Books features
sue.steward
Throughout the 60s and 70s, when Soviet reality was based on observation, supervision, communality, destruction of sense of self and concealed from the West, Sutkus’s portraits quietly revealed details in images quite at odds with the official convention for portraits of smiling, women working on farms, respectful teenage soldiers atop tanks, and intense factory workers lunching in vast canteens – all designed to convince the vast population that “everything’s OK.”
His young “Pioneers” – the corps of children sent to farms for harvest, to cities to train in workers’ skills and Read more ...
howard.male
Helen Chase’s biography of post-punk band Magazine is in some ways a textbook example of how to do the job correctly. In fact, with its classically austere cover (designed by Malcolm Garrett, who did many record sleeves for the band) this handsome paperback even looks like a textbook. Back in the late 1970s Magazine never quite made the same impact as the grim and intense Joy Division or the emptily anthemic Simple Minds, who went on to huge cult status and stadium glory, respectively. As for why things turned out this way, to a large degree Helen Chase just lets Devoto and co tell their own Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Most boys grow up playing Cowboys and Indians. Thing is, I never grew out of it. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to write my own variant on the great American road book. I pinpoint three pre-adolescent experiences that warped my mind: reading Huckleberry Finn, seeing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and hearing Bo Diddley. Inevitably, reading Kerouac ruined me. Not that I headed to the US expecting things to be as they were in Jack’s time. Yet just how harsh poor America can be to live and travel amongst did surprise me. The title of More Miles than Money: Journeys through American Read more ...
frank.johnson
Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-formers in the arts as ruthlessly as he quilled politicians. These extracts from a newly published collection of his writings, edited by his widow Virginia Fraser, show both sides of him. 5 March 1989: Benjamin Britten's whimsicalities As an impressionable youth in the 1950s and early 1960s, I endured the unceasing propaganda of the Read more ...
mark.hudson
In 1522, Jacopo Tebaldi, agent of Titian’s great patron Alfonso d’Este, paid a visit to the artist who had claimed to be too ill to work. "I have been to see Titian," he wrote to Alfonso, "who has no fever at all. He looks well, if somewhat exhausted, and I suspect that the girls whom he paints in different poses arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits. Though he denies it."The nature of Titian’s relationships with his models has exercised the imaginations of critics and historians from his day to this. For centuries it was simply assumed that Titian Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Michael Palin (b 1943) has had - is having - an amazing multi-pronged career. One of the original members of the Monty Python team, he has subsequently reinvented himself as a prolific author, a film and television actor and, more recently, a hugely popular and successful travel show presenter and writer. Palin has a lot to celebrate these next few weeks with the publication of the second volume of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, and, next month, Python's 40th birthday (can it really be possible?) Tomorrow Palin is giving a public interview in Ely Cathedral for the Cambridge Film Festival Read more ...
michael.palin
This second volume of my diaries covers my life from the beginning of the 1980s to the night before I set out from the Reform Club in September 1988 on Around The World In Eighty Days, the journey that was to change my life.For me the 1980s was the decade when I could have become a Hollywood star, but didn’t. I made plenty of films, seven in seven years, but they were all incorrigibly British. Two were with Terry Gilliam. Time Bandits, British to the core, nevertheless topped the US box-office charts for five weeks. Brazil is constantly voted one of the world’s favourite movies. The diaries Read more ...
robert.sandall
This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period which has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments - Brian Jones’s drowning, Altamont, the Exile On Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour which followed it – had all happened and been written up.To German’s teenage peers the Stones were yesterday’s news, eclipsed by Pink Floyd, and Saturday Night Read more ...
theartsdesk
With thanks to the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, Madrid's Prado Gallery, Naples' Capodimonte Museum and Washington's National Gallery, and to mark the publication of Mark Hudson's major new biography, Titian: The Last Days, we reproduce a marvellous gallery of masterpieces. This is the first part of a four-part special, including three extracts from Hudson's book, about the master Venetian painter, Tiziano Vecellio (1489?-1576), universally known as Titian. A powerful exhibition has just opened at the Louvre, in which several of these pictures are on display, and the £50 million Read more ...
mark.hudson
In 1519 Titian was commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, the famously irascible Duke of Ferrara, to provide the first of three paintings for a study, the so-called camerino d’alabastro or alabaster room. If the following five years of delays and procrastination drove the duke almost to distraction, they produced what is arguably the most famous room in the history of Western art.When I first saw Bacchus and Ariadne it hung on its own screen in front of a huge doorway, linking two of the most important parts of the National Gallery. You could see it shining out from several rooms away, a Read more ...
robert.sandall
Even with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, the failure of the major record labels to grasp the implications of the internet seems extraordinary. As Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper explains in this pacey account of corporate greed and myopia, they certainly had enough warning.At the heart of Knopper’s story is the record industry’s longterm tendency to view technological opportunities as threats. When the recession of 1979-1982 reversed a 20-year boom which had seen record sales steadily quadruple in value, opposition to the introduction of compact disc was rife. The tech guru at Read more ...
robert.sandall
Bankers aren't the only fabulously remunerated fat cats to have taken a tumble in the public's estimation recently. As Dom Phillips points out in his highly entertaining account of the rise and fall of British club culture, "superstar" DJs no longer command the devotion, or the fees, they used to.Back in the Nineties they were adored, their antics big news. When Radio 1 nearly lost two of its top jocks, Zoe Ball and Lisa l'Anson on Ibiza in 1997, after they got trashed before going on air following all-night club benders, the nation was agog. Characters such as James Lavelle - DJ producer and Read more ...