Culture

Culture

Saturday

Alexander Larman

The greatness of Sam Neill

The recent death of the actor Sam Neill, at the age of 78, was greeted with a mixture of surprise, sorrow and, in many quarters, unexpected grief. It is likely that Neill would have regarded the lavish tributes paid to him by actors, filmmakers and politicians with a mixture of embarrassment and quiet pride, because although he was a brilliantly versatile actor who managed to make a deep impression in virtually every role that he undertook over his five-decade-long career, he was also someone instinctively uncomfortable with the limelight.

sam neill

Friday

Ian Sansom

The appeal of asymmetry: Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers, reviewed

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologizing for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

contrapposto
Rupert Christiansen

Three cheers for Britain’s most unabashedly elitist school

As we ponder the ups and downs of the UK’s sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting their unquestioned prowess when it comes to the demands of classically based dancing. The Royal Ballet is consistently more than a match for any comparable company in the world, and its chief feeder, the Royal Ballet School, currently celebrating its centenary, is similarly and solidly rated as one of the two or three best of its kind anywhere. Both these institutions are deeply beholden to tradition, and the RBS might well be the most unabashedly elitist educational establishment in the country. It receives globally more than 2,500 applications a year. All these will lead to an audition, the number finally whittled down to 30-odd offers of a full-time place.

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Jonathan Sumption

Christian soldiers in retreat – the disastrous Fifth Crusade

The Fifth Crusade, which was fought between 1217 and 1221, marked a new direction for the crusading movement of the Middle Ages. Instead of invading Palestine, as the first three crusades had done, and the Fourth Crusade might have done, the crusaders decided to attack Egypt. That was not the original idea. The formidable Pope Innocent III, who launched the Fifth Crusade, had envisaged a repeat of the old strategy of marching on Jerusalem from the sea. The invasion of Egypt was decided on the initial wave of forces after they had reached the Levant. There was a sort of logic behind the decision. The crusading kingdom of Jerusalem had been destroyed in 1187, when its army had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Saladin at the Horns of Hattin above the Sea of Galilee.

Carson Becker

Why do political elites insist on posing as outsiders?

The American political elite have developed a peculiar habit of styling themselves as outsiders. The closer they stand to power, the less likely they are to claim it as their own. In fact, power always seems to be in the hands of someone else, someone located just out of sight. So where exactly does it reside in this late-stage republic? Nobody seems quite certain. Two new political memoirs, one seeking to clarify the past, the other aimed implicitly toward the future, share this bewilderment. Surprisingly, they also share a good deal else. There is a common obsession with European heritage, Jill Biden through her Italian roots, and J.D. Vance through his love of Great Britain and his adopted Roman Catholicism.

outsiders

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

Confessions II gets thrillingly close to vintage Madonna

There comes a point in the career of any established artist when looking backward seems to be the only possible way to move forward. Madonna was a great pop star until she wasn’t. Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005, was her last really successful record; “Hung Up,” from that album, her last truly unforgettable single. Ever since she has been chasing musical trends with increasingly diminishing returns, the heavy-handed concepts and contrived personae – Madame X, anyone? – no longer supported by anything approaching a properly decent song. Ms Ciccone seems to have belatedly remembered that Madonna is, and always has been, the concept So Confessions II is an act of both commercial and creative necessity. Its reclamation of the past is twofold.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Are the British the most evil people in history?

If you have not spent a great deal of time on the internet, you will probably know the British actress Jameela Jamil for her starring role in the popular comedy series The Good Place, or alternatively from her appearance in the Marvel miniseries She Hulk: Attorney at Law.  However, for the terminally online, Jamil is either a savior who is unafraid to say controversial things that her peers would shy away from, or someone whose batshit crazy utterances are given far too much attention given her modest celebrity status.  The latest of her pronouncements is on Brexit, ten years on, along with sundry instances of racism and horror in her home country. Jamil declared that “Britain is fucked. It doesn’t feel as though I’m going back to some haven.

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Jewish artists are no longer safe in France

It is dangerous to be a Jewish artist in France. On Saturday, the well-known DJ Barbara Butch was forced to abandon her performance during a music festival in the Alpine city of Grenoble. Butch is an icon of the LGBT movement and best-known, among international audiences, for appearing in the "Last Supper" skit during the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On that occasion the 45-year-old Butch infuriated conservative figures on both sides of the Atlantic with her irreverence. Donald Trump labeled the parody a "disgrace," as did the Vatican, which deplored "the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions." On Saturday, it was the far-left who took offense to the presence of Butch.

Monday

John Rhys-Davies

I’m proud of my utterly insignificant association with NASA

Even though my career has been almost entirely in front of the camera, rather than behind it, I’ve long been obsessed with film equipment. How, then, can I resist a party in LA for Cine Gear, a trade show for new film kit? It’s a good place for the “creatives” to meet the technical guys. The director Dan Trachtenberg is there, and we handle the latest Cooke glass. Cooke has been making lenses in Leicester since 1893, and they are still the best cine lenses in the world. I bought my set of Cooke Speed Panchros in the 1980s, when nobody wanted them because they were “slow,” but now they are back in fashion. They have a warmth and softness that modern lenses strive to emulate because their coatings involved radio-active elements that are not permitted in manufacturing now.

nasa
homer
Philip Womack

Bringing Homer into the home: how the Iliad and Odyssey became widely available

Homer’s ghost is particularly busy, popping up in the dreams of pretty much every poet going. In fact if you are a poet and haven’t been visited by Homer, you may find yourself wondering why you’ve been left out. The cultural reach of the two major poems that appear under Homer’s name – the Iliad and the Odyssey – is undeniable. I teach my creative writing students that there are only two stories: the siege and the journey, and there they are, right at the beginning of literary history. They’ve been read continuously for centuries. On my shelves is an edition of Alexander Pope’s Iliad which belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, in which are still bits of paper put in by subsequent family members.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

The Odyssey is shallow and tiring

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s relentless, deafening three-hour take on Homer’s epic poem, and while it is technically impressive filmmaking – IMAX cameras; massive mechanical puppets, minimally pimped up by CGI; thousands of extras – it is set piece after set piece which becomes rather tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring What we get is an action blockbuster, without significant depth, although there is some heft to the final act – everybody’s favorite act, surely. Who doesn’t love it when Odysseus finally makes it back to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and no one recognizes him?

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations

China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing forward their borders rather than by crossing oceans; both have a deep tradition of autocracy that survives to this day; and both (more plausibly in China’s case) believe that their social contract, ideology and system of government is a universal one superior to all others. In Entangled Empires, the German historians Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner explore the convoluted story of Russo-Chinese relations from the moment in the mid-17th century that roving Cossack bands bumped up against Siberian tribes who owed fealty to Beijing up to the latest performative amity between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

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odyssey
Count Binface

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph

Incredible stories, otherworldly creatures, false identities, a cavalcade of trickery: the original Odyssey is packed with everything you could want from a big-screen blockbuster. And like all great stories, it’s more than just a fantasy adventure. It’s about survival, marriage, truth, what it means to be a man and much more. It’s also roughly 2,700 years old, and by picking it for his latest movie, Sir Christopher Nolan has definitively proved that the old ones are the best. But why, really, has he decided to go Greek? Screenwriters have always been suckers for a good “coming home” story. It was such a popular genre in ancient times that the Greeks even coined a name for it: “nostos.

James Delingpole

In defense of Little House on the Prairie

You can tell things have started to get really bad by the fact that they’re bringing back Little House on the Prairie. When a society is in serious crisis – or so I’ve read – it no longer needs edgy, transgressive, exciting art to push boundaries and challenge assumptions. Rather, it needs to be soothed and cosseted with bland, undemanding and familiar comfort food. Nothing, not even The Waltons, does that quite like Prairie. People griping about the remake have clearly forgotten how dire the original was I may well have gawped uncritically at quite a few of the original series’ 200-odd episodes, the first of which aired in 1974.

Wednesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Death of a looksmaxxer

Is the looksmaxxer a morality tale for our time – a sort of Hogarthian parable about everything, or at least some of the main things, that ail us as a society in 2026? After all, could there be a greater indictment of the vanity of the vainest society in history than a young man who devotes his entire waking life to improving his appearance, and not only that, documents every second on camera for a legion of adoring fans and imitators? An otherwise perfectly handsome, fortunate young man obsessing so much over his looks that he spends a portion of each day hitting his face with a small rock hammer.  The modern individual is concerned with optimizing himself without limits, without any goal beyond optimization itself There are other, darker, interpretations of looksmaxxing.

Clavicular

Tuesday

Sabrina Philip

Meet the man road-tripping across America in a giant pear

Inflation drives us to think ahead: plan out grocery trips, buy in bulk, carpool. One young man had an unorthodox way of funding his summer road-trip across America as gas got more expensive: he constructed a life-size pear on his moped.  Twenty-four-year-old Andrew Glubbey has 19,000 followers on his Instagram account, @glubbey. His profile has grown since the start of the road trip as he adventures in his self-built pear car from Florida to Washington State.  “I've talked to a lot of people that are like, ‘I could never do that or I would never do that with that kind of thing’,” Glubbey tells me.

pear

Monday

Terry Barnes

Why Sam Neill was so loved

Actor Sam Neill, whose unexpected death was announced today by his family, was claimed as a son by not one, but three countries. Neill’s light-hearted description of his highly-successful vigneron business reflected his approach to his acting career Born in Northern Ireland, grown up in New Zealand and first making his name in Australia, Neill was more than the “Jurassic Park actor” as first reports of his death labeled him. From the time he first enjoyed the spotlight in the 1970s Australian film, My Brilliant Career, and his BAFTA-winning portrayal of the enigmatic Sidney Reilly in television’s Reilly, Ace of Spies, to his most recent work, Neill’s career was as versatile as it was broad. Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders was Cardinal Wolsey in The Tudors.

sam neill
Sam Neill

On the importance of dogs

The actor Sam Neill has died at the age of 78. Here is a column he wrote for The Spectator in 2014. Last week, my dog left me. Walked out. Gone and left me for another man. I knew what had happened when I returned to the vineyard after a week or two abroad. As soon as I got out of my truck, there he was, running right past me without so much as a how d’you do. I couldn’t help it – I’m afraid I yelled after him, “Listen, you little shit, I saved your life! One day from death row you were, and this is what I get?” A house without a dog is oddly empty. I grew up with dogs I suppose you think I should be heartbroken. I’m not really. Truth is, I liked him well enough, but I never really loved him. That’s hard to admit; you are meant to love your pets unreservedly.

Monday

Alexander Larman

The vulgarity of the Swift-Kelce wedding

When Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop star, announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, the rather less wealthy (although still multi-millionaire) NFL player, she chose to mark the occasion by declaring, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” It was rather a nice way for Swift to refer to herself and her forthcoming nuptials. Those who, like me, have always been fans of both her and her music had hopes that her wedding to Kelce would not become the usual hideous exercise in celebrity tackiness. Boy, was I wrong.

Taylor Swift
World Cup
Toby Young

The World Cup has revived American soft power

Not only where the England fans outnumbered by 30 to one inside the Azteca stadium, but on their way to and from the game they had to run a gauntlet of Mexico fans, including the Anti-Globalist Assembly, a far left group that promised to target England supporters because of Britain’s history of colonial rule.  The local police advised the visiting fans not to hang around the area after the game – and with good reason. After Mexico beat Ecuador last week, over a million people gathered outside the Azteca to celebrate and four fans died in the crush. Contrast that with the experience of football supporters attending games in the United States.

Saturday

Richard Bratby

Fresh, original Mozart

It’s spring in Vienna; well, OK, it’s early summer but it’s a gray day when Mozart doesn’t make you feel younger and I reckon this new release from Alim Beisembayev will do just that. In a world of infinite entertainment possibilities, Beisembayev has done the hard bit – the choosing – for you. Here we have two late piano concertos (Mozart wrote them between the ages of 30 and 32, as his own solo career wound down) charged with a grandeur, a playfulness and an endless smiling compassion that will come as a glorious corrective to anyone whose last experience of Mozart involved bodily fluids and confectionery in Sky’s hellish remake of Amadeus.

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James Delingpole

The Roswell incident is the setting for an enjoyably old-fashioned caper

Aliens are very fashionable right now. Steven Spielberg recently announced that they are real and have been visiting us since for ever – but then he does have a poorly reviewed new movie to push. Trump’s White House, meanwhile, has been busily trolling us with hints that it knows more about the subject than it has hitherto let on. I personally think it’s all bollocks – or, if you believe Project Blue Beam, worse than bollocks. But whichever camp you fit into, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy the three-part documentary series The Alien Autopsy Scandal. It has the feel of one of those old-fashioned capers where an unlikely band of English eccentrics with specialist skills – butchery, model-making monsters for Dr.

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art
Peter Parker

The problem with ‘queer art’

In 1911, Duncan Grant’s “Bathing” went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the Borough Polytechnic in Southwark. This large painting depicts a group of strongly muscled male bathers diving, swimming and hauling themselves into a boat. Only one of them is wearing a bathing slip, and while this kind of spectacle might have been familiar to anyone educated at a public school at this period, the art critic of the Times complained that it could well have “a degenerative influence on the children of the working class.” The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, and is used on the gallery’s website to direct people to an account of “Queer Life and Art.

Bryan Appleyard

Alien fever shows no signs of abating

These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan is a distinguished lawyer and believer; David Lavelle is a journalist and skeptic. Aliens have always been with us. For at least 4,000 years there have been reports of strange visitations assumed to come from heaven, hell or simply the universe. Angels and demons were commonplace, but they were eventually replaced by technology-based visions, most often flying saucers. These could be quietly ignored until 1947, when postwar alien fever was sparked in Roswell, New Mexico. Metal and rubber debris were found which the US Army initially claimed were parts of a “flying disc.

blood
Anne Sebba

There will be blood – the vital work of field transfusion units

Most conventional World War Two military histories focus on weapons, materiel and even the manpower needed for a decisive victory over Hitler and the Axis powers. Little has been written about blood as a strategic resource. However, a pioneering service of specially trained medics who worked dangerously close to the front lines, pumping blood into the veins of battle casualties, not only saved lives but contributed significantly to winning the war. They did this by returning men to the front line and boosting morale by persuading them that, if wounded, they had the maximum chance of life.

Friday

Deborah Ross

Toy Story 5 contains delicious touches

Toy Story 5 – do we need it? One worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is thrashed to death like this. The latest ​installment, however, does address one of the most pressing dilemmas of modern childhood (screen time) and whether it will be the end of toys. (‘Extinction… Not again!’ cries Rex, the dinosaur.) It is timely, with some delicious touches – Woody now has a bald spot So it is timely, with some delicious touches – Woody now has a bald spot. And while it isn’t as entertaining as the first three and stumbles at the finishing line, it may be better than the fourth, with its horrible doll Gabby Gabby.

toy story 5
Horatio Clare

A trove of avian lore and history

I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window to smoke and think about it, when there among the tumbling spires of the apple trees was a spasm of fluttering and a flurry of notes: two spotted flycatchers! One held the air for a moment, hovering and looking me in the eye, and then darted back to its perch while the other called. It has been years since we have seen them, and straight to my bird books I went. The Book of Birds was no help because it does not include the spotted flycatcher and is not designed as a recognition guide. Instead, Macfarlane writes: "Ours is a field guide with a difference... It asks not 'What is that bird?' but 'Who is that bird?' The aim is to help readers identify with them.

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Alexander Larman

Why are there no good films about Independence Day?

This month marks 30 years since the release of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a science-fiction blockbuster best viewed as the anti-Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg’s 1977 film suggested we would be better off finding common ground with extraterrestrial visitors; Emmerich’s more bombastic picture stuck to the (surprisingly Trumpian) idea that aliens were evil, wished to destroy our planet and must be resisted at all costs, preferably with nuclear weapons. It is not a subtle film, with the most fondly remembered moment coming in the famous shot when the White House is destroyed by an alien spacecraft.

Simon Jenkins

The making of America

The story of the United States was determined from the start by the manner of its birth. The original 13 English colonies may seem lost in the distant past. Yet it was their diversity that was the key to their union. The creation of the US reflected the tensions of 17th-century England, pitting the Puritan republicans of Massachusetts against the landed gentry of Virginia, Quaker New Jersey against Catholic Maryland. The Founding Fathers resolved these tensions by instituting the concept of states’ rights. Their Constitution was a tissue of compromise, yet it was robust. What served to unite 13 colonies still holds together the mightiest nation on Earth.

America