The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the
Since reading Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites, I keep catching myself in imaginary conversation with an Essex thatcher called Frederick Pratt. On 9 March 1923, he was working in a wheat field at Ashdon Hall Farm, near Saffron Walden, when he heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound and looked up to see ‘the earth fly up like
Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find
We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow
The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’. Rebels seeking to
In the side chapel of the church of St Giles’, at the northern apex of the historic Oxford thoroughfare, hangs a remarkable painting. ‘Menorah’ (1993) depicts the (now demolished) Didcot power station with its six massive cooling towers and central chimney stack as the setting for the crucifixion; Christ and the two thieves are set
They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in
Those of a violently masochistic disposition would have heartily enjoyed the Saturday matinée of the Strictly Come Dancing: Live Tour at the Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Talent loses out to glitter and hype, as shrieking vulgarity envelops all What deliciously perverse pleasure was to be drawn on this bleakly cold afternoon from the vast, snaking queues,
Is it possible to find a common thread running through the finest Scottish music? If pushed, one might identify a quality of ecstatic melancholy, a rapturous yet fateful romanticism, in everything from the Incredible String Band to the Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile to Frightened Rabbit, Simple Minds to Mogwai. The Jesus & Mary Chain
Pansy is meant to be a sympathetic figure, but I felt sorrier for those who had to put up with her The central character in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an angry, bitter, late middle-aged woman who rages against everyone and everything. Against her husband, her son, chuggers, dogs in coats, shop
An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt,
Santi & Naz is a drama set in the Punjab in 1947 that uses an ancient and thrilling storyline about domestic violence. The main characters are a pair of young lesbians who plot to kill Naz’s bridegroom, Nadim, on the eve of the wedding. They discuss stabbing or poisoning him and eventually they decide to
Netflix is the television equivalent of pasta and ready-made pesto: a slightly desperate but acceptable enough stand-by when you’ve got home late, you haven’t time to prepare anything more nutritious and at least it fills the gap without too much pain or fuss. It is an adamantine rule of television that foreign-language dramas are always
I don’t know what books Rachel Reeves keeps at her bedside, but, since the Treasury still seems to be setting the UK’s China policy, I heartily recommend that she read the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s magnificent On Xi Jinping. Ideology and -isms may or may not be Reeves’s thing, but while the book
I probably won’t be the only one to say this of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection: it made me feel seen, and not in a good way. The novel takes aim at aspects of modern life, from social media to remote working and interior design trends, that aren’t obvious subjects for serious literary attention. Latronico, a philosopher
One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are
In the early 20th century, the world went ‘raving mad on the subject of radium’, according to George Bernard Shaw. The newly discovered element was considered a miracle cure, used to treat about 150 medical complaints. And it was fashionable: society ladies drank afternoon tea in rooms filled with radium vapours, and cosmetic companies developed
Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In
Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there,
Arms outstretched, head thrown back, flounced skirt rippling over a raised leg. The 1942 photograph of Sophie Maslow dancing in her own creation Folksay makes her look as if she is performing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or some MGM musical spectacular. Yet Maslow was a radical artist, who asserted that modern dance was
Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party? Plato answered that question centuries ago with his sublime Symposium, a gripping, novel-like account of a gathering of Athenian notables, which is also a powerful philosophical exploration of the force of Eros, or love. We know that the feast is supposed to have taken place in
In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is
Three generations ago, Britain and the United States joined forces to propose the establishment of a revamped international rules-based system to remake the world. This was initially articulated in a document that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, signed in August 1941. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, were persuaded to join the
A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of
Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated
Many indie types from the 1980s and 1990s were secretly metal fans. But it’s not something they ever really wanted to admit to in public. They’d talk a good game about the Stooges and the Velvet Underground but back home – as was the case with Leeds’s goth overlord Andrew Eldritch, of the Sisters of
The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of Oscar buzz and has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an inversion of the American dream’ and ‘up there with Citizen Kane’. It’s three and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) and
The West End’s new political show, Kyoto, can’t be classed as a drama. A drama involves a main character engaged in a transformative personal journey. This is a secretarial round-up of various environmental summits, or ‘Cop’ meetings, held during the late 1980s and 1990s. If you remove the private jets, a Cop summit is a
Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes