The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
My Bed, one of the works that failed to win Tracey Emin the Turner Prize (she lost to Steve McQueen in 1999), made £2.2m at Christie’s this week, going to an anonymous buyer. Charles Saatchi, who put it up for auction, had bought it for £150,000 in 2000. It has apparently lost none of its
We may have had the verdicts and the sentences in the hacking trial, but the biggest question remains unanswered: who’s going to play everyone in the movie? There’s one clear and obvious frontrunner for the part of Rebekah Brooks: Bonnie Langford. Sadly, however, Ms Langford has heavy panto commitments and cannot be released for filming.
The illustrator Quentin Blake is uncannily like one of his own creations: tousled, bright-eyed, quizzical, and apologetic about his summer cold. He greeted me warmly and conducted me down a dimly lit hallway into his lair, a studio giving on to a leafy London square, piled high with the tools of his trade: papers teetering
As the boundary between auction house and art dealer blurs yet further, with auctioneers acting increasingly by private treaty as well as taking over commercial galleries, and as West End gallery space becomes ever more expensive, alternative exhibiting venues are being sought with growing urgency. One solution is to move further into corporate territory, and
A court-martial — followed by an execution: not exactly promising ingredients for a musical. But Ross Clark’s new music drama Shot at Dawn turns out to be unexpectedly moving. On the outbreak of the first world war, Adam, a farm labourer, enlists in the army, despite being underage, and is later shot for cowardice; his
Bridges aren’t necessarily something you think of as being beautiful, particularly if you consider them primarily as the means to cross a river, rather than as works of art. London, however, has always been famous for its bridges, many of which are architectural marvels. From medieval London Bridge, piled high with shops and houses, to
Out there in the great ether there’s a whole new world of radio beyond the stations of the BBC and the FM dial. This week I found myself listening to a programme in Danish. I know. It sounds mad. But there I was glued to my computer screen reading the English subtitles while I listened
BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have secrets. We all tell lies just to keep them from each other and …pause to indicate psychological profundity …from ourselves.’ Luckily for the viewer, this was accompanied by the sight of man in a restaurant
‘Charlie. E. Powder,’ said the friendly, helpful man working his way through the crowd during the mindblowing Friday-night headline set by the American dubstep DJ Skrillex. I looked wistfully at his man-bag of chemical enhancers. Skrillex was good. Maybe the best electronic act I’ve seen in 24 years of Glastonburies. (‘Slivers of mutant dancehall, booty
It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to be done one a year, semi-staged in an idiosyncratic way. In fact, it is four years, and now the complete cycle has been performed to universal acclaim, with the loudest cheers going to the conducting
Fashion Victim — the Musical!. There’s a title that’s been waiting to be used for ages. The Cinema Museum is a frumpy warehouse, tucked away in a Kennington backwater, crammed with big-screen memorabilia. A cobwebby salon fitted with a catwalk serves as the theatre. Charmingly camp Carl Mullaney kicks things off by introducing the cast
In 2010, Brendan O’Neill suggested that Glastonbury had become an authoritarian, corporate pigpen. From the looks of things this year, nothing has changed. Here’s Brendan’s piece: Most people, when they hear the word Glastonbury, think of mud, drugs, drunkenness, moshing, free love, the lighting up of spliffs, and generally harmless experimentation in a field. Well,
John Bishop doesn’t just tell funny stories. He also tells the sort of life story that makes you sit up and listen. He grew up on a council estate outside Liverpool and, at the age of six, visited his father in prison. By the time he was in his mid-thirties he was working in middle
For decades I’ve been aware of the work of Keith Grant (born 1930), but it is only in recent years that I have come to know it at all well. During that time both the style and the subject of his paintings have undergone a series of remarkable revolutions, as he determined not to rest
Fwoooosh! That, were someone to write a strip about it, would be the sound of a thousand comic books going up in flames. They used to do that, you know; burn comics. It was mostly in America, in the late 1940s, after these DayGlo fictions, with their monsters and superheroes and suggestive curves, were declared
This season has already seen Manon Lescaut appear in several different operatic guises across the UK, but it was Covent Garden’s new production of Puccini’s version (its first staging of it in three decades) that was the hottest ticket of all. The Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais and the superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann were tackling the
As far as ‘jukebox films’ go, Mamma Mia! was a riot, Sunshine on Leith was tolerable, just about, while Walking on Sunshine is a step too far and brings the genre to its knees.It’s being billed as ‘the feel-good musical of the year’ although, bereft of a single original idea, ‘the feel-ennui musical of the
Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan Lake attended, I’d be a few centuries old. Obviously, the list includes many revisions and re-creations of this quintessential ballet, which is the second most revisited in history after The Rite of Spring. In her
Did you know that the 8th-century Kingdom of Northumbria was the epicentre of an international exotic reptile trade? I only discovered this myself from watching episode six of Vikings (History Channel, Tuesday) and being introduced to the snake-pit maintained by King Aelle. What particularly impressed me were not just the variety of pythons and boas
First, a confession. Even an ardent radio addict can enjoy a fortnight away from the airwaves, disconnected, switched off, unlistening. On return even the programmes that are usually ignored because they’ve become so familiar catch your attention. I grew up with Gardeners’ Question Time as a regular weekly slot on Sunday afternoons, snooze time for
Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress has been a rich resource for artists. Film-makers recognise his modern moral subjects as an ancestor to the storyboard. But in this age of mass media can the format still hold its own and tell us something about ourselves? A new exhibition at the Foundling Museum (until 7 September) suggests so.
Nice one, Roy. Across the West End secret toasts are being drunk to the England supremo for his exquisitely crafted belly flop in Brazil. A decent run by our boys in the World Cup has the potential to put a nasty dent in the box-office takings. As a welcome home present the lads deserve free
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without hands down a tree-lined road, weaving in and out of shadow. What I count as treasure is a robin’s nest neatly cached in a corner of my windowbox, a tight squirm of five hatchlings, mum
Nick Penny announced that he is stepping down as head of the National Gallery. Next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne also announced that he is leaving. Could he be after the job at the NG? Nick Penny’s predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, came from the NPG but his lack of knowledge about the NG collection is
Country Life’s ‘Gentleman of the Year’ awards were announced last week, and contrary to the bookies’ expectations, David Beckham has finished in second place. The winner, their panel decided, was another David. David Dimbleby, in fact, for being: ‘an anchor in every sense of the world’ and ‘holding the nation steady when the water gets
‘Oompa Loompa juice,’ says the actor Alex Jennings when I ask if he takes any supplements to preserve his looks. He’s 57 but could pass for a decade younger. We meet backstage in his Drury Lane suite, which boasts a fridge crammed with pink champagne, where he’s preparing to play the lead role in Charlie
Tragically, Ian Welsh (1944–2014) did not live to see this exhibition of his latest work. Diagnosed with terminal cancer on the eve of his 70th birthday, he struggled to finish the two large paintings in his last series of works, entitled ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. He found it increasingly difficult to stand to paint, but he worked,
When she thinks (if she does) of the first James it is of a six-year-old who died when she was fourteen, of meningitis. His spirit, like a trespassing sprite, flew into his parents’ marriage bed and lurked there as they comforted each other. A month later, conspiring with the genie of ovulation and the hormone
The Fault in Our Stars, which is based on the bestselling young-adult novel by John Green, is about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love and it’s a sort of Love Story for younger people, God help them, although unlike Love Story it’s not set to mislead an entire generation. (In my experience, love
