Main features
Saoirse Ronan on playing a vampire in Byzantium
WHO is afraid of Saoirse Ronan? In the bowels of a Glasgow hotel, she looks innocent enough, sitting demurely in the manner of a 1950s model, legs crossed at the ankle and chatting about how best to drain a body of blood.
Angelina Jolie brings home a frightening dilemma
AS WENDY Helliwell came downstairs on Wednesday morning, the name Jolie flashed on the TV screen. She caught the words “double mastectomy”.
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Flowers of Scotland at the Chelsea Flower Show
THERE are nine of them. Nine Chelsea girls, or Chelsea ladies to be precise, down from Scotland, from Kelso, Keith, Castle Douglas, Dalgety Bay, North Berwick, East Lothian, from all over, and poised, secateurs in hand, to take Britain’s most prestigious gardening show by storm.
Claire Black: Young women face the same problems as men
DIANE Abbott MP, is a woman I have some trouble taking seriously since my retinas were scarred watching as she and Michael Portillo writhed together, OK sat, on the This Week sofa, and also that time she said private schools were bad before promptly sending her son to one.
Fordyce Maxwell: Fifteen minutes ago I knew what a pediment was. Now I was damned if I did
IT WAS some years since I’d been in an exam room.
Books
Book review: All That Is by James Salter
IF AN aged, once-eminent author, close to the end, ekes out one almost-certainly-last novel, and it’s of an indifferent standard, or worse, should it be published out of respect for his or her more glorious past?
Book review: Inferno by Dan Brown
ONE of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spiky-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.
Book review: The Devonshires by Roy Hattersley
A PUNCH cartoon, two dukes at a party, one whispering into the other’s ear: “Don’t you think it must be just terrible being an earl?”
Book review: Grace And Mary by Melvyn Bragg
OVER the years, Melvyn Bragg’s writing has attracted a degree of (jealous?) teasing, but the dissenting voices compete with a louder chorus of praise in which he is favourably compared with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.
Claire Black: Reading time is precious and I don’t want to waste it on Dan Brown
DAN Brown has a new book out this week. I confess I am underwhelmed.
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Film
Film review: Beware Of Mr Baker
THERE are probably more foolhardy enterprises than interviewing the aggressively venomous rock drummer Ginger Baker for a documentary, but it’s hard to think of many.
Film review: The Great Gatsby
IT HAS been suggested that there’s something of the Gatsby about Baz Luhrmann, since both men are predisposed to throwing extravagantly spectacular parties, with just a hint of hollowness.
Film reviews: Fast & Furious 6 | Something In The Air | Epic
DO YOU like cars? Or do you prefer movies where bulging, baldy action heroes like Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel glower at each other like homoerotic new potatoes?
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: The problem is Merida has been turned into an object
AS YOU may have heard, Merida from Brave has just become an official Disney princess, and had a makeover to celebrate.
Romain Duris on his new film, a ‘Rocky with typewriters’
Having swerved some English-speaking roles, French actor Romain Duris tells Siobhan Synnot why there’s no place like home when it comes to his film choices
Music
Album review: Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
Like the ubiquitous single Get Lucky, Daft Punk’s new album is a distillation of pop’s better moments of the last four decades.
Eurovision: From nul points to Number One
It’s Eurovision time again, and David Elder has the lowdown on the cheesiest show on TV
Album review: Primal Scream - More Light
THERE’S more light but much less of an Exile On Main Street parody here than on much of the band’s recent work, as Bobby Gillespie submerges us in his wonderful world of psychedelic paranoia.
Art
Art review: Scotland + Venice 2013, Venice
I MEET the artist Hayley Tompkins in a Glasgow coffee shop during a brief sunny interlude in a week of rain.
Art review: David Batchelor - Flatlands, Edinburgh
FOR most people October is a month. For art world types it’s a secular bible. October, founded in New York in 1976, is the journal that, depending on your point of view, is the voice of radical critique or the delusional product of an inward-looking clique. Unbelievers have even named a syndrome after it: Octoberism.
Visual art review: Carol Boave, The Foamy Saliva Of A Horse
The flotsam and jetsam of Carol Bove’s sculpture belies a maddening attention to detail the Victorians would have understood
Turner Prize finally taking David Shrigley seriously
THERE are certain things one must always mention when writing about the artist David Shrigley. The first is that he’s funny. The second is that he’s very tall. But after last week there’s another.
Art review: Julie Brook, made unmade, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh
WHEN I arrive at Julie Brook’s handsome home in the south of Skye, it is one of those magical spring days.
TV reviews
TV review: Apprentice | The Politician’s Husband | Life of Crime
‘CLICHES, cliches... I’m sick and tired of all that bloody rubbish, to be honest with you.” Is this a) Lord Sugar when confronted with another bunch of braggards spouting business-speak on The Apprentice? Or b) your correspondent on having to listen to yet more soundbites, headlines and clunky phrases passing for dialogue in The Politician’s Husband? Both, actually. Let’s deal with The Apprentice first.
Eurovision: From nul points to Number One
It’s Eurovision time again, and David Elder has the lowdown on the cheesiest show on TV
TV review: Vicious | The Job Lot | Dave Allen: God’s Own Comedian
LAST week I slagged off Ben Elton’s sitcom The Wright Way for being old-fashioned. Poor Ben took such a kicking for it that I almost felt sorry for him.
TV reviews: Broadchurch| The Politician’s Husband| The Wright Way
WHAT an unbearably sad end to Broadchurch. A community torn apart by Danny Latimer’s murder comes together for his funeral, his killer caught at last.
TV review: America In Primetime | The Ice Cream Girls | Endeavour
ONCE, I loved Benny the Ball from Top Cat, Vincent Van Gopher from Deputy Dawg, Buck from The High Chaparral, Illya Kuryakin from The Man From U.N.C.L.E (what a thrill to discover he was Scottish) and the WW2 German hiding in the bushes in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In whose catchphrase was “Very interesting… but stupid.”
Peter Ross
The Royal Caledonian Ball keeps it reel in London video
Once a year the Grosvenor Hotel in London is turned into a floor-shaking bacchanal when the tartan aristocracy take the floor for the Royal Caledonian Ball
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Phone box pilgrimage: A trip down memory lane video
Art galleries, hot houses, libraries – a phone box pilgrimage is much more than a trip down memory lane
A day in the life of A&E staff at the ERI
WATSON McDonald has blood on his vest, an arm in a sling, a broken collar-bone, and Rizla-thin skin which is difficult to stitch.
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Claire Black
Claire Black: Reading time is precious and I don’t want to waste it on Dan Brown
DAN Brown has a new book out this week. I confess I am underwhelmed.
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Claire Black: One in five young adults doesn’t own a hammer, a screwdriver or a spanner
OUR stair door started sticking recently. It wasn’t entirely refusing to close, just being a bit recalcitrant unless you really slammed it.
1 commentClaire Black: Kalq minimises travel distance and maximises alternation between thumbs
THERE are few things in this world of which we can be certain. The preposterousness of Donald Trump’s hair. The ridiculousness of Donald Trump’s tweets.
Claire Black: My mum used the law of the hoover to enter whenever she wanted
A POSTCARD of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall looking mean and moody in Key Largo, several badminton racquets, a tiny porcelain Kewpie doll.
Fordyce Maxwell
Fordyce Maxwell: I felt I could come off the subs bench at short notice if needed. I wasn’t, so didn’t
TWENTY minutes into the demonstration I had my lightbulb moment with: “I could do that.”
Fordyce Maxwell: Most killer dogs start with the excitement of seeing something run away
MY FATHER was an intermittent diary-keeper. Occasional bursts of a few days would be followed by weeks or months of no entries. Years could pass without a diary at all.
Fordyce Maxwell: The most moving part was when graduates applauded family and friends
‘I’M DISAPPOINTED,” Jacqueline said, “I didn’t hear any whooping when it was my turn.”
Fordyce Maxwell: Questions have been raised about his sanity, but I’d back Walter every time
LIFE can be tough for the self-taught. Usually (make that too often), hard-won experience is trumped by academic credentials and thickets of initials.
Andrew Eaton-Lewis
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: Yes vote is a leap of imagination
HOW important are the voices of artists in the independence referendum?
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: The problem is Merida has been turned into an object
AS YOU may have heard, Merida from Brave has just become an official Disney princess, and had a makeover to celebrate.
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: In some respects American Psycho makes perfect sense as a musical
IS IT a good idea to make an all-singing, all-dancing stage version of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho?
Andrew Eaton-Lewis: Why does having Scots in this country’s top arts jobs matter?
AS PART of its Mayfesto programme, Glasgow’s Tron Theatre is staging a debate next week called Who Runs Scottish Culture (And What Is It Anyway?).
1 commentAndrew Eaton-Lewis: Rob Drummond is shaping up as the David Bowie of Scottish theatre
THERE was an obvious problem with Rob Drummond’s clever new play Quiz Show, which finished its three-week run at the Traverse last night.
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 20 May 2013
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