Every new product, whatever it is, needs a bit of ‘buzz’, and indeed vast numbers of people around the world make a decent living trying to generate that ‘buzz’, while the rest of us spend much of our time trying to ignore it. Last week, though, much chatter was to be had in music-loving circles
In purely demographic terms, Mark Millar isn’t too different from the rest of us. He’s a middle-aged, wiry-haired, churchgoing Scot with two kids. He subscribes to The Spectator, and enjoys his ‘weekly treat’ of reading the latest issue in the bath. So, unless you have excavated this copy from the yellowing stack in your dentist’s
A knight and his lady awaken, naked in the forest. She pins up her embroidered gown while he begins his ablutions in a pond. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! He plants a stick between his shoulder blades before getting dressed himself. On goes his tunic, gauntlets and plated armour. And then they both climb on to his
The Weir is the ultimate hit-from-nowhere. It was written in 1997 by the 26-year-old Conor McPherson. It opened at the Royal Court Upstairs and glided over to Broadway and then toured America. The script defies every rule of theatrical physics. It’s wordy and static, it’s entirely devoid of action or spectacle, and the atmosphere is
Why stage a Handel oratorio, or anyone else’s for that matter? The recent urge to do it, with Bach’s Passions — even, I’m told, with Messiah — suggests a further incursion of TV into our lives, the inability to absorb anything that isn’t partly or primarily visual. At least Handel’s Joshua, which Charles Edwards directs
Forget The Apprentice. A ‘reality TV’ show where you have no say, and where you can only watch as Sir Alan Sugar does all the hiring and firing? That is so last decade. Forget, too, quaint programmes such as The X Factor, where you pick the contestants you like and the ones you don’t —
Alexander Calder (1898–1976) needs no introduction. The master of the mobile — that poignant hanging arrangement of moving elements — he also invented the stabile (stationary) and the standing mobile. There was no one who could cut and shape sheet aluminium and suspend it from wire with quite the same wit, economy and shape invention.
Sixty per cent of the best Renaissance art is said to be in Italy, and half of that is in Florence. So why bother going to Florence for a particular Renaissance sculpture exhibition when there’s huge amounts of the stuff on show in the city’s museums any day of the year? It’s true that some
P.D. James is a figure of fun in my household. She used to be a regular pundit on Newsnight Review, the old BBC arts programme, and her film criticism was guided by her hearing. Every new film, she complained, was ‘terribly loud’. Why didn’t projectionists reduce the volume? We wondered if it had ever been
What will you miss most if your hearing begins to diminish? Those secretly overheard snippets of conversation on the bus? The throwaway comments of partner or child? A great Shakespearean in full flow on the stage of the National? High on my list would be the Dawn Chorus. Once it starts up again in full
