One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney
Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do
If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily,
You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode
A poem At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon after Rimbaud I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail to Guadalupe as far as Hidalgo. At Casa Verde I ordered a bottle of beer and the special: greasy tortillas, fried cactus, chillies con carne. I cooled my feet on the dirt floor under
So the big question this week is: is the Today programme a viper’s nest of evil pinkoes, all of whom should be put in sacks and dropped into a deep well? And the answer is: yes. Shame, though, really, because wrong and bad though it is I do have a soft spot for Today. I
Mary Wakefield talks to Jonathan Kent about his plans to jump-start the West End Something is rotten in the West End. It’s not just the sour smell of lager, or the Saturday night binge drinkers. It’s more that as I walk up St Martin’s Lane, through what should be the beating heart of theatreland, there’s
Born Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz adopted the name of his birthplace in Saxony, East Germany just after his definitive move to the West in 1958. Brought up in an atmosphere of gloom and social realism, he had been expelled from art school in East Berlin for ‘social-political immaturity’. He fared better in West Berlin
Positively oceanic was the season’s principal novelty. It was not a new commission; rather, the rediscovery 440 years after its composition of the Mass in 40 parts by Alessandro Striggio, whose final Agnus Dei rises to a staggering 60, which ought to leave Tallis’s celebrated Motet (whose inspiration is reckoned to originate here) pale and
Anyone who goes into the Annely Juda Gallery in Dering Street expecting something like those light, airy, weight-denying abstract steel sculptures, painted bright red all over perhaps, like the Tate’s song-evoking ‘Early One Morning’, 1962, is in for a big surprise. All works shown here stand with absolute, resolute, broad-based firmness as if to proclaim
Too many musicals in London? It depends whether you think the West End should be a temple or a funfair. Room for both, I’d say. But the fact that many musicals are thriving doesn’t mean any musical will. Hit shows succeed because they get virtually everything right. Bad Girls gets three out of five things
Michael Clayton is one of those American films about American lawyers doing American lawyer stuff which isn’t usually my kind of thing. And, anyway, didn’t money-hungry men in neat suits stop being cool or interesting in about 1982? But you know what? This is a pretty decent corporate thriller: tense, exciting, involving, and best of
Guilty pleasure (Radio 4) Unmasking the English (Radio 4) In 1908 Gerald Mills borrowed £1,000 (worth about £52,000 in today’s money) to set up a publishing company with his friend Charles Boon. Among their first authors were P.G. Wodehouse and Jack London, who would probably be horrified to realise that their books are now associated
I once knew a young woman who worked for a large public-interest organisation. She was clever and well educated, but funds were tight, and she feared she was about to lose her job. In which case, she planned to follow a university friend and become a high-class prostitute. It sounded marvellous, she said. The agency
Lloyd Evans Zimbabwe – last in the dictionary and too often last on the agenda. The new season of Intelligence Squared debates opened with the motion ‘Britain Has Failed Zimbabwe.’ Moderator Richard Lindley set the scene by taking us back to Salisbury, now Harare, on November 11th, 1965 where, as a young journalist, he reported
On The Courtauld’s 75th anniversary, Robin Simon looks back at its colourful and distinguished history The Tate Gallery …sorry, I’ll start again. ‘Tate’ spent £100,000 a few years back just to lose its ‘the’. Staff are strictly instructed by the gallery’s Oberkommando to refer to it according to the brand name, as in ‘I’m at
This beautiful exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of Lee Miller’s birth in Poughkeepsie, New York State, and it takes place 30 years after her death from cancer. When she died, her only child Antony Penrose had no idea of her achievements as muse and artist, and only learnt about them gradually. As he grew to
It is not surprising that Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is an immensely popular artist. His pleasing deployment of colour and easy-going presentation of the paraphernalia of everyday life give his work an immediate warmth and likeability. His muted palette, careful modulation of hues, and soft-edged precision are a recipe for visual charm. Considered simply as aesthetic
Opera: Iphigénie en Tauride, Royal Opera House; Romeo und Juliet, St John’s Iphigénie en Tauride Royal Opera House Romeo und Juliet St John’s It is astonishing that Gluck achieves such greatness with such limited musical resources. For me he ranks with the top four or five operatic composers, yet he remains a permanently semi-neglected figure.
No idea why, but the hunt is on for lost 20th-century masterpieces. Michael Attenborough is searching for gold at the Almeida and Matthew Dunster has his pan in the stream at the Young Vic. Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding is an adaption of her 1946 bestselling novel. We’re in the Deep South where