In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ, visits “David Bowie Is …” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition, Jones writes, “is a proper multimedia extravaganza, and for Bowie obsessives like myself is probably the final word on the man (in a good way)”.
Our Critic at large this week is Ed Smith, who examines the enduring power of the music of Richard Wagner, whose bicentenary falls this year. Smith recalls going to a performance of Wagner’s Die Walkure at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. “The experience of Act III of Die Walkure that evening was as far removed from Hollywood shallowness as I am capable of imagining … The experience was qualitatively different from anything I’d known from watching a stage play or reading a novel.”
Deborah Levy, whose novel Swimming Home, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012, contributes a new short story to this issue, “Migrations to elsewhere and other aches and pains”.
In Books, Aditya Chakrabortty, economics leader writer of the Guardian, reviews Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier and To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov. Both writers, Chakrabortty argues, are in thrall to what he calls “the engineering mindset”. “If this age belongs to any profession, it surely belongs to the engineer – not in the term’s historical sense of builders of dams and railways but in its new sense of makers of technology and software.”
Also in Books: Helen Lewis reviews Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach (“In 2013, feminism is at a crucial moment”); Suzy Klein reviews Dinner with Lenny: the Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott (“The genius of Cott’s book is not only to remember but to recall with pinpoint accuracy and sympathy the flame of Leonard Bernstein that burned so brightly and so true”); Andrew Biswell uncovers the story of Anthony Burgess’s lost script for the film of the James Bond novel The Spy Who Loved Me (“[The producers] probably suspected (quite rightly) that Burgess was not taking the assignment entirely seriously”); Robert Hanks reviews the reissue of Louis MacNiece’s 1938 book about London Zoo (“To read Zoo is to share with [MacNiece] a glimmer of understanding of the distance and nearness of civilisation to the state of nature”); Hannah Rosefield reviews Mohsin Hamid’s novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia turns out to be as much moral fable as it is satire”); Jonathan Derbyshire reviews Eric Hobsbawm’s final book, Fractured Times (“Hobsbawm’s indifference the main problems of Marxist historiography … ensured that his work reached a much larger audience than that of many of his contemporaries”).
In the Books Interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to Lucy Wadham about her book Heads and Straights, part of the Penguin Lines series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the London Underground (“There were a number of key events in the life of my family … that had happened near Circle Line stops”).
Elsewhere in the Critics: Alexandra Coghlan talks to Sir John Eliot Gardiner about Bach (“Bach fills whatever space you allow him to enter,” Gardiner tells Coghlan); Andrew Billen reviews The Book of Mormon at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London (“It is clear … that someone has lost their nerve”); Rachel Cooke is beguiled by Michael Cockerell’s documentary about Boris Johnson (“Whatever else he is, Boris isn’t dull”); Ryan Gilbey reviews Francois Ozon’s latest film, In the House (“In the House never sacrifices its thriller credentials”); Antonia Quirke celebrates Simon Russell Beale’s radio presenting (“Not just whole programmes but whole stations happily adjust around him”).
PLUS: Will Self’s Real Meals and “Riddle”, a poem by Bernard O’Donoghue.
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