or a private jet, but that would be so boring. Surely the nicest way to spend it would be to ask one of America’s greatest architects to build a
There is hardly ever one of Noël Coward’s old plays not on tour or in the West End. Sometimes you think the commercial theatre would collapse without him. A ‘new’ Coward is therefore an event. Never performed or published, Volcano was written in 1956 when Coward was living permanently in Jamaica as a tax exile.
Rumours of disaffection were widespread even before I had seen this year’s RA summer extravaganza (sponsored by Insight Investment). The usual complaints about the hanging and selection had doubled or trebled, not just from non-members but from the Academicians themselves, but the critic tries to keep an open mind for as long as possible. Unfortunately,
What does a producer do on a record? I have often wondered this, as the evidence suggests that they either do (i) too much, or (ii) not enough. The heavy rock producer Steve Albini legendarily limits his contribution to switching on the equipment and pressing ‘record’. The band bashes out the song, Albini switches off
Last Wednesday two of the three live pooches that appeared in Pina Bausch’s Viktor did onstage what most dogs do when in a state of arousal. The incident, which elicited a great deal of audience laughter and repressed giggles on stage, would have amused the late Bausch. First seen in 1986, Viktor was the first
There’s an honourable track record of versions of Shakespeare’s play presenting Julius Caesar as a dictatorial monster of modern times. In 1937 Orson Welles (playing Brutus) cast Caesar as Mussolini and staged many scenes like Nazi rallies. Despite a curmudgeonly critic dismissing the conspirators as looking like ‘a committee from a taxi-driver’s union’, the show
Will and Nic’s canoodling in the woods. Adam’s bashed-in head. Amy’s makeover from wholesome midwife to foul-mouthed stepdaughter. Ambridge, home to the Archers, the Grundys and of course Lynda Snell, has been transformed from a sleepy village in the heart of Middle England into a crime-ridden soap, fuelled not by the everyday happenings of ordinary
When should you set Antigone? Apparently not in the time of Antigone. The greatest classics these days seem to be aimed at the stupidest ticket-holders. And these hapless wretches can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside their immediate experience. Polly Findlay’s version of Sophocles’ tragedy doesn’t even get modernity right. Her slightly out-of-date set
As an occasional user of Queensway Tube station, I have noticed that on exiting the lift I am met with the extraordinary and beguiling sounds of Mozart symphonies and piano concerti — well-chosen, beautifully played and blasted over the Tannoy system. There is something transporting about this post-underground experience, something I don’t expect after the
The BBC has been heavily criticised for its coverage of the Jubilee flotilla, and the tone was incredibly annoying. All those smiley celebrities pretending to enjoy themselves! The tabloids, those for whom the Beeb can never do anything right, would have been just as mean if the treatment had been sombre and serious. ‘And we
It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that this opera, Strauss’s first to maintain a place in the repertory, and its successor Elektra are, for all their differences, companion pieces. Even before reading the late Patrick O’Connor’s excellent article ‘Happy Families’, the best
The first Saturday of the Hay Festival is always a bit like the first day of term — bumping into people you’ve haven’t seen in months, sometimes for a whole year. Then there are the people down from London, dressed in mufti, sporting inappropriate sunglasses and crumpled linen jackets that haven’t been out of the
A Royal Affair is a beautifully mounted historical drama which goes right where so many films of this type go wrong: it doesn’t get distracted by carriages and candlelight and pretty frocks and balls and sumptuous feasts, but keeps its eye firmly and surely on character and story and, my, what a fascinating story it
New Martin Amis novels haven’t always received a fine reception of late. So much so that even tepid praise now reads generously. In the current magazine Philip Hensher reviews the latest, Lionel Asbo, and closes by declaring it, ‘not as bad as I feared.’ Having just finished it I think there is much more to
Jackie Kay, one of Scotland’s most celebrated living writers, is a woman of many voices. In her latest collection of short stories the voices mainly belong to women of middle to old age. Many are lonely, some are caring for barmy relatives, some are barmy relatives. Reality Reality’s most successful tales glow with a quiet
A biography that is also a collaboration with its subject is something of a novelty. Here, Maggie Fergusson writes the life, while Michael Morpurgo contributes seven stories, each springing from the subject matter of the preceding section. Fergusson has previously written an excellent biography of George Mackay Brown, so has now moved from a detached
This wonderful book is not a history of food in 100 recipes at all; it is a history of the world in 100 recipes, as seen through the medium of what we ate and how we cooked it. William Sitwell’s erudite work never drags and should not be seen as a collection of recipes (although
Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK
Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels, qui invented der irreverente lingua des Europanto, ‘eine mix van differente linguas sonder grammatica und regulationes,’ as el puts it sichself. Oui, c’est Franglais, aber more so and avec knobs on, und der late Kilomètres
The case for Richard Ford isn’t hard to make. Ever since his breakthrough novel The Sportswriter in 1986, his multi-award-winning fiction has combined an unsparing intelligence with an unashamed high-mindedness about what literature can achieve — nothing less than a careful exploration of the best way to live. In some hands, this moral sense might
The landscape architect Kim Wilkie grew up in a house on the edge of the Malaysian jungle. ‘Things decayed as fast as they grew.’ Leather shoes would fur over with mould within hours if left outside. His father was posted to Iraq next. ‘Everything was brown.’ But stare long enough at the sand and you
Juliet Nicolson is a member of a literary dynasty second in productivity only to the Pakenhams. She is herself the author of two distinguished volumes of social history describing Britain immediately before and immediately after the first world war. This is her first novel. The danger of letting a social historian write novels is that
This is the shortest political memoir I have ever been sent for review. It is a marvel of concision: 27 years in the Commons set down in only 168 pages. Can any Spectator reader point to a briefer example of the genre? Yet I confess that I opened Confessions of a Eurosceptic with a degree
After the turn-of the-century memoir Experience, Martin Amis’s career has been widely perceived as somewhat rocky, shading into moments of disaster. If Experience, with its triple narrative of father, teeth and Fred West, was regarded as a compelling and masterly whole, Amis’s subsequent novels and non-fiction have not been as widely admired. Yellow Dog was
Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the