The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbaran
A Doll’s House has been reconstructed at the Almeida with a new script by Anya Reiss. Torvald Helmer is an inept drug-addled financier who wants to sell his business to a wealthy American investor. But the deal is a dud. Without his knowledge, Torvald’s bossy wife, Nora, has stolen £860,000 from a client’s account to
I was on the way to Cecily Brown’s exhibition at the Serpentine last week when I heard that Kensington Gardens had been locked down. Word was that terrorist drones armed with ‘radioactive material’ were on course to blitz the Israeli embassy, presumably taking out a large part of west London with it. Scary though this
Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising line-up becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the
Rose of Nevada is the third film in Mark Jenkin’s Cornish trilogy and if you have seen the first two (Bait, Enys Men) you will have booked your cinema ticket already. Rooted in characters shaped by the histories and tensions of Cornwall’s fishing folk, Jenkin’s film-making is uniquely tactile, textured and sensory. It has been
On the first night of Welsh National Opera’s new Flying Dutchman, the company’s co-directors walked on stage to salute their departing music director Tomas Hanus. There were cheers, of course; Hanus has been a courageous MD and his Wagner was thrilling. But no one has been appointed to succeed him, and that morning WNO had
Grade: B+ Some of us lost a lot of our early twenties to a god-game called Dungeon Keeper, in which you built and maintained a dungeon and filled it with tricks, traps and monsters to kill the goody-two-shoes heroes who periodically tried to invade it. Minos is a descendant of that game, and a welcome
There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate
What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences. These often have hints of the uncanny, but rather than making her writing unsettling they give it an appealing intimacy. Her fourth novel begins as the narrator Flora visits her parents in Mexico City. Without warning, the family’s Alsatian
Everyone I have met who has read Belchamber, Howard Sturgis’s novel of 1904, would endorse Edith Wharton’s judgment that this was a book which was ‘very nearly in the first rank’. I can still vividly remember the week – half a lifetime ago – when my wife and I discovered the little blue World’s Classics
Rainer Maria Rilke’s claim that fame is the ‘sum of all misunderstandings’ is certainly true of Franz Kafka, whose life, work and reception have long been plagued by myriad misunderstandings. Despite publishing comparatively little in his all-too-short lifetime (1883-1924), Kafka gained a reputation as a writer’s writer, whose work was met with keen appreciation by,
It would be easy to dismiss A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles film made in 1964, as a throwaway period piece. The plot hurls the Fab Four into a meta narrative, playing themselves while a director – a seething Victor Spinetti – panics as the boys are delayed on their way to a televised variety
Blake Morrison is the quintessential man of letters. More exactly, he’s a man of genres – poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, librettist and, most notably, memoirist. (Four memoirs so far, each a prize winner and/or bestseller). Although in the introduction to On Memoir he refutes the notion that he established the genre of life writing in
As an angler in pursuit of fish across some 45 countries, I have travelled in a variety of precarious watercraft, from a Tahitian va’a to a coracle in Coorg, and remain convinced that all buoyant vessels are merely looking for somewhere to sink. In his study of the cultural history of small boats around the
If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI filling the world with humanoids, it will be the look on their glassy faces when they realise that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby beach in
Many of Jay McInerney’s characters had their glory days in the 1980s and 1990s of his vivid early novels, with all of the excesses and freedoms that he captured, most famously in his 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City. As familiar as New York’s landmarks and favourite haunts remain, the city of 2020 can seem
In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text. Dispensing
In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM colour. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of
You’re never too old to dance we are told nowadays. This encouraging injunction has been taken up by everyone from the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alessandra Ferri, who have found wondrously creative ways to compensate for their declining virtuosity and stamina, to septuagenarians who insist on bopping to Abba at their grandchildren’s wedding parties.
The dark side of the Moon, a broken loo and a floating jar of Nutella: such was Artemis II. When Helen Sharman joined the Mir space station in 1991, becoming the first Briton to visit space, the appetite was rather for oranges. Not only were they ‘rare in the Soviet Union then’, Sharman recalls on
When following up a successful sitcom, should a writer head off into new territory or not? That was the question facing Dan Levy after Schitt’s Creek and John Morton after WIA – and now we have their answers: ‘yes’ and ‘not really, even with a change of country’ respectively. Curiously, both seem to have made
Do Belle and Sebastian have the most polite audience in pop? Normally when a pop singer leaves the stage to promenade through the audience, they are besieged. Even in seated venues most stars will make sure to take a security guard with them. I once saw bouncers drag women in red dresses away from Chris
Glenrothan is Brian Cox’s directorial debut and I wish there were a nicer way of putting it but, Brian: please, please, don’t give up the day job. The screenplay, meanwhile, is by David Ashton, whose only previous film credit seems to be Freddie as F.R.O.7 (1992), a James Bond spoof starring a six foot animated
Anyone for a spot of acoustic science? Apparently the distinctive colour of a musical note is concentrated almost wholly in the attack: the first split-second; the beginning of the sound wave. Obscure or somehow cut off, that first bite of a note or chord and what’s left sounds – well, not the same as everything
I feared this summing-up of Tracey Emin’s career might be self-congratulatory – biennale here, damehood there. But it’s Emin at her most operatic, facing mortality after surviving extensive surgery for bladder cancer in 2021. Blood and suffering are its subjects: the broken body, and the ascension of the spirit. The Young British Artists are getting
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a problem play. It debuted at the National in 1998 and ran for two years in the West End before transferring to Broadway. Since then, no UK producer has mounted a revival. Something must alarm investors. It’s a very chatty show. Three actors with three wooden chairs appear on a
It occurs to me only now that I might have spent far too much time in France. Indeed, so familiar with Paris did I claim to be that, in 2023, I was contacted by an agency in need of someone who could conduct specialised ‘art tours’ for small groups of foreigners. Most of these clients
Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart
Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind,