The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Andrew Ferguson is one of America’s most accomplished conservative writers, but he is barely known here. That’s a pity because his sceptical pen would appeal to many English readers. The other day, on behalf of the Weekly Standard, he attended a panel discussion on the politics of Darwinism at the American Enterprise Institute. The theme
“Barzini’s dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia — Moe Greene — Strachi — Cuneo — Today I settle all Family business.” Remember that scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone tells his soon-to-be-executed brother-in-law that the Corleones have settled all their vendettas in a bloody spree of vengeance? That’s what Westminster feels like this morning. The
The Spectator’s pop critic looks back on 20 years It suddenly occurs to me, with a jolt, that I have been writing about pop music for The Spectator for 20 years. This makes me the fifth (or possibly sixth, since I am bound to have forgotten someone) longest continuously serving columnist on the magazine, which
Marylebone is the pleasant departure-point if you’re taking the train to Aylesbury from London, and what better way to spend a spring day than an outing to the gentle Buckinghamshire countryside to see a celebration of its merits by fine artists. Upstairs at the Bucking-hamshire County Museum, near St Mary’s Church, is an excellent small
Yorkshire Sculpture Park is the first and best of the breed in the British Isles. Since 1977 it has activated 500 acres of undulating land between Barnsley and Wakefield in a unique way. A man-made upper and lower lake, with a weir and cascade at the narrow junction between the two, runs through the middle
Holocaust art must be approached with care. There’s a worry that by finding fault you’re somehow failing to take the world’s all-time Number one human rights violation seriously. Kindertransport follows the tale of Eva, a Jewish schoolgirl sent from Nazi Germany to Britain at the close of the 1930s. She’s adopted by a rough-diamond Manchester
I wish the term ‘ballet-theatre’ had not already been snatched and (mis)used by dance historians, for there is no better way to define Will Tuckett’s art: his creations are to ballet what dance-theatre is to modern and postmodern dance. Not unlike some of the most acclaimed performance makers who specialised in the latter genre, Tuckett
Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, has always been the Cinderella in that area of his work, and the production of it at the Linbury Studio in the Royal Opera House is unlikely to change that. Britten wrote it for presentation on BBC television, and took very seriously the possibilities and limitations which that medium possesses
Victoria’s Empire (BBC1, Sunday) is the BBC’s new Palinesque travelogue series in which comedienne Victoria Wood goes from exotic location to exotic location chatting to the locals, making wry observations and being mildly funny. But there’s at least one thing that’s very, very annoying about it. The annoying thing — and I don’t know whether
One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’ Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and
Death puts a different value on a person, usually a smaller one than in life. Sometimes, how- ever, the opposite happens. For instance, how many medieval Archbishops of Canterbury can most of us name off-hand apart from St Thomas Becket? In some cases, death makes the man. It is likely that Alexander Litvinenko will be
John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt asserts the crucial role of political ideas in the coming cataclysm of the English civil war. His focus is close: the 18 months before the final breach between Charles I and Parliament, but it is as scholarly in depth as it is cinematic in scope. Here is a dramatic retelling
In 2003, two days after his now infamous interview with Phil Spector was published in the Daily Telegraph, Mick Brown heard that a woman had been shot and killed in the legendary pop producer’s mansion. Most journalists in his position would be exhilarated by their good fortune — the interview was the first that Spector
Ali A. Allawi has spent much of his life in exile from his native Iraq. Born into a family that had served the royal family that came to grief in 1958, he spent his childhood at schools in England and his career abroad as an academic, engineer and banker. Active among the émigré anti-Baathists in
From the day in 1513 that Balboa stared at the Pacific from a peak in Darien men dreamed of cutting a path from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the ‘Golden Isthmus’ of Panama. Not until the 19th century did the dream become a realistic engineering possibility. We have become blasé about scientific breakthroughs and
Would you ever torture somebody? ‘Of course not’, you say. The author, Professor (of psychology) Philip Zimbardo, disagrees. His view is ‘any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us — under the right or wrong situational forces’. The evidence he adduces for this shocking proposition is
‘Political correctness’, which divides and galls our society, is a modern manifestation of an old impulse which periodically demands, in the cause of social improvement, the curtailment of pleasure and the inhibition of language and thought. It happened with the rise of Puritanism midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, when stage-plays and popular enjoyments
Armadillos dig, that’s what they do best, but the three-banded variety from South America — and anyone brought up on the Just So stories will know this already — can also curl up like a hedgehog, and protect its back with layers of leather armour- plating. So the heroes of Malvinas Requiem, a band of
What is the peculiar magic of string quartets? Ian McEwan posed this question when I interviewed him recently. It came to mind again during an enchanting evening at the Spectator’s Westminster offices last night, as the Bridge Quartet gave a sublime performance of Elgar’s music, including the String Quartet in E minor. The event renewed
The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’ Unlike my fearless and indefatigable colleague, I visit the opera with reluctance, expecting the worst and usually finding it. The almost universal betrayal in recent decades of this most complex of genres by hideous design and perverted production is never so sheerly ghastly as with the
Since Sir Edward Poulton’s pioneering study The Colours of Animals was published in 1890, the importance of disguise in the natural world — and, by extension, in the human one — has been widely recognised and exploited. As technology changed the patterns and prospects of warfare, with aerial reconnaissance and long-range shelling becoming a nasty
I’d never really looked at landscapes with cows until a student experience brought them sharply into focus. I was standing in front of one at a tutor’s party when I noticed the boy next to me staring at it. As I wondered what had so captured his imagination, he suddenly gasped, ‘God, I’m hungry!’ There
Handel’s Giulio Cesare in a staged concert performance at the Barbican, given under the experienced baton of René Jacobs, was something to look forward to keenly, especially for that tiny minority of us who think the work a great one but the enormously popular Glyndebourne production a vulgar travesty. In the event, it was rather
‘Censorship,’ shrieked Hanif Kureishi after discovering that his short story, ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, was not going to be read on Radio Four as part of the National Short Story Competition (organised with various organisations including Prospect magazine, Booktrust and the Scottish Book Trust to promote the skill involved in writing short stories). The five shortlisted
Some years ago, I went to visit the offices of a small Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Novaya Gazeta has always led a precarious existence — it is one of the few publications that has consistently opposed the Kremlin — and that day the editor was particularly distracted. While I was talking to him, the
This is a success story. In the 60 years since Nehru proclaimed India’s tryst with destiny all has not gone as he would have wished. Only just over 60 per cent of adult Indians are literate, far less than the comparable figure for China. Life expectancy has nearly doubled since independence, but here again China
Any new novel by John Harvey is cause for celebration. He produces beautifully written, solidly engineered crime stories that probe the flaws and sensitivities of British society. Gone to Ground (William Heinemann, £12.99) begins with the murder of Stephen Bryan, a lecturer in media studies bludgeoned to death in the shower of his house in
Next month, the Literary Society will celebrate its 200th birthday. The monthly dinner at the Garrick Club will be bigger than usual, but otherwise there will be nothing unusual. The membership has often been distinguished but, as is perhaps typical of English letters, the club has never done anything other than dine. It is not