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The Critic|April 2024A DISCORDANT SONGBARELY A WEEK GOES BY WITHOUTfurther bad news in the world of classical music. Swingeing cuts to orchestras, choirs, ensembles and concert series leave many struggling for survival. Broadcast music is reconfigured to be more “accessible” and “inclusive”, by removing great art in favour of Disney evenings, film music, or a tribute to a faded pop star. Those running the professional associations pronounce on the necessity of such changes, usually adding some shtick about the need to better represent the diversity of modern Britain. Some of these changes are undoubtedly fuelled by poor economic circ*mstances, but ideological factors are just as important, with classical music being perhaps the worst casualty of identitarian politics. In earlier decades it was common to see terrestrial broadcasts of full operas and concerts (including many…6 min
The Critic|April 2024Plain English by committeeTWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on 26 April 1999, Lord Woolf’s Civil Procedure Rules came into effect. Replacing two existing sets of procedural rules for England’s civil courts, the new CPR was launched to much fanfare — all of England’s county courts closed for a day the week before in order to prepare for the great occasion — and had the laudable aim of creating a cheaper, simpler, and more predictable dispute resolution process for everyone. Whether the CPR managed to make English civil justice cheaper or simpler is, of course, very much open to doubt, as anyone who has been near an English court in recent years will know. But one lasting effect of the Woolf reforms was to purge English law of much of the specialised vocabulary it had developed…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Let the blood-letting beginWHO LOST THE 1997 general election? Or, to put that another way, who won? We know this! Tony Blair. And how? New Labour, obviously. Along with the Third Way, Clintonian campaigning techniques, the red rose, “Bobby”, Philip Gould and The Unfinished Revolution, a paradoxically improving economy, Gordon, China, Granita. Much as this might read as a man in his 50s having a stroke, it’s also a narrative. Which, for some time now, people have grimly asserted Sir Keir Starmer lacks. And how could he possibly win without one of those? Quite handily, it’s turning out. Not that it didn’t take some sneering to knock away the idea that oppositions somehow win elections rather than governments always, always, always losing them. Snide people had to caw about Labour’s lead being soft,…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Consider the way of the tigerFROM THE MOMENT I opened the door to him I knew that this year’s financial health check was going to be even more miserable than my recent company medical. My financial adviser avoided eye contact as he clicked open his black leather box briefcase and laid out meaningless bits of paper on the kitchen table. Slowly the ghastly diagnosis emerged. My investment trusts had gone thrombotic. “More sellers than buyers, I am afraid,” muttered my adviser. The stake in a commercial property fund stacked with empty provincial shopping centres was still gouty. And the spivvy micro-cap fund run by a chum I once drank with in a Leadenhall basem*nt bar was now in a terminal condition. But, amid the gloom, there was one corner of my portfolio in rude health.…4 min
The Critic|April 2024FINDING THE MIDDLE GROUNDHER SOUND IS ROOTSY AMERICANA: SOOTHing, conversational songs with lyrics about hope in hard times and the magic of self-belief. Lady Nade — AKA Nadine Gingell — is a vocalist with more than a flicker of Nina Simone to her style. Gingell has a solid fanbase in the UK and US, which she earned, like Simone, through regular live performances in modest-sized music venues. Some artists suit venues that offer comfort with a sense of warm encounter, rather than cavernous stadiums built for digitally enhanced extravaganzas, or dank basem*nts with questionable acoustics. “I’m so happy to be here,” Gingell (right) told the audience when she took to the stage in Bristol — her home city — late last year at the re-opening party for the Bristol Beacon concert hall (formerly…7 min
The Critic|April 2024AND THE BAND PLAYED ONANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER CLASSICAL MUSIC funding crisis and if you deal with this sh*t for a living you know the pattern by now. The story breaks on the Slipped Disc blog and the serious classical journos pause for 24 hours so they can pretend they read it somewhere else. The rest of the sector doesn’t hold back. Social media lights up with fury, initially directed at whichever funding body has made the decision, but swiftly refocused (the mental gymnastics are Olympic-level) on the usual suspects: the Tories, Brexit, choose your right-wing bogey-man. Gradually the shock fades; the great and good sign an open letter, and underpaid, exhausted admin staff start picking up the pieces. Again. So why did I get the feeling, this time, that people were looking at me?…5 min
The Critic|April 2024The sacred and the profaneAT 9.20PM THEY WALKED across the street to the newly-opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. “CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS,” from the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. “LONDON’S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC.” They entered. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old favourite: “There Ain’t No Bottle in All the World Like That Dear Little Bottle of Mine.” Four hundred couples were five-stepping round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. Don’t worry, Westminster Abbey hasn’t fallen. This comes from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,…4 min
The Critic|April 2024KEYSTONES OF BRITAIN’S HISTORYTHROUGHOUT THE AGES, RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE HAS often been the most distinguished any society can produce. I would include the tomb within that category: funerary and ecclesiastical architecture are often closely connected, although the detached mausoleum can often be very fine, standing alone as a great work untroubled by considerations of changes of use or the need to be “updated”. Today, it is evident that religion is hugely important in geopolitical terms (contrary to received opinion in the West which, in its catatonic state of liberal delusion, has ignored obvious signals for the last 50 years) and it is likely to become a dominant issue as we move uncertainly through the twenty-first century. For many decades I have been involved in higher education, and have been appalled by how disconnected are…6 min
The Critic|April 2024CHASING VOTES ON FOREIGN SOILIT’S A SUNNY, WARM DAY IN LATE SUMMER. A BRAND-new, purpose-built kindergarten and nursery school is awaiting its official opening. Smiling small children line up, gently marshalled by quietly-spoken female teachers. Boys and girls are resplendent in impeccably laundered and fitted folk costume: white frilly-sleeved shirting and red-and-green waistcoats and skirts. People gather to listen to the children singing, and to the town and Catholic church dignitaries making stirring speeches to mark the opening of this new educational establishment, the Angyalkert (Angel Garden), a free school for 180 children. Banners and signage festooned with the green, white and red national flag, alongside the arms of state topped with its emblem of the Holy Crown of Hungary, indicate that the main source of funding for this state-of-the-art building — 850 million…8 min
The Critic|April 2024A monumental work on British buildingsIN 1975, GAVIN STAMP TRAVELLED OUT TOIndia with Colin Amery, then assistant editor of the Architectural Review, to visit Edwin Lutyens’s buildings for New Delhi, which were beginning to be seen in a more sympathetic light after falling disastrously out of architectural fashion following Lutyens’s death in 1944. It was the beginning of Stamp’s lifelong interest in twentieth-century classicism and led in 1977 to an exhibition at the RIBA Drawings Collection, Silent Cities, on the tombs that Lutyens and others designed for the Imperial War Graves Commission and, in 1980, to the great Lutyens exhibition, held at the Hayward Gallery. It was the task of rescuing Lutyens from the condescension of posterity that led Stamp to the most substantial work of his life, helping to establish the Thirties Society…6 min
The Critic|April 2024Love in a remotely-controlled climateTHE PROBLEM WITH THE FUTURE IS that it’s never quite as interesting or as different as we imagine (or, in some cases, hope) it might be. Human beings still feel old-fashioned emotions like jealousy, lust and disappointment, and no matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise, we will still inhabit ageing and often painful fleshy bodies that feel miserable without touch and which long for doughnuts even when too many doughnuts have already been consumed. If you’re an anthropologist-futurologist like Roanne van Voorst, curious to find out about what the future of sex might be like, it makes sense that you’d begin your enquiries at the bleeding edge of the new things that people pretend they like. After all, she tells us, experts have claimed that, by 2050,…5 min
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The Critic|April 2024A “lost” novel better left unfound“THE LOST NOVEL,” IT SAYS HERE, ONthe cover of Until August, which is published ten years after the death of its author, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. And why shouldn’t they trumpet it? Márquez was by common consent one of the great novelists of the last century, influential on several generations of writers after him and the man who popularised the genre of magical realism. (We’ll forgive him the last.) But if “lost novel” implies a missing masterpiece from the man’s pomp — they would imply that, wouldn’t they? — then let’s take a sense check. We’re a long way from Márquez’s touchstones One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985): indeed, a long way from full-length fiction at all, since…7 min
The Critic|April 2024Norman Lebrecht on MusicSEIJI OZAWA WAS THE FIRST OF his kind and, in many respects, the last. No conductor from China or Japan ever commanded world orchestras before him, and none has since matched his impact. After entry jobs in Toronto and San Francisco, Ozawa was music director in Boston for just under three decades. When he left in 2002, the Vienna State Opera made him music director. Although his opera repertoire was as limited as his German conversation, Ozawa added a much-needed dynamism. In an era of peaco*ck conductors, Ozawa brought an unfeigned and impenetrable exoticism. Not for him the post-1945 cringe that Japan displayed towards Western culture. Ozawa bore his twin heritages with pride. The son of a dentist in occupied Manchuria, he spoke Chinese as a child and visited China…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Michael Prodger on ArtLONG BEFORE THE IMPRESSIONISTS became the Impressionists they had other names. The key members, including Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Degas and Sisley, used to meet at the Café Guerbois near Manet’s studio in Batignolles, north-west Paris, and became known as the “Batignolles Group”. In 1873, they formalised this loose faction as the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. Zola, a boyhood friend of Cézanne, suggested they call themselves “the Actualists”. Degas thought they should be called “La Capucine” after the Boulevard des Capucines where their first show was held. But when a hostile critic called them “the Impressionists” as a slight they adopted that name instead — or it adopted them. THE EXHIBITION WAS SEEN BY 100 PEOPLE A DAY — AS OPPOSED TO THE SALON’S 10,000 DAILY…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Adam LeBor on TelevisionI’VE JUST FINISHED WRITING TheLast Days of Budapest, an account of the Hungarian capital during the Second World War. Like every author nowadays I dream that my book will be turned into a television series. Until now, received wisdom was that the high production costs of period dramas deter producers. But that is changing: Masters of the Air, about American bombers during the war, had a budget of $250 million. Todd Kessler’s The New Look, also on Apple TV+, doubtless cost less but the vivid period details are even more finely observed. Set mainly in Nazi-occupied Paris, the series tells the story of Coco Chanel and Christian Dior. The title takes its name from Dior’s post-war collection. The wartime new look revolved around the sharp lines of Nazi uniforms —…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Charles Saumarez Smith on ArchitectureFOR MOST OF MY LIFE, I HAVE regarded the University of London’s Senate House as a strange and monstrous construction looming in a sinister way off the north side of Russell Square. But a small public exhibition on its first-floor landing organised by Bill Sherman, the enterprising director of the Warburg Institute, and Richard Temple, London University’s archivist, has encouraged me to think differently. The secondary literature on the growth of London has traditionally emphasised the way in which it is the product of organic growth. In this narrative, Sir Christopher Wren’s plan to reconstruct London after the Great Fire on a grand new classical plan was thwarted by brave householders who wanted as far as possible to maintain the recollection of the City’s more random medieval streets. John Nash’s…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Alcohol and IslamONE OF THE MOST UNUSUAL travel books of recent years is The Wet and the Dry (published in 2013) in which Lawrence Osborne, an English novelist, travels in the Muslim world in search of a drink. Osborne is something of an expert on the subject, the soi-disant “vodka critic for Vogue magazine” and author of an offbeat wine book, The Accidental Connoisseur. He is also an alcoholic. So on his travels he isn’t just seeking out a cheeky half of lager, he’s looking to get intoxicated. As one Pakistan businessman says to him: “Are you serious? Get drunk in Islamabad?” On this subject, Osborne is deadly serious. While most writers on drink shy away from examining their own less than healthy relationships with booze, the opening of the book sees…4 min
The Critic|April 2024The big bangON A BITINGLY COLD Saturday, earlier this year, I was standing next to the head keeper at Holkham in front of a dense wood. It was probably the best shooting invitation I’ve ever had and I was letting myself down. “Tough wind, sir,” he said with a thoughtful nod as another hen bird shot by and I missed with both barrels. As estates go, Holkham is quite something. Tom Leicester, the current earl, has worked hard to create a place where tourism, agriculture, forestry, and shooting all run alongside each other as highly effective strands of a bustling whole. Even those who loathe the idea of earldoms, great landholdings, and big houses, seem to give Holkham a free pass. In part it’s probably because they provide so much access. It’s…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Dial S for screen timeSO HERE I AM, LIKE EVERYONE with a primary school-age child, dutifully signing pledges that I absolutely will not give Hector a smartphone until he is 14 at the very youngest. In no circ*mstances will he rock up to Year Seven with the latest iPhone. All eminently wise. Slight problem, Minnie and Lyra — who are now 15 and 12 — both got iPhones at eleven. I’m keeping this very quiet from the mothers at Hector’s school, immediately changing the subject when they enquire, wide-eyed, when I gave my older kids phones. I didn’t ask for this! I never set myself up as some kind of Mother Superior, relaying messages from the dark side of puberty. It’s just one of the annoying aspects of having had a third child, the…3 min
The Critic|April 2024SHOCK OF THE NEWAS JOHN HIGGINS LINED UP THE fifteenth black of what had been a flawless frame in Riyadh, the Scottish snooker player’s attention was distracted by the arrival of a group of Arabs in flowing white robes and head-dresses. They had drifted into the auditorium not, one suspects, out of any particular desire to see a four-times world champion in the second round of the World Masters event, but because they had heard that someone was seven pots away from making a stonking pile of cash. For this competition in Saudi Arabia, the sponsors had come up with a gimmick. As well as the usual 15 reds and six colours, a golden ball would be placed on the top cushion and come into play if someone made a maximum 147 break.…5 min
The Critic|April 2024Therapy is making kids illIF YOU DON’T HAVE WORDS TO EXPRESSa thought, can you even think it? The idea that language shapes cognition is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, and almost a century after it was proposed, it’s still controversial. Many thoughts aren’t really linguistic — they’re more like visual or other sensory impressions — and anyway, if thinking follows language, how, then, does language arise? But the twenty-first century has brought with it a new test for the hypothesis that language at least shapes cognition, even if it doesn’t entirely constrain it: the rise of therapy-speak and its impact on mental wellbeing. More than a century ago Sigmund Freud gave the world the subconscious, phallic symbols, the Oedipus complex and much more —…6 min
The Critic|April 2024Woman About TownAll in the family TO THE BOOKSHOP LIBRERIA IN SHOREDITCH, to celebrate the launch of Tracy King’s memoir Learning to Think. It’s a record of an extraordinary life — it opens with a scene of young Tracy being exorcised, after her perfectly reasonable trauma and grief following the sudden death of her father was mistaken for demonic possession. To the economic precarity of her upbringing was added emotional precarity: it’s a circ*mstance that would have sunk many. But more importantly, it’s an extraordinary piece of writing. Partly because she grew up with so much uncertainty (and partly because her parents always encouraged her to be curious), Tracy became a sceptic in the highest sense: never settling for pat answers, always asking the difficult questions, even about her own life. Which…4 min
The Critic|April 2024WHY THIS NEW BOOK WILL PASS UNNOTICEDONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AND widely-read opinion columnists in the Western world is never published in mainstream outlets. Despite being read by major commentators and politicians, he is almost never named, let alone discussed. Steve Sailer, a 65-year-old Californian, has haunted mainstream discourse for decades. You can see his name popping up in New York Times columns by David Brooks and Ross Douthat. He is occasionally published in the American Conservative. Yet the extent to which he is perceived as being politically unmentionable has made him the closest thing that opinion commentary has to an outlaw figure. The once-edgy comedian, Patton Oswalt, quoted Sailer’s line that “political correctness is a war on noticing” on Twitter in 2014 (and has since deleted the tweet). The now-edgy comedian Tim Dillon referenced…7 min
The Critic|April 2024THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAMEBACK IN 1928, A MAGAZINE CALLEDThe Musical Mirror published a satirical yet affectionate article about the relative popularity of classical music and sport. It imagined a future, 50 years hence, in which concerts drew larger crowds than football matches and presented a spoof review of a recital by the pianist “Schweinhund” at which the audience stormed the platform and 900 people had to be hospitalised for injuries. In a companion piece, a fictional manager complained that football, “instead of being, like music, a great national sport, was merely the pursuit of the cultured few”, and dreamed of the day when a cup final would be as popular as a symphony concert. For the time being though, the average man considered football a bit “heavy” and preferred to relax with a…9 min
The Critic|April 2024GOD SAVE THE KINKSTHE KINKS ARE NO STRANGERS to our national conversation. Having played their last note in 1996, they’ve now been defunct for nearly as long as they were together. Yet their stock continues to rise. At the 2012 London Olympics, their signature song “Waterloo Sunset” was given a place of honour in the closing ceremony. Five years later their main songwriter and singer, Ray Davies, was knighted for services to the arts. Meanwhile Sunny Afternoon, a West End musical based on their career, picked up a clutch of Olivier awards. Regularly cited today as the third wheel in a Sixties pop holy trinity completed by The Beatles and Stones, and regarded as hugely influential on subsequent musical generations, The Kinks have joined the likes of Judi Dench and Alan Bennett as…8 min
The Critic|April 2024Mirabel Chevenix Grande dame“ER, IT DID SAY,” MURMURS Chloe the publicity assistant, one eye on the austere-looking elderly lady in the grey cloak stalled in the entrance hall, the other on the queue of people lined up in her majestic wake, “that guests were supposed to bring their invitations with them?” There is an awful, freezing silence, broken only by the sound of the Reform Club’s wine waiters going about their business. Happily, Chloe’s boss Hermione is equal to the situation. “Mirabel,” she coos, practically abasing herself on the carpet as she does so. “How wonderful to see you. Can I get you a glass of champagne?” Mirabel accepts the glass of champagne, gives Chloe a look that would melt a bar of soap and is triumphantly escorted into the Reform Club library’s…2 min
The Critic|April 2024Putting a gloss on big ideasTHE TERM “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”is tautological: all intelligence is artificial, in the sense of being man-made. There is nothing new about the notion of robotic intelligence; from the Golem to Google, we have been haunted by the Cartesian model of the ghost in the machine. It flourished during the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction against it — the eras that gave us such utopian visions as Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain and such nightmarish fantasies as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Then came the computer, which in turn gave us the internet and social media. More than ever before, we are obsessed with the unlimited possibilities of AI, leading to transhumanism, the secularised transcendence of humanity. Yet there is another, more genuinely humanistic and certainly more humane form…9 min
The Critic|April 2024A decade of economic disasterBARRING MIRACLES (or an unlikely decision to hold the next general election in January 2025, the last legally-possible month), 2024 will be the final year of the present Conservative government. Although the Conservatives were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats at the start, the period 2010 to 2024 will have been dominated by Conservative policy-making. On the economic front, only one verdict is possible: Conservative rule has been a comprehensive failure. Output per hour worked has gone up in the 14 years, but by only 0.5 per cent a year. This is the lowest rate of increase in productivity over such an extended period since the Industrial Revolution. Inevitably, living standards have stagnated. Public debt has climbed relative to national output, up from 70 per cent in 2010 to about…4 min
The Critic|April 2024How to lose an empireA PROVINCE OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, BAGHDAD IN THE 1820S WAS GOVERNED BY A WÃLI WHOSEhabit was to make money by arresting members of the wealthiest families and demanding a ransom for their release. Among those detained was David Sassoon, a member of one of Baghdad’s most prominent Jewish families, whose father was the pasha’s treasurer. Upon the father paying his son’s ransom, David fled to Bushir in southern Iran in 1830. The following year, he took his family with him for a new life in Bombay. As a refugee in a new land who had lost his wealth and status in Baghdad, David Sassoon chose to identify with the British Empire, then the world’s strongest power. When in 1853 he was granted British citizenship, he signed his oath of…7 min
The Critic|April 2024When classicists attack classicsRESEARCH INTO THE ANCIENT WORLDhas a serious problem with imperialism. The best introduction to this subject is Rajiv Malhotra’s 2016 book The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive? Malhotra, a devout Hindu, opposes the efforts of American university academics, and specifically “postmodern Orientalists”, to impose their secular values on ancient Hindu traditions and sacred literature. He regards such Americans as smug, passive-aggressive and laughably hypocritical. Malhotra claims that too many scholars have latterly been co-opted into academic projects that serve American imperial interests whilst helping various scholars assuage their sense of “white guilt”. Professionally insecure young people are easily talked into advancing their careers by spitting in the faces of their ancestors, and claiming that (for example) exploitation was built into the…7 min
The Critic|April 2024He’s not the messiah, he’s a transwomanIT IS NO FUN BEING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF“the trans debate”. Given the choice between rainbows and kindness or binary sex and bigotry, who’d want to align themselves with the latter? This is why so many feminists, troubled by the insistence that “trans women are women”, go to great lengths to educate ourselves. This whole thing can’t just be what it looks like — men deciding that nothing of ours cannot be theirs, not even the very experience of being us. There must, we tell ourselves, be more to it than that. Like Debbie Hayton, what we tend to find — at least if we dare to keep tugging at the thread — is that we were right to start with. Hayton, a post-operative transwoman who came to realise…5 min
The Critic|April 2024Weak, flawed, limited; an opportunity missedDOUBTLESS KINDNESS LAY BEHINDPenguin’s absence of response to The Critic’s repeated requests for a review copy for me of this book. My request also failed, but I have gone out and bought a copy, and now understand. Possibly Penguin felt I might be upset to find no reference to my Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World (2019) in a book described as “a groundbreaking exploration of how British empire has shaped the world we live in today”. But actually no. With its pretensions and authorial conceit, Sanghera’s book is actually rather a good laugh. He apparently is the word and the way for Britain which “cannot hope to have a productive future in the world without acknowledging what it did to the world in the first place”, a…5 min
The Critic|April 2024Who edits the editor?THE SECRET AUTHOR has always regarded the Bookseller as a symbol of pretty much everything that is wrong with contemporary publishing. Nevertheless, he took a keen interest in a story that appeared there at the beginning of last month. Here it was revealed that Ana Fletcher, a former employee at Jonathan Cape who had worked with such luminaries of the modern novel as Martin Amis, Howard Jacobson and Ian McEwan, was founding an agency called Unfolding Edits. Its aim, Ms Fletcher explained, was to “demystify the art of editing”. There was quite a lot more of this in a mission statement included on the agency’s website. Trained up to proofread and copy-edit, its proprietor had then discovered that the job of being an editor required far more than these rudimentary…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Robert Thicknesse on OperaABOUT BLOODY TIME TOO: FINALLY, a statue is to be raised to London’s transgender sex workers, right outside the ENO, on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Let’s hope they dedicate an opera to these unsung heroes: it would make a joyous change from modern English opera’s obsession with child abuse and allied miserablisms, and as anyone whose horizons have been abruptly expanded in some Bangkok love-bower would have to agree, it would fit perfectly into that other, jollier strain of our native lyric drama, orgiastic, sensual, sexually all-embracing, featuring such marvels as Handel’s Alcina and Michael Tippett’s free-for-all love-feast, The Midsummer Marriage. NOW THAT IT’S ILLEGAL TO SUGGEST any positive angles in the country’s sordid, vicious history, opera finds itself in the odd position of being English culture’s last…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Anne McElvoy on TheatreWE START WITH A PICTURE: well, we would, given that Oscar Wilde’s quirky fin de siècle gothic horror, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is about the power of portraits and the quest for eternal youth, themes as old as the Greeks and as contemporary as the anti-aging mythology sold over a million beauty counters. The balancing allegories of human frailty and vanity are timeless. But Dorian, while treated to sundry film adaptations, has not often graced the stage. This may be because the baggy (and only) Oscar Wilde novel is really a series of vignettes with characters who can feel more like Pirandello constructs than flesh-and-blood. We meet Dorian and his libertine influencer, Lord Henry Wotton, and Basil Hallward, whose image will free Dorian to pursue a life of untrammelled…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Michael Henderson on Radio“SPRING IS HERE,” BEGINS ONE OF Rodgers and Hart’s best-known songs. “Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?” That depends on which Spring you have in mind. Is it the season of renewal we greet each April, when all the flowers bloom, tra-la, and the nights lengthen? Or is it Marianna of that ilk, the BBC’s “disinformation” tsarina, promoted with unnerving speed, and determined not to let the grass grow under her size sevens? For this Spring is here, there and everywhere. Only 28, she has already presented several programmes and podcasts with titles so enticing that only the foolish do not pay attention. If How toCure Viral Misinformation doesn’t grab you, there’s The Anti-Vax Files. Other favourites include Death by Conspiracy?, Disaster Trolls and Marianna in Conspir-acyland (with illustrations, presumably,…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Sloane dangerIN THE 1950S, DEBORAH, duch*ess of Devonshire accompanied her daughter on a culturally improving visit to Paris. As recounted in a letter by Deborah’s sister, Nancy Mitford, the ladies got as far along their itinerary as Notre Dame when the duch*ess announced, “Now darling, you’ve seen the outside, so you can imagine the inside. Let’s go to Dior.” Sometimes, just sometimes, a restaurant comes along which inspires the same confidence. The first time I walked past Azzurra, just by the Peter Jones end of the bit of Sloane Street that is perpetually being dug up, I knew precisely how preposterously awful it was going to be. From the location (the soulless no-man’s land between SWs 1 and 3) to the size (vast) to the gilded tangle of fishing nets depending…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Out with the old and in with the newLAST MONTH I WROTE ABOUT how the marketeers at the auction houses have pushed luxury brands as the “gateway drug” for new buyers coming into the art market. However, it remains to be seen in what direction these new Hermès handbag-toting buyers will go. Will they gravitate toward the flashy, fun, and largely conceptual (and intellectually open) area of contemporary art, such as the insanely popular works by Yayoi Kusama, or perhaps the downright hip street works by Rashid Johnson? Maybe they will find their happiness in eighteenth-century European furniture and ceramics, seventeenth-century Italian paintings or sculpture? My money is on the former, though my preference is for the latter. The rise and rise in the size and value of the contemporary art market has continued (with a major dip…3 min
The Critic|April 2024A matter of National concernI WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE BEEN AROUND TO WATCH Red Rum’s astonishing three Grand National winners between 1973 and 1976, but the first I was properly invested in — literally — was Ben Nevis, who ran away with the race in 1980 at 40/1 and helped pay for far more under-age nights in the local pub than a 15-year-old should have had any business with. The thing about the National is that every winner is memorable — or, rather, becomes memorable through the very fact of winning. I guess it’s much the same as interest in the backstory of Liz Truss; the one fact of her having been PM makes it so. It’s a cliché that the race is less of a lottery than it used to be. The…3 min
The Critic|April 2024WHY THE GOAL GLUT?A FEW DECADES AGO, FOOTBALL boffins thought the beautiful game was too boring. In 1996, the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, tried quite literally to move the goalposts. He wanted the sticks widened by the diameter of two footballs, and the bar raised by one. Fortunately, his ridiculous idea was killed quickly, and Blatter and his UEFA sidekick Michel Platini were driven out amid a corruption scandal. Fans around the world had reacted with horror to the idea, and football — never boring, even when Italy is defending a 1-0 lead — has only grown more exciting. Take this season’s Premier League, which has seen a stupendous increase in THENUMBER OF GOALS. At the time of writing, with most teams having played 28 games, the League has seen 907 goals at…4 min
The Critic|April 2024LettersDECOLONISING SCIENCE The woke agenda poses a threat to science and maths that is, if anything, even more fundamental than that to the humanities reported by David Butterfield (HOLLOWED-OUT HUMANITIES, MARCH). Scepticism has been recognised as the bedrock of “natural philosophy” since the days of Galileo and Pope Urban but “inclusion” may now require physics and aboriginal legends to be afforded equal status in the science curriculum. In 2022, two professors resigned rather than be effectively forced out of the Royal Society of New Zealand for questioning teaching the equal validity of Maori mythology with scientific method. Meanwhile in the UK, “decolonisation” has become a euphemism for “racism”. Chemists at the University of York are engaged in an Orwellian rewriting of history intended to purge significant white males from the…3 min
The Critic|April 2024NOVA’S DIARY“I can’t find Liam, have you seen him?” Rishi has put his head round the door into the room where I’m sleeping. James, who used to write nice things about us in The Times, jerks guiltily and closes the window on his computer screen. I don’t know why he’s embarrassed, it was just an email he was writing to some of his old work friends asking if anyone needed someone to write nice things again. Apparently he expects to have a lot more free time by December, or February at the absolute latest. “Dentist appointment,” says James. “I expect that’s why he’s turned his phone off,” says Rishi. “I wanted to talk to him about what I’m doing in the local election campaigns.” “Lot of campaign visits?” “Well, that’s what…2 min
The Critic|April 2024The true lie of the landTHERE IS AN UNDERSTATED ENGLISH BIRD species, so perennially and universally persecuted by circ*mstance and predator alike, that Shakespeare used them, in both Henry VI and Much Ado About Nothing, as a metaphor for tragic death. It is rare, red-listed in fact, with a mere 40,000 breeding pairs still at large in the British Isles. For a literary giant it is not that big; 30 centimetres or so in height, a fat one tops out at around 500 grams. The rasping “kerr, kerr” that passes for its song, sounds akin to a farm-gate in need of oiling. Its plumage is muted, like a dank December day in Suffolk. Doomed, tuneless and dumpily dowdy then, yet the grey partridge is an avian superstar, unique in truth, and of the utmost national…10 min
The Critic|April 2024SINGERS HAVE A VOICE, TOOTHE WESTERN LIBERAL LEGACY HAS REFRAMED “freedom” in an entanglement of misconceptions and skewed viewpoints. In the arts, they tend to be sacralised as an absolute precondition of the artist. Yet for all its lofty intent, art is still a product of human hands and minds. Its object shouldn’t blind us to the unavoidable and less glamorous realities of economic and legal constraints faced by artists. To acknowledge this is not to reduce intellectual debates to balance sheets. But the limitations matter, since it is precisely within set frameworks that humans thrive, even if it is to transgress or transform them. Creativity involves making the most of what is available to us at a given time. As such, constraints aren’t automatically “negative”, in the sense that they represent a nuisance…7 min
The Critic|April 2024EVERYDAY LIESRelaxing with the SUNDAY PAPERS after lunch is not what it used to be. Whether the change is in me or the newspapers I cannot be absolutely certain, but these days I find reading them more and more irritating. Recently, for example, I read in one of them an article taking up nearly a whole page, half of which admittedly was composed of photographs, about a film called Poor Things. Could there really be nothing in the world more important to write about than this? Anyhow, I started reading the article and I suffer from a strange compulsion: I must finish whatever I have started to read, however bad it may be. According to the article, many critics thought that the film was p*rnographic, though not the author of the…1 min
The Critic|April 2024The Critic Profile W.S. Gilbert“Though the Philistines may jostle,You will rank as an apostleIn the high aesthetic band,If you walk down PiccadillyWith a poppy or a lilyIn your medieval hand.” —W.S. Gilbert, “If you’re anxious for to shine”, from Patience, 1881 POSTMANS’S PARK, THE PUBLIC GARDEN a short walk from St Paul’s Cathedral, was immortalised by the play Closer (and its subsequent film adaptation) as the site of ordinary people remembered for acts of heroism that cost them their lives. The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, as it is known, commemorates those who died in a variety of ways in attempts, whether successful or in vain, to save others. The idea was that of the painter and sculptor G.F. Watts, who wished to commemorate the valiant deeds of ordinary people who might otherwise have been…10 min
The Critic|April 2024It’s time to transition babiesTHE NHS IS NOW OFFICIALLY a neo-fascist organisation. It was bad enough that it appropriated the rainbow flag during the Covid pandemic, thereby erasing LGBTQ+ people from existence. But now it has banned puberty blockers for trans children. It should be renamed the NSS: the New Schutzstaffel. Trans children exist. Even in the womb, many foetuses can sense their own trans identity. This is why pregnant people often feel them kicking from within. Given the opportunity, the unborn would doubtless declare their pronouns, only it’s very difficult to enunciate with a mouthful of amniotic fluid. So-called “research” has apparently shown that most feelings of gender dysphoria are resolved during puberty. But if it is true that children are less likely to transition if they develop into adults, then surely the…2 min
The Critic|April 2024Let there be loveGREAT LOVE STORIES, ONCE A STAPLE OF British cinema, have pretty much vanished from our screens. The reasons why filmmakers have fallen out of love with the genre include cynicism, changing relationship dynamics and a retreat into solitude. But it is a loss we should feel because a good romantic film can teach us so much about the human condition. A quick scroll through my local cinema listings reveals just how far we have strayed from the path of true love. The week I selected, much like any other, includes an all too familiar and American conveyor belt of rehashed superheroes and kick-ass kiddie-flicks and something called Bottoms about two teenage girls who “start a fight club in order to find someone to have sex with before graduation” — as…8 min
The Critic|April 2024STUDIOSINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, BRITAIN’S OLDEST purpose-built synagogue, Bevis Marks in the City of London, has survived multiple attempts at its destruction. One made in the 1880s prompted the establishment of the Bevis Marks Anti-Demolition League, which drew the support of William Morris. It survived the Blitz and, more recently, two major IRA bombings. Today, the synagogue — Sha’ar Hashamayim, the Gate of Heaven in Hebrew — is in a struggle against a new threat, arguably more insidious than those made before. For some time, it has been attempting to see off the planned development of the nearby site of 31 Bury Street for a super-tall office building. Its trustees, and many supporters from local and national heritage groups, fear it would leave the building’s daylight provision at only one…5 min
The Critic|April 2024Regency romanceMARRIAGE, THE INTERNET GLEE-fully informs me, is just too expensive for people my age. In June 2023, the Thriving Center of Psychology found that 73 per cent of Millennial and Gen Z couples thought tying the knot too pricey in today’s economy. But is this news? Take Arthur Wesley, an ambitious young army officer, who proposed to Kitty Pakenham. But thanks his miserly captain’s salary, Pakenham’s family twice refused to bless the match. Wesley, now better known as Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, eventually did get his way — but only after 12 years of professional success made the marriage financially viable. Love and Marriage In the Age of Jane Austen is replete with stories of newlyweds reduced to scrimping, or of men staying unmarried for years until their accounts…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Why Labour has the best history booksSOMEONE I KNEW BACK IN THE DAYonce told me that when he left home he joined all three political parties: Labour because they had the best drugs, the Tories because they had the best women, and the Lib Dems for a night off. His point being, I guess, that the movements still had their differences, even in the “I agree with Nick” period. Painful as it is for a Tory historian to admit, obviously, Labour has the best history books — if not the best history, or necessarily any history at all. Part of the reason is that most historians are on the left anyway, so most histories of the right are written with such masticating hostility that you can find teeth-marks on the spine. Hatred doesn’t necessarily make for…5 min
The Critic|April 2024A Freudian slipWHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOUdescribed someone as “anal”? Denoting a fastidious individual, the adjective relates to terms such as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex and the Freudian slip. The last reveals the source who unites them, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind provides insight into the fascinating theories and life of this ubiquitous figure. Tallis seeks to prove beyond all doubt both that Freud is a cultural icon and that Golden Age Vienna (1900–18) was the birthplace of modernity and the modern mind. Mammoth in scope, Mortal Secrets fuses art, culture, psychology and biography to present a multifaceted view of Freud in his own era and of his posthumous reception. Mythic self-presentation from an early…3 min
The Critic|April 2024Romeo Coates“Between you and me …”DESPITE OPPOSITION expressed in some quarters, surely the idea for “black-only” audience nights at the Noël Coward Theatre deserved to be applauded? If we’re to truly embrace the spirit of vibrant diversity in 2024, being fleeced by exorbitant West End ticket prices must no longer be the largely exclusive privilege of the white middle-classes. WHILE THE EAGERLY-offended are quick to seize on supposedly disparaging remarks made about scary Sunderland folk by RADA’s inspirational new vice president Cynthia Erivo, one cannot help thinking there’s been a crossing of wires. After being shown said footage, it seemed clear enough to me that Ms Erivo was merely pointing out she prefers northern cities to “feel like London”. Perfectly reasonable! FOR THE SAKE OF TRANSPARENCY — and after repeated goading from certain rivals —…5 min
The Critic|April 2024Sarah Ditum on Pop“IT’S LIKE WE’VE COME TO ONE OF the support groups at the start of Fight Club,” said my husband. He was right: we’d gone to see The Hold Steady at the Electric Ballroom in Camden for the first date of their annual three-night London run, and all around us there were men emanating the distinctive joy that comes with feeling your feelings. I don’t want to suggest that a Hold Steady audience is a testosterone-only environment — after all, I was the one who had dragged my husband there. But there is something about the Hold Steady experience that seems to hit particularly sweetly for men. As singer Craig Finn rasps on the song “Carlos Is Crying”, “it’s different for boys”. Like most Hold Steady songs, “Carlos” is really a…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Robert Hutton on CinemaIF I HAD THE SKILLS TO HACK THE computers of the Apple Corporation, I wouldn’t go hunting for the specs of the new iPhone. What I want to know, more than anything, is at what point people at home stop watching Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese’s vastly overpraised drama is now streaming on Apple TV, which funded the film. But at three and a half hours long, what percentage of the audience is getting through it in one shift? How many people are deciding that it’s late in the evening, there’s another 90 minutes to go, and nothing has really happened yet, so they might as well leave the rest until tomorrow? Which leads me to my next question: how many of them ever finish it? Like doorstop…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Ben Sixsmith on PodcastsONE OF THE SELLING POINTS OF podcasts, as a media format, is the promise of depth. In TV or radio, journalists and commentators have producers breathing down their necks, insisting that they make a point as quickly as possible. In podcasts, they have time to develop their thoughts and go “behind the headlines”. That’s the idea at least. The News Agents promises “expert analysis” from “three of the UK’s top journalists”: Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall. The trio are “not just here to tell you what’s happening, but why”. Excellent! Has everybody got their thought goggles on? We’re swimming into deep political waters here. Actually, The News Agents has the depth of a puddle. I’ve listened to episode after episode, waiting for insight like a man sitting in…4 min
The Critic|April 2024Good for the soleSEAGULLS SQUITTER OVER-head. Cracks in the pavement trip your feet. Potholes tear at your tyres. The precipitate topography of Hastings wears down ill-advised retirees, who stagger between slope and strand. Rubbish overflows from bulging bins. On the beach the stones stick in my dogs’ paws. Along the esplanade civic vulgarianism has vandalised such fragments of faded elegance as Hitler spared. But there are compensations: the gaunt, ruined outline of the clifftop castle, the rickety charm of the unspoiled old town, the delightful church of St Mary Star of the Sea on the High Street, the inspired eclecticism of Bayte — an off-seafront bistro in St Leonard’s — and the wonders of the fishmongers. Fish for sale no longer strew the beach as they did in Turner’s paintings, but the varieties…3 min
The Critic|April 2024What makes a gentleman tick?IT IS SAID THAT YOU CAN SPOT a gentleman by his shoes and his watch. At least, it was said in the days before contemporary incarnations of the noblesse de race (actors, civil servants, sons of peers, trustafarians and anyone in the media) affected to look like they had spent the weekend sleeping in a hedge. Nonetheless, these two items of apparel still have the power to mark the man from the masses, especially a fine watch — which even hedged-welling sons of privilege have been known to own. Of course, there are watches and there are watches, and then there are watches. Most of us at one point or another have had a mass-produced timepiece on our wrists, save perhaps the late, great Gianni Agnelli who only ever wore…3 min
The Critic|April 2024Wearing shades“WHAT’S THE COLOUR we should be wearing?” absolutely no one is asking. Once this was the kind of question wimmin and haute hom*osexuals were wont to inquire of gurus such as myself, only they now consider themselves too self-determining for it. Well, maybe they should revert, this kind of thing being the only means by which the likes of you and I will be able to afford a slice of fashion action. You know matters have reached an economic extreme when even fashion journalists — aka receivers of free 'fits — start taking note. In a Washington Post article entitled “The Reality and Delusion of Milan Fashion Week”, Rachel Tashjian riffed on the unaffordability of garb produced by socialist Miuccia Prada, among others. “The clothes have gotten outrageously, laughably expensive…3 min
The Critic|April 2024WINNING SINNERAN UNWANTED SILVER JUBILEE HANGS over this year’s cycling season. It is 25 years since LANCE ARMSTRONG won the first of his now annulled seven Tours de France, and though he has been expunged from the history books the ramifications of what he did continue to reverberate — for they hit at the heart of how and why we watch not just his sport but all sport. Do we shrug and accept doping as a necessary evil? Do we go the other way and denounce any sport with a doping problem as one without integrity (and if so, do we include rugby, tennis, football, the NFL and so on, because if you think they’re all clean then I’ve a bridge to sell you)? Or do we square the circle with…4 min
