The cultural year 2007

Which cultural events—books, films, television shows, operas, plays, concerts—have been most overrated and underrated this year? We put this question to over 50 Prospect writers, and all their responses are printed below.
January 20, 2008
What do you think were the most overrated and underrated cultural events of 2007? Click here to comment at our blog, First Drafts.

Anne Applebaum journalist

Overrated
Opera: Mozart's Idomeneo, the one that was cancelled, and then reinstated, at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. It was cancelled for fear of offending Muslims—for no apparent reason, Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and, yes, Muhammad appear in the final scene—but actually it was a ludicrous mess of fluorescent costumes, obscure phallic imagery and pointless religious symbolism.

Book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury). But how could it not be?

Underrated
Andrzej Wajda's Katyn, so underrated that (as of this writing) it isn't being distributed in English. Yes, it's not the world's best script; but no, you won't see a mass murder scene like this one in any film, in any language.

Arthur Aughey professor of politics

Overrated
Book: Life Class (Hamish Hamilton) by Pat Barker. Described by reviewers as "compelling," in this novel Barker returns to the themes of how art, gender relations, class, politics, sexuality and national identity were transformed in the course of the first world war, ideas developed in her trilogy Regeneration. This time, poets are replaced by visual artists and the novel feels stale and repetitive; these are the clippings which were left out of the earlier trilogy. We have some lesbians, a German family interned, domestic violence and some effete "southerners." This reader had high hopes of a section where many of the main characters were in the middle of a battle zone in France; sadly they survived a bombardment to resume their lives of worrying about "art."

Film: Lions to Lambs. Though it had pretensions to contemporary relevance, there was no persuasive critique of neoconservatism, the war on terror, or misguided patriotism. It was an exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for those great days of the anti-Vietnam war protests when conscience won the day. This is bad history and made for an even worse movie. I rarely squirm with embarrassment at actors' performances but I squirmed at Redford's self-torturing politics professor; at Glenn Close's pathetic liberal journalist; at Tom Cruise's stereotyped Republican senator.

Exhibition: The terracotta warriors at the British Museum. A monument to Chinese propaganda in the 21st century.

Underrated
Orbital's Live from Glastonbury: 1994-2004. This is peerless, groundbreaking techno, covering ten years of their work with all their live sets at Glastonbury. They are to electronic music what Dylan is to folk: they not only mastered the style but broke new ground and took their audience on a journey with them.


Peter Bazalgette television producer

Overrated
Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape) was a slight and unsatisfactory novella. How on earth could it make the Booker shortlist?

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) was a fine piece of scholarship but fell some way short of his previous, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, one of the great biographies of my lifetime.

Emperor Jones at the National Theatre was an overegged production of a second-rate play. Despite its warm reception there were much richer pickings at other times on the South Bank this year. And on television, The Blair Years was a regrettable whitewash. The BBC should have insisted on more frankness or not bothered.

Underrated
The Rebels by Sandor Marai (Picador) is the second republished work by this pre-war Hungarian novelist. He died in obscurity in California in 1989, more ignored than underrated. The recent reprinting of the magnificent Embers (a sort of central European The Leopard) rekindled interest in him. The Rebels is a beautifully written story about the intensity and surrealism of late adolescence. It ranks alongside Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, Cocteau's L'Imposteur and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Also underrated was ENO's barnstorming production of Aida, designed by Zandra Rhodes. The Coliseum is the largest theatre in the west end and it's been packed to the rafters for this production. Never has there been such a pronounced gap between popular taste and the critics. The latter almost uniformly attacked it (and since I'm associated with ENO, I declare an interest).

Antony Beevor historian

Overrated
I was deeply disappointed by the film Atonement. Perhaps my expectations had been too high, having greatly admired the novel. The film certainly opened well, but the vastly expensive Dunkirk sequences—a massive self-indulgence on the part of the director—wrecked what might otherwise have been a great success.

Underrated
Justin Cartwright's The Song Before it is Sung (Bloomsbury) did not get the recognition it fully deserved. At a time when novelists and filmmakers distort real historical characters in a desperate search for lifelike drama, Cartwright shows that a roman à clef is the best and only honest answer to this terrible faction-creep.

Mihir Bose journalist

Overrated
Plays: Noel Coward's Present Laughter. Neither entertaining nor amusing, qualities you associate with Coward, this production mocked those who had backed a Coward revival. Tom Stoppard's Rock 'N' Roll. If this play was designed to attract those who normally do not go to the west end, it worked brilliantly. Sitting behind me were a family who clearly thought they had come to a rock concert. They left at the interval. I did not and regretted it. Stoppard is a skilful and often clever playwright, but in this case he was too clever by half.

Underrated
Play: George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. This is a play I would insist Tony Blair watch with his friend George Bush as their penance for taking us to Iraq. Shaw, almost a century before the Iraq war, brilliantly discusses the issues that are so relevant to the Iraq debate, such as religion, nationalism and the use of state power. But most of all the consequences of our rulers lying to us.

Book: Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 (Jonathan Cape). If not quite in the Gibbon class, this deserves a classic status of its own. As a single-volume narrative history of the empire, starting with the defeat of Cornwallis by George Washington to the arrival of Tony Blair, this book will take some beating. It should be on the reading list of everybody who wants to understand how the empire led to the Britain of today.

Andrew Brown writer & journalist

Overrated
The worst book I read all year was Peter Conrad's Creation (Thames & Hudson), but no one else seemed to think it was any good either, so you can't call it overrated. I confidently expect that James Lee Burke's book about Katrina will be awful, because all he knows how to do is gothic melodrama, yet it is being plugged as if Tolstoy had come to New Orleans.

Underrated
We don't really have cultural experiences in north Essex; but among books, I would say that the most underrated was Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun (4th Estate), a first-class piece of pop science writing. Oliver is a friend, so this is log-rolling, but if he wasn't I would want him as one after reading it.

Bartle Bull journalist & writer

Underrated
The Umbrella of Faith by William Stirling (Reportage)—the literary debut of this politician and former remittance man has earned him underground success as the wittiest new talent in Britain. Stirling provides a profound insight into the carnal nature of primitive man and the capacity of belief to inspire his most alarming instincts.

Philip Eade's Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters: An Outrageous Englishwoman and Her Lost Kingdom (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)—the scarcely believable story of the outlandish last Ranee of Sarawak was one of the most gripping biographies of 2007; stylish, funny, poigniant, crammed with eccentrics, it may yet be a slow-burn bestseller.

Stephen Chan professor of politics

Overrated
The reformation of certain boy bands and girl bands. Is this what nostalgia has come to? Lip-synching crooners and belters? May the Spice Girls and all their kind disappear into the seventh circle of hell. Still, not all nostalgia is bad. May Led Zeppelin ascend their stairway to heaven, magisterial step by magisterial step.

Underrated
This year's Palestinian film festival. This takes place at the Barbican but attracts a largely partisan audience. This is a pity, as the festival avoids many sins. In 2007, one of the great screenings was on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, and this was deliberately to inject a note of sorrow about the suffering of the Jewish people. Some of the pro-Palestinian films were, this year, beautiful in terms of cinematic, production and acting values. My own favourite was by the Japanese filmmaker, Sato Makoto, on Edward Said. It was quietly plangent and moving, but did not indulge itself in sentimentality or hero worship.


Robert Colls historian

Overrated
As a play, The History Boys was massively overrated and the film version was unwatchable. May it be that "national treasure" Alan Bennett is himself just a teeny weeny bit overrated? Where would he be without Yorkshire? As for Peter and Dan Snow's Twentieth Century Battlefields (BBC) you have to gasp at the nepotism behind the most boring enthusiastic television series of the year.

Underrated
Against cardboard cut-outs, I want to speak in praise of poetry readings. I recently went to Leicester University poetry society to hear Tom Pickard. Only words stood between us. He caught me across the face with Dark Month of May (Flood 2004) and Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood 2007).


John Cornwell historian & journalist

Overrated
Michael Palin's New Europe reduced country after country to his special brand of Mr Nice Guy pap-spoon feeding: televisual Reader's Digest replete with cultural pretentiousness and bogus spontaneity.

Underrated
Antonia Quirk's Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers (4th Estate) was the most courageous, original and imaginative memoir-cum-movie celebration of the year. The irony, wordplay and social commentary was evidently lost on most reviewers, and spectacularly so on the Observer's.


Tyler Cowen economist & blogger

Overrated
Hollywood movies. US ticket sales recovered this year, but to what end? This was a year for microculture, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The bigger visual productions of the year won't much stand the test of time. On the bright side, television drama continues to rise in quality.

Underrated
The iPhone. The world really did change on 29th June 2007. We now have handheld personal computers and personal entertainment centres, yet they are no larger than a thin pack of cards. And no, I'm not a techie, a gadget freak or an Apple lover. The device itself is beautiful as well.

Amanda Craig novelist

Overrated
The terracotta army exhibition. The British Museum has far greater treasures than these, it was hideously crowded and boring to see what amounted to mass-produced toy soldiers.

Underrated
Heroes. At first I thought it was just a retread of X-Men, and a riff on the cheering fantasy that what makes you feel alienated is in fact a strength (an eternally appealing theme for artists/adolescents/homosexuals). Yet it transcends cheesiness; brilliantly conceived and scripted, and connecting widely different cultures and characters through the medium of the family. I have become addicted to watching BBC2 on Wednesdays in consequence. My other choice is the Wigmore Hall, possibly the single greatest source of spiritual pleasure available in Britain, yet one in which seems mysteriously empty of people under 50.

William Dalrymple writer and historian

Overrated
VS Naipaul's embittered A Writer's People (Picador) demonstrates again that the Nobel prize is to writers what Hello! is to the marriages of celebrities. Naipaul was once a penetrating critic, but here his literary criticism has been reduced to a series of spiky provocations, interspersed with brisk assassinations of his perceived rivals: A Passage to India has "no meaning"; Walcott grew "stagnant"; Waugh is "mannered [and] flippant"; Anthony Powell's writing is "over-explained"; Nirad Chaudhury is "vain and mad"; Henry James writes only "sweet nothings"; Philip Larkin is "a minor poet" while Flaubert wrote "bad 19th century fiction. " And so on.

Maria Mishra's slapdash Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion (Allen Lane) received relatively respectable reviews in Britain, but was shredded in India. The astonishing number of basic errors it contains were listed with glee by a number Indian historians, while India Today published one of the rudest reviews I ever read under the headline: "Clueless in Wonderland: Pop History Meets Half Baked Scholarship."

Meanwhile, Nicholas Dirks's study of the trial of Warren Hastings, The Scandal of Empire (Harvard), was almost a case study of what happens to academics who get caught up in university administration and no longer have the time to do research, but still feel the need to publish. While claiming to break radical new ground, and seriously criticising the painstaking research of the great authority on Hastings, Peter Marshall, Dirks does not seem to have bothered to access more than a handful of primary sources, and apparently did not consult at all the papers of Burke and Hastings, the two principals in his study. Instead, the references point entirely towards the secondary theoretical work of Dirks's academic friends and colleagues in postcolonial studies. The results can be imagined.

Underrated
Kathryn Tidrick's enjoyably iconoclastic Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (IB Tauris), in which Tidrick locates the roots of Gandhi's thought in the lunatic spiritualist fringe of Victorian England among the occultists, high fibreists, mediums and the ectoplasm-seekers who flourished in late 19th-century London. It is almost too good to be true that the huge, pompous Curzonian edifice of the Raj was undermined by ideas emanating from such wonderfully dotty sources.

Another book which did not get the attention it deserved was Linda Colley's wonderful The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (HarperPress). This stunningly revisionist study of Britain's imperial vulnerability is seen through the lens of one woman's strange odyssey through the surprisingly globalised world of the 18th century. It follows its heroine's journey from Jamaica to India via Portsmouth, Minorca and a period of captivity in Morocco. It is beautifully written, superbly well researched and reads a little like the adventures of a non-fiction Becky Sharp.

Jonathan Derbyshire journalist

Overrated
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic). For all the shapeliness of his sentences, Hitchens's pamphleteering on behalf of the "new atheism" is superficial, complacent and historically undernourished.

Underrated
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Harvard). Charles Taylor's gargantuan philosophical history of modernity, which complicates the flattering and simplified story we like to tell ourselves about secularisation, is a major intellectual event. Somehow, it hasn't yet been recognised as such.

Geoff Dyer writer & novelist

Overrated
It is a measure of Tracey Emin's extraordinary achievement—and of Britart generally—that even though everyone at the opening of this year's Venice biennale spent the whole time talking about the unbelievable crapness of the so-called "work" on offer at the British pavilion, still— still—this was the most overrated art event of the year. There was so little to say about these ridiculous doodles that coverage focused on Emin's demands for pampering—the hotel suites, the bed linen. The gap between the setting, the occasion, the resources poured into the whole affair and what actually resulted was so vast it made any kind of critical discernment seem parochial, irrelevant. Emin's reputation was not dented; if anything she climbed a little higher up the global celebriarchy.

Underrated
Discussion of Eric Steel's documentary The Bridge—about people committing suicide from the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco—concentrated on the ethics of a filmmaker bent on filming people bent on destroying themselves. A shame: this was a profound and beautiful study of love, loss and despair.

Jean Hannah Edelstein writer

Overrated
Book: No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (Canongate). Individually, these stories have a certain quirky charm, but the overall effect was overwrought and monotonous, as if the author was taking you by the shoulders and screaming, "Love me! I'm wildly eccentric!"

Play: The Rose Tattoo at the National. Lavishly produced, right down to a superfluous live goat running around the stage. But the goat and Zoë Wanamaker's heroic efforts couldn't make this play brilliant, and not just because it's not one of Tennessee Williams's best.

Underrated
Book: In Love, second revised edition by Alfred Hayes (Peter Owen). Plucked from deepest backlist obscurity, this is a small treasure of a love story: exquisite, cruel, true—and shamefully overlooked for half a century until Peter Owen published the second edition this year.

Dance: Silk and Knife by the Royal Danish Ballet, at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen. This innovative ballet is at once breathtaking and hilarious. I would have happily gone back every night for a week. It is returning to the Royal Theatre for a short run in September 2008 and it is absolutely worth a special trip to Denmark.


Duncan Fallowell writer

Overrated
The new Wembley stadium. Norman Foster has done some wonderful things but I'm getting sick of him in heavy girder mode. A clunky mess.

Underrated
The most underrated building was Dumfries House in Ayrshire. Designed 250 years ago by the Scottish Adam brothers and with all its original décor and Chippendale furniture in situ, it is a sublime treasure which was to be broken up into lots and sold off this year by the Marquess of Bute. Scotland's philistine administration under Alex Salmond refused to help in any way. It was saved at the last minute by a consortium led by Prince Charles.


Peter Florence director, Hay festival

Overrated
The Sopranos: Tired plotting and monotone dialogue made unbearable when complacently acted. The only American drama in living memory to contain not a flicker of humour in any episode. Too in love with itself to see its own slackness.

Underrated
Glastonbury festival: forget the weather and the idiotic BBC celebrity interviews, it's the best place to discover emerging talent and to expose the overhyped stars who cannot deliver outside a studio; and the audience is far sharper than the media.

Nick Fraser editor, Storyville

Overrated
Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (and for that matter the overrated film based on another overrated book Atonement). McEwan's work is in the image of contemporary British genteel culture; underpowered, negligible in impact and yet genteelly fêted at bookfests and on the BBC.

And of course overrated—or was it rated, outside the club?—was Naomi Klein's latest tome The Shock Doctrine (Allen Lane) on the horrors of capitalism, conflating Milton Friedman with sundry torturers and other hate figures. Whoever said that working for a boring transnational was just about buying and selling?

Underrated
Of the many good non-fiction books, Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville (Yale) didn't show up on the radar—page after page of brilliant insights about 19th-century France and, more contemporaneously, the good and the bad of democracy. Tom Segev is not known enough in this country and 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (Metropolitan) is a superb work of popular history, critical of Israeli attitudes and policy while holding out for understanding.

The most underrated polemic was Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World (OUP). After so much hazy utopianism, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu outline the new systems of restriction of information. Groundbreaking and easy to read.


Carlo Gébler writer

Underrated
The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader (Jonathan Cape) was a fantastic, exhilarating, hilarious and ultimately chastening biography that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved. Amis is much derided nowadays, but Leader's scrupulous and fair-minded account, which pulls no punches, will, I hope, rehabilitate this great English comic novelist.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape) is a great chamber novel about what we do not want to talk about: mortality, physical deterioration and death. A lot of reviewers were sniffy, finding the book crabby, hermetic and uninteresting, but I thought that was unfair. We need to think a lot more about death, obviously because we are all going to die, but more importantly because concentrating on extinction might make us want to make a better fist of things while we're alive.

The most underrated book of the year has to be The Lost, The Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins), which tells the story of the author's search for the truth about family members who perished in Poland during the second world war. This isn't simply a Holocaust memoir. It is also—because the author has read his Homer and knows that he has to shape raw experience into an artifact—a beautifully wrought work of narrative art that is as moving and as enthralling as any great tragic novel.


Maggie Gee novelist

Underrated
Two books were underread and underreviewed by the metropolitan mainstream. The first is Mai Ghoussoub's Leaving Beirut (Saqi), a subtle commentary on the aftermath of civil war in Beirut and on the long conflict between Christianity and Islam in Europe and the middle east. Ghoussoub makes you feel both the impossibility and absolute necessity of forgiving if a society is to move forward. The second is Durham-based Jordanian writer Fadia Faqir's vivid and harrowing novel about honour killings, My Name is Salma (Doubleday), about a woman fleeing to Britain from an unnamed Islamic country where she has become pregnant outside marriage. The raw loneliness (and occasional comic horror) of her life is described in a way that makes you wince and smile.

Overrated
All articles, books and programmes about food. Food is delicious and we are lucky to have enough of it, but reading or watching television programmes about it is a mighty poor substitute for sex, travel, cinema—or even eating.

Norman Geras political philosopher, professor and blogger

Overrated
The BBC's production of Cranford. Tasteful in a BBCish sort of way, and boasting some impressive performances, it is nevertheless a pale caricature of a beautiful novel. The understatement, irony and subtleties of that work have been lost in something that's far too busy, with too many subplots crowding in on one another and too many rackety comings and goings.

Underrated
Australia's completion of a 5-0 Ashes whitewash at the beginning of the year. Hard, of course, for England supporters to relish. But it was over 80 years since the previous 5-0 scoreline in an Ashes series, and we were seeing a great cricket team playing outstanding cricket. All capped at Sydney by the farewell appearances of Warne and McGrath, two of the game's very finest.

Julian Gough novelist & writer

One of the nice things about living in a perfect free market with a perfect free press, where impartial critics guide informed and educated consumers toward the very things that they need, is that no cultural item is ever underrated or overrated.

Linda Grant writer & novelist

Overrated
The film of Atonement: a shallow adaptation of a much more interesting and ambitious novel. Too Gosford Park for its own good.

Christopher Haskins farmer & peer

Overrated
1. Cranford: soap for middle-class women of England (my wife strongly disagrees).
2. English football—died when Hungary won 6-3 in 1953.
3. Britishness—died with Suez.
4. Last night of the Proms—the BBC's last unique selling point.
5. The film on Kipling's son—pushing imperial nostalgia to the limit.
6. Anything to do with the Olympic games. And things can only get worse.
7. Food culture and Jamie Oliver.


Jonathan Heawood director, English Pen

Overrated
David Cameron in prime minister's questions. Forget the polls—Cameron has barely laid a finger on a prime minister facing a series of monumental political crises. A few feet away, Vince Cable has been giving weekly masterclasses in how it's done. Perhaps it helps to have a coherent political ideology to back up the gags. Perhaps it also helps not to have a brasserie of braying Tories behind you in every camera shot. Either way, it's Brown who has lost these encounters; not Cameron who has won them.

Underrated
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Aaron Sorkin's latest show was never going to compete with The West Wing for the love of political anoraks, but it's a completely different beast. More The Muppets than Network, it has celebrity guests, bleeding-heart liberalism and love intrigue between a pig and a frog—well, a producer and a director. This is the only show where the studio executives are the good guys and the encounter between faith and reason is staged with charm and mutual affection. Yet Channel 4 have buried it so deep in their schedules it would take an archaeologist to dig it out.

David Herman television producer

Overrated
1. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth. The most overrated novel by the most overrated writer.
2. ITV's rugby world cup coverage. How could anyone seriously argue that Brian Moore, Jeremy Guscott et al wouldn't have been a million times better?

Underrated
1. Adam Thirlwell's Miss Herbert (Jonathan Cape) is one of the most fun and ambitious works of literary criticism in years and almost everyone hated it.
2. Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (4th Estate). Forget late Roth and the late Mailer, Jewish-American writing is on a roll and there's a new generation in town.

Pico Iyer writer

Underrated
At last a nuanced, fluid, textured vision of the diaspora experience, delivered with the complexity and richness of a classic novel. The only problem was that Mira Nair's The Namesake was a movie, and not every gatekeeper of the arts is ready to accept that movies can sometimes be far more subtle and involving than the novels on which they are based.

Dave Eggers is such a one-man entertainment centre and poster boy for literary hipsters that many people overlooked the fact that he was responsible for the most selfless, wrenching and indelible book of the year, What is the What (Hamish Hamilton), a fictionalised account of the true story of a lost boy from the Sudan and his arrival in America. But he did so—as Norman Mailer did in The Executioner's Song—by completely eliminating that media character who goes by his own name.

Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles (Century) is one of the most dashing and formidably detailed expositions of recent British history this side of Ken Tynan or The Queen—or that it was sometimes overlooked only because Brown is such a celebrity herself.

Oliver Kamm writer & banker

Overrated
Earlier volumes of Tony Benn's diaries have contained much of political and human interest. More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 (Hutchinson), though, is a vainglorious and trivial document untempered by critical judgement or common sense. Benn's account of his 2003 interview with Saddam Hussein—which for obsequiousness in the face of despotism would have put Robert Maxwell to shame—is exceeded in gullibility and tastelessness by the author's reflections on the 9/11 "truth" campaign: "Probably, in their heart of hearts, most people think the attack was genuine, but I don't rule anything out."

Underrated
As the messianic Holocaust denier holding the presidency of Iran might remind us, bizarre and atavistic ideas remain a potent force in world affairs. The most underrated book of 2007 is a model exposition of one such notion that has almost died out. Flat Earth by Christine Garwood (Macmillan) is an elegant and non-polemical study of a movement that is now a synonym for crankery, but whose methods of reasoning (consider the biblical literalism of "scientific creationism") are with us always.

Andrew Keen writer
Overrated
1) Those supposed "democratic" CNN/YouTube presidential debates: mostly infantile voter narcissism without much grown-up political discussion.
2) Radiohead's In Rainbows—the only thing more worthless than this collection of instantly forgettable songs was the band's much hyped decision to allow fans to name their own price to download the album (surprise, surprise—60 per cent of online "consumers" paid nothing for the music).

Underrated
1) The Kindle: Amazon.com's poorly reviewed digital replacement for the old fashioned book—just maybe the beginning of the beginning of the end of the physical book.
2) Gunter Grass's delicious striptease Peeling the Onion (Harcourt). (Who cares that he was press-ganged into the SS?)

Norman Lebrecht cultural commentator

Overrated
1) Kenneth Branagh as director—I've not seen anything clunkier than the film Sleuth for many a year.
2) The great British conductor (tick as applicable).
3) Any classical musician who gets so much as the tip of their nose onto television, upon which they are automatically referred to as "one of the world's greatest"—conductor Charles Aizlewood, cellist Matthew Barley and so on.
4) The entire Wagner family, bar the founder, along with their squalid summer tax-squeezer at Bayreuth.

Underrated
1) Some young British violinists: Matthew Trusler, Ruth Palmer, Rachel Podger, Jack Liebeck. The astonishing Ingrid Fliter, current Gilmore artist and the most illuminating pianist under 40 (sorry about that, Lang Lang).
2) Radio 3—we take its benefice for granted. Imagine what our culture would be like if it weren't there.
3) Harrison Birtwistle—true grit himself. The only composer since Ligeti with a consistent ability to surprise.
4) Bucolic music festivals in England and France—Dartington, Two Moors, Saintes, Prades and suchlike.


Ben Lewis art critic

Overrated
Frieze art fair—it's worse than an art college jumble sale. There was virtually nothing of any artistic value or originality in the fair this year. One work of art caught my eye, a fabulous shade of orange and purple, made out of pencil shavings. The cost was over £100,000. Time for a reality check, I think.

Channel 4. When was the last time you saw anything good on this channel? Don't be deceived by the ads they are running for Dispatches, they're just a diversionary tactic.

Damien's skull: not a work of art, but a large Saudi table ornament.

Underrated
Storyville, Britain's window on international documentaries.

Philip Glass's performance of Music in 12 Parts at the Barbican. The first time Glass has performed this, his best work, in Britain since 1985.

Alexander Linklater writer

Overrated
Why did the critics turn soft on Norman Mailer for his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (Little, Brown)? If it was because he was 84 and hard of hearing, they should have raised their voices. To be quietly nice about this fictional disaster was a disservice to an author who was up for a fight to the end, and who bears the nearly unique distinction of being as great for the scale of his failures as for his literary conquests. Anyway, to have gone out as an octogenarian still determined to explain the mind of Hitler and the nature of evil, even though he failed in this last novel, is almost indistinguishable in its life-affirming bravado from ultimate success.

The sub-Merchant Ivory Atonement, despite James McAvoy and because of Keira Knightley—and certainly because of its dramatically inert Dunkirk set-piece.

Underrated
The HBO drama, The Wire, which has been discreetly showing on Sky's FX channel, has passed largely unnoticed in Britain. Yet it is the most brilliantly achieved and sophisticated drama ever made for television—leaving The Sopranos in second place. To call it a cop show would be to describe Dickens as a thriller writer. The Wire is a Dickensian portrait of an American city—Baltimore—revealed as a complete urban ecosystem of political and institutional struggle, crime, race and power, character drives and economic determinants. The eponymous wire tap is an analogue for the complex connections between people, and it generates the most multidimensional drama of social organisation ever to have been squeezed into the small box.

David Lipsey economist & Labour peer

Overrated
Lang Lang at a packed Royal Festival Hall. It is all very well being a glittering superstar with a technique to die for, but this does not remove your obligation to play the notes the composer has written at the speed he wanted them rendered with dynamics and rhythm that somehow accords with his intentions. It was exactly what you might expect of a celebrity; if he is to realise his talent, he needs a good, old-fashioned, strict teacher.

Underrated
ENO's Carmen. The critics were right about its faults but it had compensating strengths. The first two acts were dull and disjointed but if you could resist leaving at the interval, things took a turn for the better: the last scene, staged with Carmen and her ex-lover outside the bullring where he was matadoring, worked—for once.


Tom Lubbock art critic

Overrated
Media-trapping contemporary art spectaculars. Every year brings a new crop. This year's included For the Love of God, Damien Hirst's diamond-coated skull; Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo's cartoon crack in Tate Modern; and Event Horizon, Antony Gormley's statues stuck on London buildings, which thankfully didn't get permission to stay.

Underrated
Vorticist and visionary, Wyndham Lewis was the most dynamic and imaginative of British modern artists. The 50th anniversary of his death fell this year and went entirely unmarked—apart from a modest, two-week long display by Rugby school (which the artist had briefly attended). A retrospective looks as far away as ever.


Denis Macshane MP

Overrated
Atonement. A less than one-dimensional film based on a novel by our master of prose. Why can't today's English filmmakers do class properly?

Underrated
Alastair Campbell's diaries were dumped on by the pol-media establishment looking for sensationalism. Read slowly, they are the best available vade mecum to understanding the Blair years. Not the whole story, but better than any of the politicians' diaries so far.

Hilary Mantel novelist

Overrated
Bruce Springsteen's new album Magic. What's magic about doing what you did so well more than 20 years ago? It only makes your fans feel old.

Underrated
Opera North's spiky production of L'Orfeo, mounted for the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi's opera, was booed by audiences in the provinces looking for—what? Genteel pastiche? The approach was thought-provoking and Paul Nilon was tender and moving in the title role.

Jean McCrindle writer

Underrated
Auden's centenary didn't get the attention it deserved, especially compared to Betjeman in 2006. Auden was supremely multitalented as a writer; scintillating prose that makes you laugh out loud at its boldness and depth, and a huge amount of poetry in every style and mode imaginable. The celebration of his writing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the summer was poorly attended but it included the songs his poems had inspired, snippets of the GPO films Night Mail and Coal Face, and readings of his poems by Simon Armitage, James Fenton and Jo Shapcott—all wonderfully evocative of the man and his genius.


Philip Oltermann writer

Overrated
Control by Anton Corbijn. Made the Joy Division section in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People feel all Greek and marble in comparison. An incredibly limp storyline, shockingly one-dimensional female protagonists and a frustrating evasiveness when it came to tackling the band's flirtation with National Socialist imagery and rhetoric. Just because it's black and white doesn't mean it's arthouse. Or good, for that matter.

Underrated
Miss Herbert by Adam Thirlwell (Jonathan Cape). A gutsy, intelligent voyage around the history of translation and the novel, written with verve and voice. It didn't receive anything resembling a fair trial by reviewers, who must have been either jealous, intellectually challenged or convinced that we needed more middle-of-the-road, disengaged sort of reading stuff.

The Member at the Wedding by Carson McCullers at the Young Vic. A neglected gem revived with real passion and depth. The play centres around the relation between a teenage tomboy in dungarees, an ageing black maid, and the six-year-old cousin, who spend most of the evening sitting in their kitchen, talking—yet it had me on the edge of my seat, and Flora Spencer-Longhurst gave a standout performance. Barely 50 people watched it—there should have been a queue stretching to the Thames.

Paul Ormerod economist

Underrated
The Rugby League super league is a celebration of the traditional working-class culture that metropolitan liberals have been undermining for 40 years: hard but fair, passionate, patriotic, but with total respect for the skills of the other side and for their supporters.


Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad professor of philosophy

Overrated
1. All cookery programmes, whether built on anger, sex-appeal or disparate ethnicity. People the world over cook wonderful stuff without the benefit of the idiot box.
2. Alan Sugar and/in The Apprentice. The man goofed with his computer business. Do you trust failed gods?
3. Celebrity-based television programmes on the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. It was all about them and not a about a billion people and their history
4. Sunday magazine supplements. Edited by 20 hyperactive solipsists who never produce more than one (smallish) article worth reading in any one edition.

Underrated
1. Michael Wood's A Story of India on BBC2. It was about India's people, their history and their culture, and not about the presenter.
2. Prospect. Well, after 2007, why isn't it acknowledged by everyone as the greatest magazine ever?
3. The works of Indian philosophers published in 2007.


Jonathan Rée philosopher

Overrated
The Century, Alain Badiou (Polity). The vieillard terrible of French Maoism tries to show that the 20th century saw "a radical transformation of what man is"; it's said to be the book of the decade but it strikes me as a gassy blend of old-world preciosity and macho bluster.

Underrated
Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher (Princeton). Most modern political debates can be traced back to rival stories about the French revolution; but this tough, fascinating book shows that these stories were constructed out of materials (concerning political ruin and public debt) that were circulating before the event—which makes the whole of modern politics look rather different.

Farewell, Babylon, Naim Kattan (Souvenir). No one seems to have read it, let alone rated it, but I was impressed by these memories of being a young Jew in Baghdad in the 1930-40s, recounted without nostalgia or sentimentality.


Robert Sandall music critic & presenter

Overrated
Prince at the O2 arena—hard to say which was the more disappointing, his slick, soulless performance or the airporty, acoustically catastrophic new venue.

Underrated
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's collaboration on the Chinese opera Monkey deserved far wider attention. And unaccountably absent from the Booker list was Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, a terrific modern historical psychothriller told in the character of one of the most extraordinary flawed narrators ever.


Charles Saumaurez Smith head of RA

Overrated
I have tried to appreciate Millais's late landscape paintings displayed in the last room of the Tate's admirable exhibition of his works. I can't. I love the portraits, which are profound, but not the landscapes, which are daubs.

Underrated
Not enough people will have made the pilgrimage to the new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art to see Edmund de Waal's meditative installation of his ceramics as sculpture.


Jean Seaton professor of media history

Overrated
Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill at the Almeida. Directed with brio, acted with gusto—so much performing intelligence expended on a historical wraith of a play, a dusty remnant of 1970s dungarees and drama-queen kneejerk politics. The first half was good fun in a trivial kind of way, the second plonkingly pointless. It got rave reviews and no one said will the Almeida please get serious again.

St Pancras is a vaunting building, which lifts one's spirits with excitement, bustle and elegant ambition. But avert your eyes from the sculpture-crime of the giant embracing couple. Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler would all have approved: it is vast, cloying, "realist," sentimental, and utterly horrible in meaning and effect.

Underrated
BBC News 24. As the main news agenda gets narrower and parochial, as Ofcom betrays the public interest and positively encourages broadcasters to abandon impartiality, as current events documentaries wither, News 24 tells us what's going on in India and Afghanistan; it shows us what's happening in Burma and helps us to understand Sudan. When everyone in news is obsessed about "platforms" and "delivery," it is a sharp reminder that what matters is impartial journalists finding things out.

Hugh Brogan's biography Alexis de Toqueville (Profile) is a model of delicate and affectionate understanding and judgement. It shows us a great and generous mind getting things wrong, misunderstanding what he observes, misinterpreting what he finds, yet delivering truths that still resonate. It shows how a difficult marriage and a clan of devoted friends helped produce a unique mind and sensibility. It illuminates France, America and Britain and the human condition.

Joan Smith writer

Overrated
The much-hyped movie of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement almost had me weeping with laughter.

Underrated
The Yacoubian Building (HarperPerennial), Alaa al-Aswany's picaresque novel about contemporary Egypt. As President Mubarak's corrupt regime draws to a close, the book is a vivid portrait of the frustrations of everyday life in Cairo and the growing popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has stayed with me for months.

Max Steuer economist & social scientist

Overrated
What isn't overrated these days? A good book, called by many a masterpiece, is The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador). Set in Samuel Beckett land, but without the humour and complexity, this book has a winning formula of flattering the reader while preying on his or her sense of guilt. A subtle appeal to religion completes the attraction.

Underrated
A truly significant underrated event was the London jazz festival. British jazz today is one of those inexplicable miracles that occurs from time to time. No mention of the event in the London free papers, and almost none in the others. Thank God for Radio 3, but this musical renaissance is too vital and too enjoyable to be confined to hardcore jazz fans.

Raymond Tallis professor of gerontology

Overrated
The annual grotesquely overrated Ian McEwan novel is a depressing feature of British cultural life. On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape) is less implausible than its predecessor Saturday, which in places made me laugh out loud. A short novel but a long trudge, its unimaginative plot and serviceable prose void of memorable metaphors, perceptions, or thoughts, leaves the horizons of the dimmest day unexpanded.

"Seduction: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now" (Barbican) could cure you of interest in both art and sex. It set out to shock and excite and failed dismally in both respects. I left neither incandescent or intumescent, only dispirited by a sterile exhibition in a sterile setting.

Erik Tarloff writer

Underrated
Superbad. Re-reading the British reviews, with their grudging acknowledgment that the film is indeed funny, I was alternately amused and depressed. How could so many shrewd critics miss the point so thoroughly? This is a great, generous, richly-textured American comedy, whose raunch is only skin-deep. I believe it will emerge as one of the key films of the decade.

Adair Turner government adviser

Underrated
Statistics on manure use in 18th-century agriculture do not fascinate everyone, but Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence (Princeton) has a big idea that has not been widely enough aired: that Europe's economic divergence from China between 1750 and 1900 relied crucially on the windfall of new world land and raw materials, without which European population growth might have driven the same Malthusian immiseration that afflicted China. That suggests important questions about the ability of today's poorest developing countries to achieve sustained economic growth without population stabilisation or the safety valve of mass emigration.

Frances Wilson historian

Overrated
A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Bloomsbury) Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to his celebrated debut, The Kite Runner. Paper-thin characters wading about in sentimentality, melodrama posing as epic tragedy; complex history rewritten as Manichean allegory. Also overrated was Tate Modern's "crack." Was it only me who missed the point?

Underrated
Venus, directed by Roger Michell and scripted by Hanif Kureishi. A brilliantly realised meditation on eros and mortality and Kureishi's best script since My Beautiful Laundrette, it brought out the philistine in critics and audiences who chafed at its May to September romance.

Alison Wolf public policy expert

Underrated
Surprisingly slow to cross the gap from the children's section to adult consciousness was Michelle Paver's "Chronicles of Ancient Darkness" (HarperTrophy)—a misleading title as it makes it sound like fantasy. The books do an extraordinary job of recreating what it would be like to live in a northern hunter-gatherer society; and of what the world looks like to an intelligent animal (a wolf).

Ken Worpole writer on public policy

Overrated
The Stirling prize is an annual black tie love-in, celebrating architecture as spectacle, with no clear criteria for judgement or evaluation, and with little or no effect whatsoever on the dire quality of the mass of contemporary housing development, commercial building or PFI-funded public architecture.

Underrated
The Green Flag award administered on a shoestring by the Civic Trust, engages hundreds of volunteer judges annually with clear assessment criteria, and has effected a quiet revolution in raising the quality of Britain's parks, with not a batsqueak of national media interest, and not a celebrity gardener in sight.

Toby Young journalist & writer

Overrated
The Sopranos. Often described as the best television series ever, it ran out of steam after the fourth season and has been in its death throes ever since. The decision to divide the sixth and final season into two parts—prolonging the agony even further—was a mistake and the ending, not surprisingly, was a huge disappointment. Thank God it's finally off the air.

Underrated
The film Death at a Funeral was a beautifully crafted, Ayckbournesque farc. It was universally panned by the British critics in spite of having a superb cast of young comic actors. This one deserved better.