Dickens
Studying Dickens at university was once considered demeaning. Now it’s too demanding
Accessible, ‘relevant’ short stories are increasingly replacing the classics, as the monuments of Victorian literature defeat today’s undergraduates
Cheesy remake of Our Mutual Friend: London Tide, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed
Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more…
Home truths
Can we know an artist by their house, asks Laura Freeman
Brief encounters
Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and…
Finding a voice
Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a…
Think twice
The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani…
Let there be light
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and……
The joys of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth
I first heard Lemn Sissay talking about his childhood experiences on Radio 4 in 2009. At that time he was…
The treasures to be found mudlarking by the Thames
The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore.…
Mean-spirited, muddled, idiotic and puerile: Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark Matter reviewed
In the year since it opened, the Bridge has given us the following: a harmless Karl Marx comedy by Richard…
‘The reality was disgusting’: Peter Ackroyd slams Victorian Britain
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was…
Only Radio 4 would allow Ian McKellan and Joanna Lumley to play Mr and Mrs God
One sphere that podcasts have so far not much penetrated is drama. Audible.co.uk is itching to develop its own brand…
The glorious history of Chatham Dockyard, as told through the eyes of artists
‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens…
Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…
It’s impossible to muff the role of Scrooge – yet Rhys Ifans manages: A Christmas Carol reviewed
Maximum Victoriana at the Old Vic for Matthew Warchus’s A Christmas Carol. Even before we reach our seats we’re accosted…
Rumbles in the jungle
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…
Grain of truth
We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked…
The American dream goes bust
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
A clash of two cultures
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…
Alive and kicking
Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on…
Assorted Christmas crackers
There’s a moment in a child’s life where Christmas begins to lose its magic. Once lost it cannot be regained,…
In the grip of yellow fever
In late Victorian south London a ‘lower-middle-class’ boy, Arthur Ward, is lingering over his copy of The Arabian Nights. The…
From the Big Smoke to the Big Choke
‘A foggy day in London town,’ croons Fred Astaire in the 1937 musical comedy A Damsel in Distress, puffing nonchalantly…
A rollicking satire on the way we live now
Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series…
Rio’s rococo genius
The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed…
