| On Fridays, we’ve been spotlighting recommendations from New Yorker contributors. Today, we spoke with Rebecca Mead, who has been a staff writer at the magazine since 1997. She’s written recently about the director Sarah Polley and the eighteenth-century Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. In this week’s issue, she reviews Prince Harry’s best-selling new memoir, “Spare.” Best companion reading to Prince Harry’s book: The Kindle app on my iPad is stuffed with books about the royals that I’ve downloaded over the years for research purposes, most of them pretty thin on revelation, with little in the way of style to compensate. In advance of writing about “Spare,” I read or reread their pages concerning Harry. But the work that gave me the best preparation for writing about the Prince was Andre Agassi’s “Open,” on which Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer, worked. I don’t care about tennis—I’m not even a hundred-per-cent clear on the rules of the game. “Open,” though, manages to be a book not just about tennis but also about the blight of being the instrument of others’ ambitions and about the vulnerabilities of masculinity—both themes that are equally relevant to the Prince: “Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature.” 🎾 Best antidote to thinking about the British royals: Harry gave a ninety-minute television interview to the British broadcaster Tom Bradby on the Sunday evening before “Spare” was published, reportedly to an average audience of more than four million viewers on ITV. But more than five million viewers tuned in at the same time to the BBC, which was broadcasting the second episode of the third season of “Happy Valley,” the crime series set in West Yorkshire, in the North of England. Starring the remarkable Sarah Lancashire as Catherine Cawood, a police officer who has suffered personal tragedy—her daughter, a rape victim, committed suicide—“Happy Valley” is an astute portrayal of family life and of sometimes fractured community in the British heartland. American audiences should feel free to turn on subtitles without shame: the dialogue is too good to miss. 📺 The most recent thing I’ve seen that I can’t get out of my head: This week I finally went to the National Gallery in London to see “Lucian Freud: New Perspectives,” a show that opened last fall on the centenary of Freud’s birth. Everything, from the beautiful, sad early portraits of Lady Caroline Blackwood, Freud’s second wife, to the crazed perspective of Freud’s self-portrait “Reflection with Two Children,” to Freud’s bold, subversive rendering of Queen Elizabeth II, is worth careful attention. The show culminates with “The Brigadier”—a larger-than-life-size portrait, in unbuttoned dress uniform, of a florid, decadent-looking Andrew Parker Bowles, the ex-husband of the former Camilla Parker Bowles, who is now the Queen Consort. Good Lord, there’s no escaping them, is there? 🎨 | 
No comments:
Post a Comment