Twelfth Night (1601-2): William Shakespeare

February 6, 2013April 29, 202110 Comments

★★★★½

(Apollo Theatre, London, playing in rep with Richard III until 9 February 2013)

I should, of course, have seen these plays the other way round: Twelfth Night in early January and then Richard III last night, spiced with the news that the skeleton found beneath a car park in Leicester is (almost certainly) that of the king. Anyway, it was a joy to return to the Apollo for my second encounter with the Globe company in their winter quarters. Once again I hung over the balcony watching the actors milling around as they were dressed, watching doublets and hose tugged on, bodices laced up, lead-white paint and rouge applied to faces. Even without their wigs, the actors gained a feminine elegance as soon as they were into their skirts; and I watched Mark Rylance’s hands fluttering convulsively as he was laced up, as if trying physically to shake himself into his role.

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Royal Assassin (1996): Robin Hobb

February 5, 2013April 29, 20215 Comments

Robin Hobb © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

★★★★ ½

The Farseer Trilogy: Book II

Sometimes, at the close of a book, you feel almost physically drained. I had forgotten, quite forgotten, exactly how tough this series is: I can’t believe I was so young when I read it before. It’s harder and more brutal by far than the work of any other author I can remember reading, even more than George R.R. Martin, who is usually referenced as the example par excellence of an author who refuses to wrap his characters in cotton wool. The miraculous thing is that it all just binds you in to the story ever more tightly. There must be few mid-series books with such a raw ending, but at least the closing mood is one of mitigated triumph.

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Assassin’s Apprentice (1995): Robin Hobb

February 2, 2013April 29, 202126 Comments

Robin Hobb © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

★★★★★

The Farseer Trilogy: Book I

About a month ago, Janet asked me whether I’d ever read The Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb and the answer is a resounding yes, though I haven’t read it for many years. This was the perfect excuse for me to return to the series, because I wanted to see whether Hobb’s work really is as good as I remember. She has cast a very long shadow over my reading life: she was the first author I dared to write to, brimming over with clumsy childish enthusiasm: to my delight, she not only acknowledged my letter but sent me some signed stickers for my books. Although I try to avoid ‘favourites’ when I talk about reading, it’s safe to say there are few stories in the world that I love more than the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. I was given Assassin’s Apprentice for Christmas when I was twelve years old and was almost immediately gripped by the harsh, windswept world it described and by Hobb’s endearing protagonist.

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Fantasy and Invention (2013)

February 1, 2013April 29, 2021Leave a comment

Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing

(The Morgan Library, New York, until 3 February 2013)

Current service has been temporarily interrupted by a business trip to New York, but even there I did my best to keep up the ‘idle’ spirit. On the afternoon of my arrival, I hotfooted it down Madison Avenue to the Morgan, hoping to keep the jetlag at bay by looking at some wonderful drawings. This January’s crop of exhibitions in New York aren’t as focused on the Old Masters as they were last year, and so the show at the Morgan was the one that bore the brunt of my expectations. I was a little disappointed to find that it took up only one room and there was no catalogue; but, nevertheless, that one room contained some beautiful things, many of which I hadn’t seen before. The purpose of the exhibition was to trace the development of Florentine drawing as it grew out of the Renaissance tradition into the full, eccentric bloom of Mannerism.

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The Woman in the Dunes (1962): Kobo Abe

January 21, 2013April 29, 20211 Comment

★★

This was an impulse loan from the library, which caught my eye because I’d started looking through the shelves alphabetically, hadn’t read it and thought the cover was rather elegant. I’m fond of Murakami‘s particular brand of magical realism and wondered whether this book, with its stylised and rather otherworldly story, might offer a similar experience. The short answer is that it didn’t. The longer answer is that I really wish I hadn’t bothered, and that I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m simply not cut out to read existential fiction.

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The Name of the Wind (2007): Patrick Rothfuss

January 21, 2013April 29, 202116 Comments

★★★★

I don’t read as much fantasy as I did when I was a teenager, but I still enjoy being able to lose myself in other worlds now and again. Often I just return to the favourite books that are already on my shelves, but once in a while I take the plunge and try something new. It’s never without a hint of nervousness: it strikes me that in fantasy there’s so much more scope for things to go wrong. The task of building a plausible, solid and convincing world is that much more challenging than it would be in any other genre. So, with fantasy, I tend to hang back until the weight of acclaim turns a particular book into a must-read. Over the past year, I’ve probably seen The Name of the Wind in Waterstones at least a dozen times, and each time I picked it up, flicked through it, and put it back unconvinced. Over the Christmas holidays I finally caved in, and I’m so glad I did.

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Homer’s Daughter (1955): Robert Graves

January 20, 2013April 29, 20215 Comments

★★½

I discovered this on my last trip to the library and, in the thrill of finding a novel by Graves that I’d never even heard of, remembered a poem by Jo Walton which I’d read some months ago. There are few sensations to compare with suddenly finding a previously unknown book by an author you’re fond of. Like many people, I’ve read I, Claudius and Claudius the God, but I hadn’t realised that Graves had written any other fiction about the classical period.

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Les Misérables (2012)

January 19, 2013April 29, 20211 Comment

★★★½

(directed by Tom Hooper, 2012)

I first encountered Les Misérables in choir lessons at school, when we learned some of the songs, and I read the book when I was about fourteen, after my father, knowing how to handle me, said something like, ‘You’ll never get through that’. Now I can’t remember anything of the novel except (spoiler!) the scene of Enjolras’s death, which affected me deeply; but the musical has a secure place in my heart. I’ve seen it several times and I have the soundtrack on CD, so it’s fair to say that I know the score rather well. I was curious to see how it would translate to film (it’s important to stress that this is a film of the musical, not the original book), and overall it’s a success, even if it’s not quite as brilliant as all the hyperbolic reviews had led me to believe.

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Top Hat (2011)

January 17, 2013April 29, 20212 Comments

(Aldwych Theatre, London, currently booking until September 2013)

It’s 1935 or thereabouts and Jerry Travers (Tom Chambers), the most popular dancer on Broadway, comes to London to star in a show arranged by the impresario Horace Hardwick (Martin Ball). On his first night in town, Jerry’s exuberant tap-dancing in Horace’s hotel room disturbs the young lady staying on the floor below: the glamorous Dale Tremont (Charlotte Gooch), with whom Jerry is immediately smitten. A practised ladykiller, he romances her in the park and fills her room with flowers; but forgets to ever actually introduce himself.

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Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite (2011): Brian Sewell

January 16, 2013April 29, 2021Leave a comment

★★★★

Brian Sewell is now best known for being the art critic of the Evening Standard: ferociously knowledgeable, scrupulously precise and utterly intolerant of pretension. His exhibition reviews are the only ones I trust completely, and I should have read this first volume of his memoirs long before now; but I mistakenly assumed that it would be like the other art-world memoirs I’ve read. Those were dull, lifeless books, little more than a chance for the author to boast of his distinguished friends, settle scores with old enemies and rattle off a list of the famous paintings that he’s sold. I should have known better; and in any case, several people have recently urged me to read it – some struck by the elegance of the writing and others by Sewell’s brutal frankness.

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