The Herald

The Giant Arts Quiz Are You Up to Speed On the Cultural Agenda? Test Yourself in Our New Year Challenge

1. National Gallery director Timothy Clifford retired. Legend has it he secured one art work after a meeting at a London club. Was it: a. Breakfast at the Groucho b. Lunch at the Garrick c. Dancing at Annabel's

I Respect Your Views, Not Those of the Chairman Classical Music

A WHILE ago, a chap sidled up to me in a concert hall and, unbidden, came out with a number of suggestions as to things I might want to write about. The suggestions amounted to storylines featuring characters, events, or music in the coming classical calendar. Rather irritatingly, he also proposed that the arrival of such and such an artist for a guest appearance in Scotland would make a good picture story - "don't you think?" As well as any professional inquisitiveness that journalists might...

Glad to See the Bach of Him the Radio Week

WELL, I don't know about you, but I'd had quite enough Bach, thanks. There was some great stuff in Radio 3's Bach Christmas but it was all much the same great stuff. That's the problem with Johann Sebastian. He wrote an awful lot of a few varieties of music (the cantatas, organ music) and rather less of a few other sorts - because that's what he was required to do. I like a bit of Bach as much as the next man: I travelled to Iona to hear John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir and English Baro...

Cds

VARIOUS ARTISTS The Caribbean

If Scarlett Still Loves Woody, Can't You? On Cinema

WHEN Morgan Spurlock's Super-size Me came out, and people came to the sudden shocking realisation that fast food drenched in fat and sugar wasn't going to lengthen their lives any, the famous McDonald's logo suddenly came over all shy. In the company's new-fangled, health-conscious print adverts, the curvy M paled from its customary migraine yellow to a restrained silvery hue, and hid demurely in the corner, as if hoping to be concealed by a drooping salad leaf or a splash of balsamic dressing.

No Headline Present [a Year in the Life of Glencoe]

Dear Diary, Today I Began a Lifetime's Addiction First Word

AS THE bells of the new year approach, many of us recall the past 12 months in a form of edited highlights, a private screening of our personal reviews of the year. Unless severely aff licted with denial or short-term memory loss, most of us can manage to recall the big events, though putting a date to some of them would be so tricky to work out you might need a slide-rule. One thing's certain: unless blessed with the sort of memory that gets on to University Challenge, we're more likely to r...

Mother of All Drama Queens a New Royal Biography Reveals a Complex and Consummate Actress

THE Queen Mother did not keep a diary, although it appears she had plenty of time to do so. At home, according to Hugo Vickers's informed biography, she made an art of doing nothing: reading, playing patience or simply relaxing on her chaise longue. If pushed, she might eat chocolates. The result of this stress-free langour meant not only that she reached an extraordinary age, but also that her life must be told by others. What reality lurked behind this most consummate performer, one of the ...

How Ike Kept the Cold War Heat On the Kremlin

Cold War John Lewis Gaddis

Theblurb a Quick Skim Through the Rest

ANY book which boasts its uselessness in the title deserves to be approached with a little circumspection. That it lays claim to being the "best" of such books is hardly a mitigating factor. Before the reader even opens it they have been alerted to the fact that any time spent perusing the pages will be wasted. And in that respect, The Best Book of Useless Information Ever, Noel Botham, John Blake Publishing, pounds-9.99, does not disappoint. Yes, it contains information, and yes, it is usele...

Read Me Like a Book Autobiographies Offer an Insight Into Our Own Lives, Discovers Hugh Macdonald

IT'S LIFE, but not as the scientists know it. It is not the perplexity of DNA, the clashing of synapses, the power of the limbic system. It is drunken fathers, solitary confinement, sadness, horror, lust, debilitating pride and the futility of temporal power. It is set in Robbin Island, Nizny Novgorod, the Somme, Auschwitz, preChristian Rome, and a Lower Manhattan that stinks of the fish market. It is full of obfuscations, rationalisations, excuses, downright lies and truth. It is autobiograp...

The Novels, but Not the Whole Story

COMPARISONS obscure Paul Auster. The American writer is routinely bracketed in style with Kafka, Beckett and Joyce in a lazy reaction that does little to illuminate. He is also hidden by the thickets of impenetrable literary terms that are used to describe his novels: post-post-modernistic, prelapsarian-involved, dystopian-obsessed. These tendencies to compare and to dissect forensically do Auster a disservice. He seems to be placed on a shelf far above the "ordinary" reader. There is a misco...

New Releases

Just Like Heaven (PG) Dir: Mark Waters 3/5