The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
What is with Toni Morrison? The Nobel laureate returned to fray this week with Home – a typically bleak novella, according to Daisy Dunn’s review. Morrison has forged a sparkling career in grim territory. Why? Simple, she says in the interview above, the black novelists of the ‘60s were predominantly men writing ‘revolutionary books’ that
In the various mixed exhibitions I’ve seen over the years that dealt with 18th- and 19th-century British art, Johan Zoffany (1733–1810) has always seemed to stand out. Yet there hasn’t been a museum show devoted to his work in this country since the National Portrait Gallery’s survey of 1977, so Martin Postle must be congratulated
Lloyd Evans talks to the young, dynamic and much-in-demand Tom Scutt about the challenges of bringing to life Narnia and its inhabitants Barky? What does he mean, ‘barky’? We’re talking about Aslan and he says he’s aiming for ‘barky’. ‘Barky like a dog or barky like a tree?’ ‘Like a tree,’ says Tom Scutt, designer
The arrival of the Proms prospectus, with its glamorous pictures of the stars of today, makes me wonder how much those very palatable-looking people are costing the BBC. The question is prompted by the style of the photography — the sexing up of the Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier has nothing on how string players
My colleague Lloyd Evans had much fun a couple of weeks ago playing the curmudgeon with the Cultural Olympiad. Alas poor Bard, he quipped, ‘press-ganged’ into the World Shakespeare Festival. And it sounds as though Lloyd will be running for his life, especially from the Bankside-based Globe to Globe project in which all 37 plays
What’s going on? Everyone’s doing playlets all of a sudden. I saw five this week. The Donmar is presenting a trio of scripts by Robert Holman entitled Making Noise Quietly. A silly title. ‘A writers’ writer’ — an even sillier cliché — is how the programme notes describe Holman. If they mean ‘a boring writer’
Last year, when I reviewed The Sum of Parts, the community-oriented piece produced by Connect, Sadler’s Wells Creative Learning department, I thought it wouldn’t be possible to do any better. Well, I was wrong, as this year’s Compass was an even more breathtaking experience. The new project, which involves more than 100 non-professional performers and
The new production of Wagner’s first indisputable masterpiece The Flying Dutchman by English National Opera is a decided success, the best account of what contemporary producers make strangely heavy weather of that I have seen in decades. For some reason they find it hard to focus on the title role, and make it all a
Listeners beware. Especially those of you who are unashamed Archers addicts. The antics of the denizens of Ambridge might seem like casual, everyday stuff, but they’ve probably been carefully designed to indoctrinate us with the ‘right’ kind of behaviour. That’s if a two-part documentary on the World Service, hosted by none other than Debbie Archer
Wilton’s, the crumbly music hall in London’s East End, has been dressed up as a crumbly Prohibition-era speakeasy. And a good job they’ve done of it, what with the bootlegger types in the foyer, foxtrotters on the upstairs landing, and an Irish giant who ushers us into a side chapel where his friend’s corpse is
I’ve realised what the perfect non-fiction book is. You’d think that as someone who writes non-fiction books for a living I’d be excited by this discovery, and would even now be scribbling feverishly away so as to hit the top of the bestseller lists before anyone else has the same idea. Trouble is, the perfect
In the US, Simon Mawer’s new novel The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is rather more optimistically entitled Trapeze. It opens as a girl with three aliases hurls herself through an aircraft hatch into occupied France. She’s an SOE spy, and the life she’s fallen into has all the surrealism of a circus. During
However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult
It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and
Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition:
At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of years ago without a murmur, let alone a box set. You get the impression from A Natural Woman (Virago, £20) that that’s the way she
Mark Haddon is in what must sometimes seem like the unenviable position of having written a first (adult) novel which was, and continues to be, a smash hit. Drawing in part on his own experiences of working with the autistic, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has become one of those
Martin Palmer is without doubt one of our leading authorities on the subject of Nature and sacred writing today — among his previous publications being Sacred Gardens and The Sacred History of Britain. One of the primary aims of his latest book is to teach us how to ‘read’ our surroundings; for, he believes, like
I am writing shortly before this week’s vote for Mayor of London, which makes it a good time to ask whether Boris is Mr Toad. Hidden away on Sunday night, after the wondrously acted but terminally bleak Vera (Brenda Blethyn can convey more with her squeaky mou noise than some actors manage with ‘God for
Jeremy Clarke, our Low Life correspondent, has sobered up to answer our impertinent questions this week. His latest book, One Middle Aged Man in Search of The Point, is available in hardback. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader 2) As a child, what did you read under
Some war veterans slip back into civilian life with reasonable ease, stiff of limb, stiff of upper lip. If at first it’s a case of concealment and self-restraint, there’s at least some chance that play-acting can infiltrate reality. The protagonist of Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home, is called Frank Money. He has just returned to
A major business deal took place in the United States yesterday that could revolutionise the books market. Microsoft has invested $300 million (£185m) in Barnes and Noble’s Nook eBook reader. The two companies have created a subsidiary, named Newco for the time being. Microsoft controls 17.6 per cent of the equity. The standard analysis is
‘A Short Song of Congratulation’ Long-expected one and twenty Ling’ring year, at last is flown, Pomp and Pleasure, Pride and Plenty Great Sir John, are all your own. Loosen’d from the Minor’s tether, Free to mortgage or to sell, Wild as wind, and light as feather Bid the slaves of thrift farewel. Call the Bettys,
Don’t be fooled by the incessant rain and your resurgent rheumatism, the summer literary festival season is upon us. The line-up at the Hay Festival is old news; the hotels of Edinburgh are preparing; and anticipation fills tea rooms from Warwick to St. Ives. The festival market is flooded, but there is one new festival
Now that the great design surveys regularly mounted by the V&A have come up to date, what will it seek to beguile us with next? These exhibitions have always been of interest, at least in parts, and often infuriating, a combination that has helped to ensure their success. The wide range of paintings and objects
William Cook says that I.M. Pei’s latest building, Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, once again captures the spirit of the age Standing outside Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, you’re reminded of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: ‘less is more’. Van der Rohe was a hero
Willie Nelson. An Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground. That is all.
A few weeks ago, feeling stale and stressed, I escaped to our dilapidated cottage in Dorset for a few days on my own. When I was younger, and especially when I was drinking heavily, I often felt ill at ease in my own company, but these days I get on quite happily alone, though I