Following the National Theatre’s hugely successful productions of His Dark Materials and Coram Boy, an epic realisation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse opens at the Olivier on 17 October. Originally published in 1982, the book was, the author told me, ‘the first I’d written that I thought was any good’. He has since written over
It’s tempting to think we know everything about Henry Moore (1898–1986), household name that he is. As early as the 1950s, Percy Cudlipp was composing satirical ditties for magazines like Punch with rousing first lines such as ‘Don’t do any more, Mr Moore’, which suggests an over-familiarity perhaps bordering on satiety. But it’s all too
In 1838 the Duke of Sussex was presenting the awards for drawing at the Society of Art, when the silver medallist failed to appear. His Grace complained that he was taking his time, until someone pointed out the nine-year-old Mr J.E. Millais hovering below his line of vision. The Duke patted the young prodigy on
The opera season at ENO began with a new production of Carmen. It was an occasion so dispiriting that I’ve been toying with the idea that the management had decided on provoking a mass act of critical suicide in order to solve the seemingly endless crisis that the house has been in for several years,
Wherever I go, I hear that music in schools is not what it used to be. By this it is not meant that the music which used to be taught is now taught according to different principles, but that the music which used to be taught is now not represented at all. School choirs no
One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney
Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do
If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily,
You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode
A poem At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon after Rimbaud I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail to Guadalupe as far as Hidalgo. At Casa Verde I ordered a bottle of beer and the special: greasy tortillas, fried cactus, chillies con carne. I cooled my feet on the dirt floor under
So the big question this week is: is the Today programme a viper’s nest of evil pinkoes, all of whom should be put in sacks and dropped into a deep well? And the answer is: yes. Shame, though, really, because wrong and bad though it is I do have a soft spot for Today. I
