The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Guardian HQ visited the future this weekend. The newspaper group hosted its inaugural ‘Open Weekend’ — a ‘festival of debates, workshops, music, comedy, poetry, food and fun’, according to the blurb. There was live music (banjos and interpretative dance, naturally). A farmers’ market ran along the adjacent canal and a selection of seedlings for sale from
You know those sad, confused people you sometimes see, standing on street corners and shouting dementedly at passing cars. Well, the other week, that madman was me. I was in Sheffield to cover the Crucible’s Michael Frayn season, and had risen early to write my review. And then my usually reliable laptop failed to come
One of the more considerable pleasures of exhibition-viewing outside London recently was the Claude show at the Ashmolean. London exhibitions are becoming mobbed by crowds, and there is little enjoyment in shoving or being shoved in the supposed pursuit of artistic enlightenment, and absolutely no chance to contemplate individual pictures in the hurly-burly. As the
Will Gore talks to David Suchet about his forthcoming West End role and his debt to the Belgian detective The first thing I notice about David Suchet is his facial hair. It isn’t a stick-on Poirot tash, unfortunately, but a grey beard that he has grown for his latest role, James Tyrone, in the West
There should be a sign on the door. ‘Plotless play in progress.’ Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, won first prize in a 1957 scriptwriting competition organised by Kenneth Tynan and judged by Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, Peter Hall and others. The West End promoters thought the script uncommercial and never gave it
Totally unexpectedly, as I don’t like Brit gangster films particularly — so many sociopaths, so little time — I loved, loved, loved, loved, loved Wild Bill and, for those of you who are slow on the uptake, let me say four times more: I loved, loved, loved, loved it. It may not even be a
Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, whose UK première was at the Royal Opera last week, has received the severest critical panning I can recall for any new opera. It is no masterpiece, but I wonder why it has been rounded on when so many new — not to mention old — pieces with no more going
On the page a minute’s worth of words doesn’t look like much. A hundred and forty-four or thereabouts. But try spouting forth for 60 seconds on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition and those 144 words become an awful lot to find, especially when they have to be summoned up at speed from
Two documentaries this week made us ponder what our country, with its 1 per cent of the world’s population, exists for. How God Made the English (BBC2, Saturday) had the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch musing about the way we have believed for a thousand years that we were God’s chosen people, having taken that baton from
‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating
Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is a complex story and he tells it, on the whole, very well. Though the first world war took the lives of more uniformed young men,
‘The World of Interiors’ might have been a better title for this novel. Its two chief protagonists, Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling, live a century and a half apart, but both are beset by circumstances that make them physically isolated and emotionally stunted. They rail in furious misery, and are sunk in interior communing. Commodities
In the summer of 1961 I was in my second year at Magdalen College, Oxford with rooms in the 18th-century New Buildings. One of my neighbours there was a quiet man called Jonathan Green-Armytage. Sitting out on the steps of the building’s colonnade, in the sun, we became friends. He was already a distinguished photographer.
I read this novel while convalescing from pneumonia. It proved admirably fit for purpose. A light diet, mildly entertaining and with enough twists and turns of plot to serve as a tonic. John O’Farrell is a man of many parts — comedy scriptwriter (Spitting Image, Alas Smith and Jones), political satirist (An Utterly Exasperating History
The mirrored sunglasses worn by Putin on the cover of Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman give the Russian president the look of a crude mafia boss, while the half-face photo on the cover of Masha Gessen’s book makes him appear both more ordinary and more sinister. This hints at the difference of the authors’ approach. Gessen
Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat (Virago, £12.99) comes garlanded with praise from the likes of J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Rogan, who has only taken up writing after a career in architecture and engineering, tells the story of Grace Winter, a young woman on trial for murder as the novel opens. She and her husband
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia for free, A. N. Wilson’s fellow literary professionals must take heart from his expectation that there is still possibl to charge for a work of such succinctness that it is essentially an extended Wikipedia entry
Colm Tóibín began his writing career as a journalist. Although he wrote his first novel, The South, in 1986, it took him a further four years to find a publisher. Since that seminal moment, Tóibín has delivered five other novels; two books of short stories; two plays, as well as several works of non-fiction. He
On 13th March 1938, judgment was passed in the political show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, former head of the Soviet Politburo. He was sentenced to death. Bukharin was taken in silence from the dock to the exit to the cells. He paused at the door and cast his eyes up to the gallery that contained
What, if any, are the similarities between the great novels of past wars, such as Somerset Maugham’s The Hero (the Boer War), Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (WWI), and Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honor Trilogy (WWII)? And is there a connection between these wartime experiences and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? As
Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward
A new world flavour to Shelf Life this week, as the novelist Sean Thomas Russell joins us from Vancouver. He has been getting to grips with Shakespeare — an attempt, perhaps, to escape the pervasive influence of Bill O’Reilly. His latest novel, A Ship of War, is published in Britain next week. 1) What are
There’s a cracking story in the Bookseller this morning. The Publisher’s Association is calling on the government to cut VAT on eBooks to the zero rate enjoyed by print books. eBooks currently attract 20 per cent VAT, whereas print books are exempt on the grounds that they promote education. The Publishers’ Association complains that eBooks
Don’t be ashamed if you can’t understand the Budget. Economics is a notoriously tricky business. Even chancellors of the exchequer find themselves flailing about in the dark, dependent on the guidance of others. Winston Churchill explained his disastrous policy of returning sterling to the Gold Standard in 1925, by writing: ‘I had no special comprehension
Attention all those who commute through King’s Cross. A new bookshop has opened on the concourse near platforms 9-11, next to the shrine for Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame. This is the first Watermark store to open in Europe. Watermark is an Australian firm that specialises in filling small spaces in major travel hubs.
‘Zines and self-publishing are a bone of contention in my house. “I don’t have much time for self-publishing,” says my flatmate who works for Bloomsbury, “if it was any good it would have been published properly.” I, however, am in love with the idea that if anybody wanted to make a book or zine themselves,
Isn’t Paxo’s series on the British Empire brilliant TV? Gone is the weary contempt that he wears on Newsnight. Instead, he is visibly enthused by talking to ordinary people in far flung lands. Paxman isn’t telling a new story, but he’s a gifted spinner of old yarns. Pottering around a spice market in Calcutta, going to the races in Hong
Easter – Rise heart: thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy
Noam Chomsky versus Daniel Everett, it is a literary spat with a difference: they specialise in language. Chomsky is the high priest of modern linguistics, progenitor of ‘universal grammar’. Everett has spent 30 years among remote Amazonian tribes and concludes that language is learned. He says that it is unique to a specific culture, which