Even being soaked by driving rain isn’t enough to dampen Jonathan Kestenbaum’s passion for innovation. Even being soaked by driving rain isn’t enough to dampen Jonathan Kestenbaum’s passion for innovation. The chief executive of Britain’s largest source of endowment funds (£350 million and counting) arrives in the Notting Hill coffee shop where we are meeting,
South Africa is buzzing — and not just in the afterglow of victory in the Rugby World Cup. Johannesburg, built in the 1880s on the back of mineral excavation, is experiencing a contemporary form of gold rush. At the gleaming international airport, yuppies of every hue shape deals on their laptops. A ride into town
One of the great things about having an area of specialism is the discovery of a new aspect to it. Since my teens, I have developed a particular interest in 20th-century British art, encouraged initially by a brilliant art teacher and by the writings of Sir John Rothenstein, quondam director of the Tate Gallery. Well,
Olaf Street sounds as though it should be in some Scandinavian city or other. No doubt there’s a street so named in several Norwegian towns, but there is also an Olaf Street in London W11, of mysterious origin. Could King Olaf II of Norway, fresh from asserting his suzerainty in the Orkneys, have decided to
Bill Clinton looks down at me with that famous, lazy grin. His perfect American teeth show bright white and his blue eyes lock on to mine. I take a few steps forward (who wouldn’t?) but as I draw closer something odd happens to Bill: his face blurs, its outline distorts, wobbling as if underwater. A
Big date for Bohemians next month: 28 November marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake whose memory is honoured by every moth-eaten visionary, every babbling poet and every garret-bound artist flinging paint at a canvas. Nowadays, Blake’s eminence is universally accepted but the great mystery of his career is that his achievements,
Exhibitions 2: L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti: Collection de la Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti In terms of body shape, the week of the Rugby World Cup final was an odd choice for the Pompidou Centre to kick off a new exhibition of Alberto Giacometti, an artist whose attenuated vision of humanity seems better suited to Paris
Tons of sterilised domestic and industrial waste lay strewn across the gallery floor. Against one wall mounds of unidentifiable detritus are shrouded with ribbons of black tape like seaweed on rocks. Beyond, the work of sifting and sorting and baling recyclable material has begun. Despite the sanitisation, the place reeks. All around are the sounds
Here’s your starter for ten. What’s the most famous unfinished piece of classical music in the world? Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, his Symphony No. 8, of course, which is usually played as a two-movement torso, bereft of the Scherzo and finale which a symphony of its provenance would normally include. Usually, but not always. The latest
This is either a seriously good film with some flaws or a seriously flawed film with some good elements. I am hoping to work out which it is by the finish of this, otherwise I will have denied you a proper ending, and we all know how irritating that is. Eastern Promises opens with a
Here’s something new to ban. Writers who use the Great War as an emotional backdrop to their stories. It’s embarrassing to see so many authors marching up the alley marked ‘failure of invention’. And it dishonours the dead to use their blood as wallpaper. Sadly the subject is just too tempting. It’s our equivalent of
‘Where were you when they crucified the Lord?’; when news of Waterloo was brought, or the Mutiny, or the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the death of Victoria? Thence into living memory and universal communications — when Edward VIII announced his abdication; when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with ‘peace in our time’; when
Dance: Thierry Baë: Journal d’inquiétude, The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre; Shen Wei: Connect Transfer, Barbican So far, the two most thought-provoking performances I have seen in this year’s Dance Umbrella have both been French. But Compagnie Beau Geste’s duet between a man and a digger, which I reviewed enthusiastically two weeks ago, and Thierry
Opera: Das Rheingold; Die Walküre Halfway through the second cycle of the Ring at the Royal Opera, I’m feeling far more positive than I could have expected. When I saw the separate parts of the work I found Keith Warner’s direction cluttered and confusing, Stefanos Lazaridis’s sets ugly and evidently unsafe, Antonio Pappano’s conducting wayward
I wish Mary Whitehouse were still among us. In my teenage years, she was an invaluable guide to where the filth could be found on television — though to be frank most of what she disliked was disappointing: hardly titillating, and far from filthy. I suspect that if she were invited back to earth to
Sex is never any good on radio. Think of all those excruciating scenes in The Archers — Sid and Jolene in the shower, or, for those addicts with a good memory, Shula on a picnic rug with that seamy journalist from the Borchester Echo. On radio, without the carefully crafted images of a film-maker and
New York While on the tennis circuit from the mid-Fifties to 1965, it was an open secret that there was a lot of hanky-panky going on in the women’s locker rooms. Mind you, lady players were much older than they are now, but there were still some pretty young and impressionable girls competing who took
The first thing me and my boy do when we go to the car auction is to head for the burger van and order a cheeseburger each. The burger bar is called CJ’s. We jokingly call it CJD’s because we say the burgers consist of cartilage, udder and compacted sewage. Sometimes we pretend to identify
The first time I came across John Mortimer was while I was working as a gossip columnist. I had for some reason or another to telephone him in search of a quote, and did what dozens of my kind had done before, and dozens have done since. The telephone was answered by an elderly lady’s
It is a brave man who attempts to uncover the truth about George Galloway. One slip, one factual infelicity, one unguarded opinion and the biographer can expect to get his head bitten off. For, when it comes to receiving rather than dishing out abuse, the Respect MP and onetime Celebrity Big Brother contestant is no