With the festive season in something close to full swing, we’re going to let our hair down and do something different with this week’s edition—and also next week’s edition—of The Culture. Instead of the usual lead article and separate cultural recommendations, we cast around Prospect’s family members and friends to ask them what books, albums, films, etc. they turn to during this cold (yet hopefully cheery) period. Here are their responses:
Christmas Holiday
The Christmas holiday is always, I like to think, a time for Christmas Holiday—both Somerset Maugham’s 1939 novel of that name and Robert Siodmak’s 1944 film adaptation of it. By transferring the action from Paris to a stormy New Orleans, and transmuting the female lead from a Russian prostitute to a good ol’ American club singer, the movie is, in many respects, a sanitised version of the book. But, in some other respects, it’s even chillier: not only is Gene Kelly cast as a narcissistic killer, he’s also—we’re also—denied a dance sequence by a particularly cruel fade-to-black. What better reminder that this is actually the darkest time of year?
Peter Hoskin, books & culture editor
The Appeal
I really enjoyed Janice Hallett’s epistolary novel The Appeal, a very entertaining murder mystery set during the run-up to a local am-dram performance. I don’t tread the boards myself, but my partner has been caught up in our own small town’s pre-panto rehearsal madness; many of the little details in Hallett’s book made me laugh out loud in recognition. I note she has a new novella out, a festive follow-up published just in time for gifting: The Christmas Appeal. Sounds like an excellent stocking filler to me.
Cal Flyn, critic
Sinatra & Sextet: Live in Paris
Since I’m sure you’re familiar with all the great Christmas albums, here’s one that isn’t so much about the season, but somehow carries the spirit of it. Recorded in the high summer of 1962 as part of Frank Sinatra’s World Tour for Children, it sees the singer and his band run through a selection of gems, from “Goody, Goody” to “The Second Time Around” via “Moonlight in Vermont”, and includes a delightful introduction from Charles Aznavour.
There’s something about the quality of this recording, the loose camaraderie of the band, the familiarity of the songbook and, of course, the bonhomie of Sinatra’s voice that, to my ear, sounds something like Christmas. It’s warm, chestnut-hued, and just a little tipsy; one to put on when the charm of Slade and sleigh bells starts to wane.
Laura Barton, pop critic
The Dennis Severs House museum at Christmas
Tucked away on a side street in London’s Spitalfields, the museum is a real-life time capsule: dressed as though the family who lived there in the 18th and 19th centuries had just popped out for a little while. Currently, the house is ready for the Christmas of a bygone era—with pine garlands and all sorts of baked goods and sugary confectionary on display. You’re encouraged to immerse yourself: snooping around the family’s rooms and possessions, listening to the evocative sounds of horse carriages outside on the cobbled streets, and devouring the festive smells of a time long gone.
Mark Cripps, interim head of marketing
Landscapes of Silence
Hugh Brody’s memoir links his troubled childhood in Sheffield—when his mother, whose family in Poland and Austria had recently been murdered in the Holocaust, never mentioned this huge tragedy—with his becoming an anthropologist; this took him to the Arctic, where he lived for a decade and more with the Inuit and other northern First Nations. Going to the fringe of human habitation, where traditional hunter-gathering customs were still practised but in diminished ways, he identified with those whose form of life was being encroached upon by colonial infringements of various kinds. A fascinating and moving read throughout.
Mike Brearley, Sporting Life columnist
You, the Living
I think there’s plenty of room at Christmas time, around the ding-dong-merrily of it all, for things that are reflective and a little spooky. If you agree, you might enjoy the films of Roy Andersson. They’re often odd, often depressing (they’re Swedish, after all), but I find them all the more beautiful and moving for it, and even if they’re not all specifically set in winter, they have a wintery, cold feel about them. You, the Living is my favourite. Andersson shoots all his scenes on a studio set, even the ones that are ostensibly outdoors, and the effect is a gorgeous otherworldliness, even as the scenes themselves are sometimes mundane. This film is a series of around 50 vignettes of people living in Sweden that all touch loosely on what it might mean to be happy. It defies explanation a bit, but if you like this one, you'll like the rest of his films—and what is Christmas for if not having the time to indulge a new obsession?
Imogen West-Knights, TV critic
The Catcher in the Rye
A Christmas story? Absolutely. Holden Caulfield’s lonely wanderings through New York are all the more poignant when the reader pays attention to the festive backdrop. From the basket “that you see nuns and Salvation Army babes collecting dough with around Christmas time” to Holden’s exasperation at “this Christmas thing they have at Radio City every year”, his solitude and scratchiness are compounded by the rituals of the season. Yet Christmas also provides him with a whisper of redemption in the generosity of his sister Phoebe, who offers him her “Christmas dough” and the joy she experiences on the yuletide carousel. A dark fairy tale of New York.
Matthew d’Ancona, contributing editor
The Dark Is Rising radio adaptation
“When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back!” Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising has long been a winter favourite for children, with its story of an 11-year-old boy who wakes to find Buckinghamshire coated in snow—and himself tasked with an ancient duty to fight the forces of darkness and cold. Last year, I was reminded that its magic still works on adults, thanks to an enchanting audio adaptation by cult theatre company Complicité, broadcast on the BBC. Fortunately, you can listen to each of the 12 episodes again this year, on the BBC website. Take them with you on a snowy winter’s walk, as I did, and ponder the power of landscape to hold spirit and history.
Kate Maltby, theatre critic
Pigeon Pie and Mistletoe Malice
Winter always has me reaching for comfort literature and, this year, it’s seen me undertake the heroic one-woman mission of re-reading Nancy Mitford’s oeuvre. Her classics still have their sting—no one can get to the end of The Pursuit of Love without a tear—but I’ve become a particular evangelist for her slightly less well-known titles. Pigeon Pie, written in the early months of the Second World War, is a story of double-bluffing spies, bungled kidnappings and one delightfully, unbelievably oblivious protagonist. In a Mitford-esque vein, I’m excited to read Kathleen Farrell’s recently reissued 1951 Mistletoe Malice, about a dysfunctional, grouchy family reuniting for Christmas.
Francesca Peacock, critic
A Charlie Brown Christmas
Being raised by a very pro-Snoopy dad meant sparing around 20 minutes each holiday season to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, a TV special engineered from the Peanuts comic strips of Charles Schulz. Broadly speaking, the premise goes like this: Charlie Brown chases an answerless question of why Christmas really matters. It’s silly and cute… and weirdly relatable.
An essay in the Paris Review notes that time doesn’t really exist in Peanuts. And while this is my Christmas recommendation, I’d say its existential melancholy is relevant for any time of the year.
Danielle Han, Social media journalist
The Christmas Song
Young British jazz virtuoso Jacob Collier was spotted at 19 years old by legendary producer Quincy Jones, who saw his compositions on YouTube and emailed him. Collier, now 29 and managed by Jones, is taking the music world by storm. In 2015, the Guardian called him “jazz music’s new messiah”. If you listen to his music and watch his YouTube videos, you’ll see why. I especially love his spin on “The Christmas Song”, released three years ago. Originally recorded by the great Nat King Cole Trio, Collier’s innovative composition includes intricate jazz harmonies and creates a rich, smooth sound. And he is a sensational pianist. There’s no need for Christmas gifts—Collier’s “The Christmas Song” is enough.
Jo Murray, head of engagement
Cassandra Darke
This, the acclaimed British cartoonist and writer Posy Simmonds’s most recent graphic novel, is a contemporary take on that most famous of festive stories, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The titular anti-heroine is an art dealer who lives in a huge house in Chelsea. She’s mean, selfish and highly unprincipled, but, as Christmas approaches, she’s about to get her comeuppance: a conviction for fraud that sees her caught up in London’s dark criminal underworld.
Lucy Scholes, critic
