The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the
‘What brings strong personalities to power?’ asks the historian Ian Kershaw. ‘And what promotes or limits their use of that power?’ Those two questions are at the centre of this book, a study of some of the 20th century’s most important leaders. The result is partly an analysis of character, but also an attempt to
The Menu is a comedy-horror-thriller set in an exclusive restaurant on a private island and it gives the rich a good kicking, like The Triangle of Sadness, except here they manage to keep their food down, mercifully. (At $1,200 a head, you’d hope so.) But the diners are not spared otherwise, and it’s nastily fun,
The Peckham Experiment was a radical, if earnest, initiative begun in 1926 in which working-class families were given access to physical activities, such as swimming, as well as workshops and a shot at cultural betterment. It’s into this rather worthy scheme that identical twins, the subjects of Guy Ware’s novel, are born: Charlie and JJ,
The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M. Schulz, whose centenary falls next week, spent nearly 50 years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and a cancer
As a teenager growing up in Cheshire I had a metal detector. Although I was slightly ashamed of it, I found all sorts of intriguing things: shrapnel, a French coin, a Khartoum Racing Club key ring, an adze and a silver brooch in the shape of a lobster. All went well until I found a
Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow. There
Paul Weller releasing a collection of solo B-sides is cause for mild celebration. After all, the Jam were one of the great B-side bands. ‘Tales From The Riverbank’, ‘The Butterfly Collector’, ‘Liza Radley’ – all A-list songs, relegated to the subs’ bench. Remember the B-side? That bijou, creative safe space which didn’t merely permit but
The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I myself may have moaned to this effect in the past. But either they are getting better or my critical faculties are beginning to fail. I think it’s the former, but if I’m wrong don’t be
Do you ever think about the ground beneath your feet? I do. Having read a number of popular science books on this most precious of natural resources, I am now obsessed. So much has recently been discovered about the invaluable symbiotic relationships that form between microbes, fungi and plant roots in the soil that it
Non-fiction tells you what happened, fiction affirms the kinds of things that happen. According to Aristotle, anyway. So while journalism seeks out unlikely events, fiction creates pleasing inevitabilities. The problem as it pertains to our brave narrative podcasters is that they have to straddle the two worlds: their material must be interesting and unusual, but
Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but I’ll tell you anyway. Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker, was banned from making films by the Iran government in 2010 yet has persisted clandestinely. One of his films (This Is Not a Film) was smuggled to
During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above
Andrew Lycett Describing how individuals get drawn, often haphazardly, into a bloody conflict such as the English Civil War is not an easy task. But Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25), which tingles with a discerning historical imagination. Lily Dunn’s memoir Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld &
Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds exactly the sort of series most of us would wish to avoid. It’s aimed at young adults (based on a trilogy by Sally Green called Half Bad) and the only reason I was keen to
Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by class, gender and race, there can be no civilised argument against the preservation and enjoyment of great architecture and art from the past. But ‘heritage’ is not quite that simple. There’s something else going on.
The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I describes his 1826 voyage from America to England to set in motion the great task – which would take 11 years – of fundraising for the printing of his mighty double elephant folio book in
Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant
This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was
At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation.
Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a strained exercise in trying to yoke together two irreconcilable mediums. It is to Anthony Quinn’s credit that his ninth novel, Molly & the Captain, not only succeeds admirably as a centuries-spanning account of the influence
‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling image; one that Gaspar, the central character, experiences both literally and figuratively. Bodies are everywhere in this novel – whether dead, undead, dying or decomposing, at swim or making love – and what they feel
It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history of the whole world then Simon Sebag-Montefiore must be as good a candidate to write it as anyone. He would seem to have read pretty well everything that has ever been written, visited everywhere of
The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history
The musical tastes of King Charles III are more sophisticated than those of our late Queen. That’s not being rude: it’s just a fact. Her favourite musician appears to have been George Formby, whose chirpy songs she knew by heart. No doubt she relished their double entendres – but the hint of smut meant that,
The UK Drill Project is a cabaret show that celebrates greed, criminality and drug-taking among black males in London. It opens with a septet of masked performers, sheathed in dark Lycra, singing a rhythmic poem while pretending to fire guns and stab people with knives. These sad young rappers are desperate to look scary because
Instructed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to move money away from London and reassign it to the regions as part of the Levelling Up strategy, Arts Council England has ended up making some very risky decisions. It has thrown funds at small untested groupuscules without a firm audience base and penalising major
Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do
‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across