The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In this splendid, monumental slab of a book, Desmond Fitzgerald, the 29th Knight of Glin, has made the chronicle of his family epitomise the whole turbulent history of Ireland since the arrival of the Normans. The survey includes chapters by academic genealogists and other historians, with less formal contributions from the Knight himself and his
William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. But since reaching the standard age for retirement, Trevor has produced four further volumes, and now Penguin has brought out a handsome new edition, in two slipcased
It is 150 years since the composer’s birth. Michael Kennedy on his remarkable popularity Approaching 60 years of writing music criticism, I have been wondering what I would nominate as the most remarkable changes on the British musical scene since I started. I decided there were three: the emergence of Mahler as a popular composer
The Conversation Piece The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 February A visit to the Queen’s Gallery is always a civilised, enjoyable experience. Apart, that is, from the airport-style security to which the visitor is subjected — a saddening sign of the retrograde times we live in. The treasures of the Royal Collection are worth
Rope Almeida Generous Finborough Oh dear, not this again. I’ve seen Hitchcock’s wonderfully creepy film Rope several times and I had little appetite for the Patrick Hamilton play on which it’s based. Big surprise. The film script was radically customised to accommodate the timid tastes of 1940s film-goers. The original, from 1929, is more daring,
Arabian Nights Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon The RSC’s Christmas show is a welcome revival by Dominic Cooke of his adaptation of Arabian Nights, first staged with great success at the Young Vic in 1998. This is also the first ‘family show’ in the Courtyard, and it was good there were so many children there to enjoy
Minicab drivers have a bad reputation for being dishonest incompetents and worse — a current poster campaign suggests that if a woman gets into an unlicensed cab she has only herself to blame if she gets raped — but down here in suburban Surrey they couldn’t be more helpful or reliable as I have had
La bohème Royal Opera House Thanks to the cautiousness of the major opera companies over the festive season, I saw Puccini’s La bohème twice in five days, with another couple of productions to go. The most fascinating aspect, for me, of seeing the Royal Opera’s 577th performance of this masterpiece, in John Copley’s production from
What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’ What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer
Back in the Sixties or Seventies it was TV that made the cultural running, showing off its photogenic qualities to make series that were supposed to change the way we thought about ourselves. Huge amounts of dosh were pumped into Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man as Clark swanned around the
Towards the end of 1979, Antonia Fraser gave an interview to the Washington Post in connection with her book Charles II (renamed ‘Royal Charles’ so as not to confuse a sequel-bombarded American public). She records her final exchange with the interviewer in the tersely effective style of the diaries from which this book is adapted:
Last year, at a gathering in a London bookshop, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe read poetry and mused over his long career. The evening was a sell-out, the mood adoring. At the end, a Scandinavian blonde raised a hand to ask whether, if he could do it all again, there was anything about Things Fall
It’s lovely to be the child of a Chinese Revolutionary Martyr. It means your parent died especially heroically for the Communist cause. I had a friend who was such a son; his father, a high-ranking Chiang Kaishek army officer, came over to the Maoist cause and died fighting for it against his former comrades. The
Perry Anderson was an editor of the New Left Review in the days when there was a New Left, and a pro-European Marxist at a time when this seemed a contradiction in terms. Since then, the opinions of this characteristically English rebel have been softened by years passed in the sociology departments of American universities.
Waking Up in Toytown, by John Burnside The Freedoms of Suburbia, by Paul Barker Finding himself in a lunatic asylum, and then at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, John Burnside has an idea. He wants a normal life. His idea is to move to the suburbs, because it is there, he feels, that he might
William T. Vollmann ruined my Christmas. But he also made my year. Like a fisherman scared by reports of mysterious beasts and monsters — Here be dragons! Gryphon! Basilisk! Unicorn! Serpent! — I’d been put off for a long time by Vollmann’s reputation as the great white whale of American fiction, the New Maximalists’ Maximalist,
Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have
Have you ever been on holiday and struggled to choose a guidebook? I mean, where does one start? I imagine in a bookshop. But, if anything, that makes the task even harder. The choice is just too wide. Waterstones sell around 12 guidebooks per major city — far more if you want a whole country
Who can we add to the roster of Great Irish Writers? Why none other than our old chum Patrick Bartholomew Ahern. It seems that Bertie’s autobiography (sadly not titled Dig Outs & Other Fuck-Ups) should be found on the fiction shelves. How so? Well… The granting of tax-free status to former taoiseach Bertie Ahern for
Been a whole lotta time since Waylon was seen around here. Time to rectify that so here’s the great man singing A Good Hearted Woman which is what every outlaw needs though since all mommas also know they really shouldn’t let their babies grow up to be cowboys you’d think that means they’d be doubly
A driven George Clooney tells Marianne Gray how important it is not to get typecast George Clooney arrived on British screens more or less a fully formed star. He had spent years trapped in American sitcom hell and by the time we got him he was in his mid-thirties playing the debonair Dr Doug Ross
Drawing Attention Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 17 January Last chance to see a really excellent selection of works on paper from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. It’s a relatively new collection, begun in 1969, but despite that it includes many of the great names of Western art. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century
I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. Blame middle age, or lack of time, or the grim, brutal feeling that you’ve seen it all before and can’t be bothered to
La Bohème Cock Tavern The Enchanted Pig Linbury Studio Puccini’s La Bohème has oddly become the Christmas opera of choice, broadcast on BBC TV on Christmas afternoon (an especially ludicrous affair), and major opera houses dusting down their elderly versions. I doubt whether any of them will be as involving, indeed thrilling and upsetting, as
The Misanthrope Comedy Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator
New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though,
I think I might be about the second-last person on earth finally to have replaced his squat, bulbous, stone-age TV set with one of those new angled, wide-screen, narrow, HD-ready jobs. My worry is it’s not big enough. ‘No, you can’t have a 50-inch. No way are you having a 50-inch. Not in MY house,’
Awoken the other night by cold and concern for global warming, I searched my conscience for ways to reduce my carbon footprint. The trouble is, a large part of it is simply my existence. During the now-forgotten demographic panic of the 1970s, I knew a man who killed himself in the interests of population reduction,
Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? With Sandown’s jumping card frosted off last Saturday, I wasn’t the only one who scuttled across Surrey to Lingfield’s polytrack, where Betdaq had sponsored an extra day to keep the cash tills rolling and the