Category: Reviews

Reviews of books. exhibitions, and other stuff I have seen.

Escher

August 26, 2026

I went to the exhibition in Somerset House. It’s really a show of two halves. First, they have an extensive collection of original lithographs, including all the greatest hits. If you have a favourite Escher picture it’s here. I found myself tempted to take pictures of every one, thereby producing a poor copy of the Escher book I’ve owned for fifty years.

Although Escher made his own lithographs, and typically only about 20-30 copies of each work, you don’t get here the strong sense of the artist’s own hand that you would with a Rembrandt painting or a Goya print. It’s almost as if Escher was striving for pure objectivity. There are some pictures, especially early ones, where he seems to be aiming for a sense of romance or sentiment, but it is entirely absent from these almost spookily clean and empty buildings.

In the end, or perhaps always, he went for mathematical rather than emotional depth, and brilliantly achieved it. The exhibition notes rightly say his work is highly esteemed by scientists who see it as a bridge between maths and art. I’m not sure how strongly artists share this feeling.

The other half of the show is some gimmicky fun stuff: a hall of mirrors, a size illusion room, and a couple of ‘insert yourself into the picture’ things. I did succumb to one of those. Escher was rather serious, though, and I don’t think he would have liked this. The exhibition includes some Escher-influenced album covers, but not the incredibly rude and curt response he sent in answer to a flattering personal letter from Mick Jagger. The exhibition mentions that the hippy movement appropriated Escher images, creating day-glo versions with new trippy titles, and says that Escher hated them. But the exhibition still includes a small room full of them.

So you could say there’s something here for serious Escher fans and for those who want something the kids can enjoy. I’m glad I went but have a slight feeling I would have done nearly as well by spending an hour with that old book.

Odyssey

August 21, 2026

A quick and belated mention that we saw the Nolan Odyssey. I thought it was pretty good.

Now everyone who knows the story has an idea of how it should be told, and no film is ever going to match exactly your personal vision. In general the things people have complained about in terms of faithfulness, historical correctness, and casting don’t bother me. It’s a much-retold legend; this is a version made primarily for a contemporary American audience, and it’s a good job, respectful to both Homer and Hollywood.

Two little defects. First, some scenes are drawn out a bit too much. It’s clever to get tension out of whether the Greeks will manage to open the gates of Troy before the Trojan defenders stop them (after all, we’ve known for thousands of years that they did). You can show the gate mechanism moving with agonising slowness once or twice. Not ten times over fifteen minutes (I might be exaggerating slightly).

Second – so much running away! Pretty much every episode ends with Odysseus and his dwindling band legging it desperately for the ships. After about the fourth occasion it starts to have an unwanted comic edge, a touch of Pirates of the Caribbean, or even Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Maybe that’s unkind. It really is a good film.

Luminiscence

August 6, 2026

We went to see the light show on the inside of Westminster Cathedral. The Cathedral (not to be confused with Westminster Abbey – this is the Catholic one) is an attractive building in a quirky Byzantine style, but there was not enough money to install the planned mosaics inside, and in the 120 years since it opened, this has never been put right. Above a certain level the walls and the great domed ceilings are bare brick. They recall railway arches (bearing in mind that I think some railway arches are very impressive and attractive structures). However this undecorated surface is great to project on, and of course one thing they can do is show you what the mosaics will look like when and if they are installed.

The show does make you wonder whether they could just keep the lights?

Mangala

July 30, 2026

The Sixth World Nomad Games will take place in Kyrgyzstan from August 31 to September 6, and my daughter Sarah will be representing Great Britain at the game of Mangala. My wife Katharine is going along in support but will not be competing.

The opening ceremony of the games will be held in the capital city of Bishkek, while the main sports competitions and cultural events will be hosted around the Issyk-Kul region (primarily Cholpon-Ata). Participants from around 100 countries are expected, competing in traditional heritage sports.

Competitions include:

  • Kok-Boru, or Kok-Par, essentially polo with a goat carcass;
  • Er Enish (horseback wrestling), Alysh (belt wrestling), and Mas-wrestling(stick-pulling contest) as well as tug-of-war, this year played in rounds of 1v1, 5v5 and the standard 8v8. There are also dozens of other forms of wrestling that were invented by, typically only entered by, and always won by the Kazakhs and the Kyrgs.
  • Traditional Archery, Horse Archery
  • Eagle Hunting and falconry.
  • Taigan Zarysh (sighthound racing)
  • Heer Shalga, (Breaking of the Vertebral Bone) sounds extremely violent, but it’s really a contest of breaking animal bones by hand.

Then we have the intellectual sports, including Mangala, Oware and Toguz Korgool (originally played with sheep dung). Straddled halfway between the intellectual sports and sports requiring aim is Ordo.

These sports are the highlights of a programme that also celebrates nomadic cultural traditions and scientific achievements, so will be accompanied by musical performances, dramas, talent shows and a museum compromising of dozens of yurts, each hosting exhibitions for unique parts of Central Asias Geography and history.

I’m following the GB teams Traditional Intellectual Sport Teams Instagram.

Anish Kapoor

July 19, 2026

We went to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Hayward, which is really worth a look.

One room is devoted to Vantablack, the super-dark pigment made from carbon fibre tubes to which Kapoor, controversially, has sole artistic rights. It absorbs light so totally that features of a surface are invisible when viewed head-on – they look flat unless viewed from the side. This is remarkable and a lot of fun, though it perhaps has the feel of a corporate tech presentation more than creative art.

Another theme is bloody sacrifice, with an upside down bloody mountain and piles of large, realistic entrails. Before entering we were solemnly warned not to touch anything – one appealingly fluffy red mountain would apparently leave indelible stains on the fingers. On a similar theme, perhaps, there are paintings of what look like wounds and scars gilded or streaked with gold. There are also gigantic red inflatables crammed into a couple of galleries: perhaps they too recall huge guts.

In the outside spaces are a series of curved mirror shapes, the perfect reflection being perhaps the opposite of the Vantablack. The distorted views from these are again a lot of fun, and they would be great permanent additions to any public space.

I feel I may have missed the deeper significance of these works, but one thing I can promise is that you won’t be bored.

Cyrano

June 21, 2026

We went to see Cyrano de Bergerac at the Noel Coward Theatre. It was pretty good: the adaptation is lively and Adrian Lester is a really good, convincing Cyrano. The last time I saw this play was 36 years ago with Edward Petherbridge, who definitely emphasised the poet in Cyrano, whereas Lester leans more to the warrior, but he’s balanced and reflects the character well. If I can risk sounding like a old git, I appreciated his delivery: I think some contemporary actors, used to TV and film, don’t really know how to project into a live theatre, but Lester’s voice and diction are exemplary, crystal clear to the back of the auditorium.

The play, to be honest, is a bit old-fashioned. The first scenes are unnecessarily confusing: the last act could be cut almost entirely. There are some creaking old dramatic devices at work: the people who are always interrupted just before they speak the words that would change everything: a character who gets a fatal wound and then walks and talks for another forty minutes before suddenly doing an elaborate, prolonged death. The big problem is with the credibility of the character’s motives. Roxane knows Cyrano all her life, but never suspects she might fancy him until she discovers he wrote all those words, when she instantly realises she loves him. She declares explicitly that she loves the man who wrote those words ‘in spite of his face’ even while she still thinks it was handsome Christian, sounding more as if she were a character in a logic puzzle than a real person.

And what about Cyrano? His refusal to declare his love, his committed support of Christian? Roxane is allowed here to briefly suggest his behaviour is manipulative, but a modern audience, with darker and more sophisticated ideas than the Victorians, can’t help wondering whether Cyrano’s behaviour is perverse in a deeper sense, with him getting a certain secret pleasure out of the idea of his beloved in the arms of another. Still, the number of times the story has been borrowed and updated shows it is an appealing archetype.

Anyway, I recommend this production.

The Armed Man and more

June 3, 2026

Last Saturday we went to hear Karl Jenkins conduct The Armed Man at the Royal Festival Hall – he also played some extracts from Palladio and Adiemus. Good stuff: to me Jenkins, along with others such as Michael Nyman, stands for the welcome return of serious orchestral music that is melodic, not austerely intellectual, and not film music (though I suppose most of Nyman’s stuff is for films.

It’s true that Jenkins relies a lot on bright, uptempo stuff and there tends to be relatively little dramatic development within pieces: they set a mood and stick with it (maybe a bit like film music after all). He has also been a little brave in taking inspiration from other cultures – you don’t have to be extremely woke to wonder whether there’s something a bit off in people singing in a fake African language. We also had muezzin singing (why not, I suppose). On the whole I think Jenkins is just respectful enough to his sources to get away with it.

A very enjoyable afternoon, anyway.

Turner and Constable

April 9, 2026

This show at Tate Britain has a fantastic collection of works by both artists (but no Haywain, no Fighting Temeraire). There was a rivalry between the two, who were almost exactly the same age: sometimes friendly, sometimes with an edge. Turner was more radical and achieved recognition much earlier. He travelled more, and was more adventurous both in his range of subjects and in his techniques. Occasionally his love of drama led him to produce paintings that are slightly absurd or virtually incomprehensible (Moses writing Genesis in a weird foggy bubble). Constable’s rural scenes are much safer, but there is an insistence on the real that perhaps veils a hint of darkness. Constable preferred to paint direct from life until he realised that ‘six-footers’, which could only be painted in the studio, were what got him attention.

Turner is often mentioned as a precursor of Impressionism, but here we can see that Constable was also given to a free, loose style, especially later on in his career. When the Pre-Raphaelites came along, all of that was dumped: though they respected the older painters’ attention to Nature, they rejected ‘sloshy’ painting in favour of sharp edges and a realism filled with clear detail. I like the Pre-Raphaelites, but this exhibition makes it seem they took British art down a dead end, diverting it away from what might have been a British school of Impressionism and some memorable art.

Ram’ses

March 31, 2026

It is a strange quirk of fate that the best-known of the Pharaohs is probably Tutankhamun. That’s surely because his is the only ancient Egyptian burial treasure that has survived more or less intact, showing something of the incredible wealth and beauty of these funeral hoards. He was, however, a minor monarch, young and short-lived, at the end of a failing dynasty.

In the next dynasty, by contrast, and not all that long afterwards, there lived what may actually be the greatest Pharaoh of all: Ramesses II – or Ramses, it seems both variants are equally accepted. I’m going to make matters worse by calling him Ram’ses. At Battersea Power Station there is currently an exhibition devoted to him, and we visited.

While Tut’s treasure has attracted blockbuster crowds all over the world, Ram’ses’s funereal collection, probably much more opulent, was lost to tomb raiders, though his mummy was discovered later. So what can you feature in an exhibition? The curators have actually done fairly well. Luckily Ram’ses commissioned hundreds of statues and monuments during his unusually long reign, and in fact it’s one of his portraits that features in the famous poem Ozymandias (his name in Greek). So the exhibition features a number of depictions of the Pharaoh and his family, especially his first and favourite wife Nefertari (he had hundreds of wives and concubines). We can also see depictions of him in battle, with his pet lion running alongside his chariot. Ram’ses scored many solid victories, but the one he was proudest of, the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, is generally regarded as more of a draw.

The exhibition does rely on a number of artefacts from earlier and later periods. Most of the jewellery here (not all that much gold, in spite of what the publicity says) is the sort of thing Nefertari might have worn, but actually from decades or centuries before or after her time. This is OK given the amazing stability of Egyptian culture, which changed little over three thousand years. In fact one interesting thing here is the way Ram’ses reconditioned statues from long before, having a thousand-year-old lady recarved to represent his mother: we also see art made for Ram’ses that much later kings appropriated in a similar way.

Less grand than other exhibits but highly interesting are a few ink sketches on stone by some of the artists who worked for Ram’ses. These are less formal than typical Egyptian art and convey a more vivid sense of the artist’s individual humanity.

All in all, well worth a look.

Samurai

March 11, 2026

Apparently they are more commonly referred to as Bushi in Japan? We went to see the British Museum’s exhibition which explains the long history of the Samurai. Beginning as medieval warriors, they effectively became the Japanese upper class until their abolition in the late nineteenth century, when the rule of the Emperor was restored and the Shogunate brought to an end.

Like their aristocratic counterparts in Europe, the Samurai retained an affection for swords and suits of armour. One set of Samurai armour here was sent to King James (I and VI) who would surely have understood the double significance of the compliment and warning it embodied. Another suit was later sent to Queen Victoria. While they retained a sense of themselves as warriors, the Samurai developed an interest in drama and culture generally, which may have helped while away the days they were required to attend the court at Edo (rather the way Louis XIV made the French nobility come to Versailles?) As a whole social class they naturally included valiant women, and it seems gay and/or cross-dressing young men were not unknown.

The exhibition features a wide range of fabulous and illuminating artefacts, but it is those extraordinary helmets that are really the stars. They are elaborately decorated with dragons, birds, and a finely worked butterfly, and there is one with leaves that Katharine said resembled a pixie hat. One Samurai seems to have been unable to decide between horns and a massive fist – so he got both. These all seem rather impractical: European knights had fancy tournament armour with decoration and crests, but when it came to an actual fight they were inclined to switch to the plain, streamlined steel that best deflected blades and points. It seems that in Japan being visible and showing high status was more important than guiding weapons away from your cranium. The followers of each Daimyo (top Samurai) had a different style of cover for the heads of their spears, and apparently there were actually spotter’s reference books, so you could identify which great lord was passing by on the weary trip to or from Edo.

Very interesting. Here is King James wearing his Samurai armour (this never happened).