The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A Time Before Genesis (1986) by Les Dawson The rare book shown above (try getting hold of a copy) is Les Dawson’s only serious work of fiction. It provides a disturbing insight into the mind of the late comedian. Its thesis is that the earth has, for millennia, been controlled by alien forces who have
It’s strange that while Britain has gone fairly mad over Mozart’s 250th anniversary, with vulgarities ranging from Mozart for Babies on Classic FM to Mozart mugs on coffee mugs, etc., we haven’t heard much about possibly his only cultural peer, Rembrandt. The Germans have now put us thoroughly to shame on the artist’s his 400th
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) needs no introduction: his vision of kingship in the person of Henry VIII has become part of our national identity, despite Holbein himself being a German whose first taste of success was in Basel. It’s a strange fact that, although endowed with a robust tradition of drawing and linear ornament
Places, like property prices, go up and down. Margate, in the most northerly corner of Kent, is just beginning the uncertain journey upwards again. The county’s largest resort, it has acres of ribbed brown sand and a harbour enclosed by a pier, ending in a lighthouse. Margate thrived when Turner painted there, and London workers
So, to cut straight to what you really want to know without having to wade through several paragraphs of plot-rehash followed by the director’s CV and his favourite seasonal vegetable, will you like this film? Hell, how should I know? I don’t know the first thing about you. But I will say this: OK, The
It’s more than three years since there was a production of Wagner’s ultimate masterpiece, Tristan und Isolde, in the UK, and I have been looking forward eagerly to Welsh National Opera’s revival of the one they share with Scottish Opera. Yannis Kokkos, who was the original designer and director, pays tribute in the programme to
Normally I detest people who use laptops on crowded trains, but if you’re watching a DVD your elbows aren’t flying, and with earphones you’re no more of a nuisance to your neighbours than you would be reading a paper. So on a train crawling towards Bournemouth for the Tory conference, I set up the machine
More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle There are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through
Medley of horses by the motorwayuntethered; the field surplus to transportor agriculture. At this speed the horses looklike Travellers’ horses beside a leftover woodwhere smoke rising sketches a caravan.As we flash by our road draws its own wake,a joyful anarchy of second growth — beechy and larchy shoots, scrub, militant bindweedwhose canker lilies, malign and
The idea is to set the mind adriftAnd sleep comes. Mozart, exquisitely dressed,Walks carefully to work between soft pilesOf fresh horse-dung. Nice work. Why was my gift Hidden behind the tree? I cried for miles.No one could find it. Find the tiger’s face.It’s in the tree: i.e. the strangest place. But gifts were presents then.
One good reason to read Simenon is to recover Paris. It is now 75 years since Maigret made his first appearance, and, if his Paris is not yet utterly lost, you have to walk distances and search diligently to find it. The Brasserie Dauphine, for instance, rue de Harlay, which in real life was the
Rafik Hariri was Lebanon’s bulldozer. A buccaneer. A bruiser. Built like a heavyweight boxer, he looked more butcher than billionaire. His father was a dirt-poor, Sunni Muslim tenant farmer, who worked land near the south Lebanese port of Sidon. The French architects of the Maronite Catholic-led Grand Liban had reluctantly granted Lebanon its independence in
It is hardly surprising if from time to time a contemporary novelist should attempt to write a pastiche of Agatha Christie, if only in the hope of solving the mystery of her egregious popular success and its longevity. Year after year this gentlyreared Edwardian lady produced stories of sometimes fiendish ingenuity which were seized on
When Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley in 2000, a year after being made editor of The Spectator, he called up Charles Moore and asked for his advice on how to handle Conrad Black, the magazine’s proprietor. The problem was that Boris had given him his word that he would not
One of the most dangerous tastes any British politician can admit to is a tendresse for the Teutonic. During the first world war the Liberal cabinet minister Haldane was compelled to resign because of his pro-German sympathies. It was not that Haldane harboured any political affection for Wilhelmine militarism, or had exhibited any slackness in
Leonard Woolf had a passion for animals, not unconnected with an appetite for control. Dogs (with the occasional mongoose or monkey) were his companions to the end of his life. Discussing human nature, he put them on an equal plane: ‘There are some people, usually dogs or old women, extremely simple and unintellectual, who instinctively
This highly entertaining and self-deprecating autobiography should dispel the myth, however craftily put about by the boy himself, that its author could ever have been a successful rent boy. Promotion of that role-play may rack up millions on the tabloid stage, but Everett is demonstrably far too original, headstrong and downright funny to ever have
B y now Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street must be almost as famous as 84 Charing Cross Road. Opened in 1936, the shop first became familiar through the lively accounts of Nancy Mitford, who worked there from 1942-45. Then came A Bookseller’s War, the correspondence between Heywood Hill, away in the army, and his
Like myself, both the Arts Council and the Arts Council Collection are celebrating their 60th birthdays this year. I was born just as the modern concept of the welfare state was being incubated, which is why I find so moving that moment in Humphrey Jennings’s film Diary for Timothy (1945) when E.M. Forster’s commentary asks
What a spectacle at the Royal Academy: the main galleries packed with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), in a massive show which dazzles with its vehement and emotional handling of materials. Here is a giant of an artist, but the paying public is overloaded with visual stimulus. It is simply impossible to take in
Honestly, first it’s restaurant reviews and now it’s films, too, which does make me think: what next? Deborah, when you get a minute, would you mind changing the toner in the photocopier? Deborah, would you make sure to empty the bins before you leave? Doesn’t anyone else at The Spectator do any work at all?
Michael Boyd’s Complete Works festival may not have over-garlanded Stratford with bunting and flags, but it’s made the town a much more buzzy place. Boyd is not only bringing back some of the best Shakespeareans of the older generation — including Patrick Stewart as Antony and Prospero, and Ian McKellen as Lear — but also
Mozart is full of loose ends and extremes. One-off miniatures, contextless and unparalleled, of singular profundity and perfection — the A-minor rondo and B-minor adagio for piano, the pieces for glass harmonica and mechanical organ, the Masonic Funeral Music; and four of his most ambitious-scaled monuments — two quasi-religious operas, Idomeneo taking seria into realms
It’s only since watching Stephen Fry’s brilliant Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (BBC2, Tuesday) that I’ve begun properly to understand why I am the way I am. Lots of people have suggested to me at one time or another that I should see a psychiatrist. ‘You’re so successful,’ they say. ‘How can you possibly
As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly
According to Bill Bryson, 99.9 per cent of the world’s ills originated in America during the 1950s. Well, he doesn’t actually say that, as such, but in the course of his book he reveals some pretty grisly statistics concerning his homeland. Apparently, chemicals in food, endless nuclear-bomb testing, teenagers, intensive television- watching, American world domination,
The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’
One of the lessons taught in these pages over many years by Christopher Fildes was that, because financial markets are human nature in action, anything that goes wrong in them is almost certain to have happened before and highly likely to happen again. Technology may advance, the language and methods of business may evolve, the
‘Kings, who are the sovereign arbiters of the fortune and the conduct of men, are always themselves the most severely judged and the most curiously observed.’ Louis XIV complained in his memoirs (addressed to his son) about the public gaze in which monarchs lived, and the malicious gossip to which they were always therefore subject: