Is there anything more essential to one’s well-being than the sound of an English choir at evensong? Is there, for that matter, any word in our language more beautiful than ‘evensong’, with its evocation of architecture, music and the Anglican liturgy? This is the season to reflect on such matters. On Christmas Eve, Cambridge once
One of the most important and enjoyable Christmas decorations in our house is the profusion of Christmas cards. I am fortunate to number quite a few artists among my friends, and a good percentage of them make and send their own Christmas cards. Most of these tend to the secular and celebratory, but the range
You can take a five-minute flight across the Thames on something called the Emirates Air Line. It’s a cable-car ride between North Greenwich and the Royal Docks that’s sponsored by the Gulf carrier. Much else on the ride simulates a plane trip — the tickets are called boarding passes, and when you ‘take off’ from
What are the rules of taste at Christmas? How might the fastidious chart a neat path through this garish and cluttered carnival of unreflective consumption? How might dignity be maintained in this tinselled and glitter-balled waste of space? Actually, how might we design it better? Nicky Haslam once and quite correctly, without a flicker of
Both these plays are about concealed sexuality. Straight, by D.C. Moore, is based on an American indie flick named Humpday. The play has one of the funniest openings you’ll ever see. We’re in a flat occupied by suburban nonentity Lewis and his wife Morgan. Lewis’s old college mucker, Waldorf, has come home after seven years
2012 has been an undistinguished year in opera, at any rate in the UK. A combination of cutbacks and the promise of stops being pulled out next year for the bicentenaries of Verdi’s and Wagner’s births and the centenary of Britten’s has led to the big companies counting on our anticipation. Except that, in the
Despite a wet summer, the recent crop of food programmes has been prodigious: six episodes of Nigellissima, eight of Nigel Slater’s Dish Of The Day, six of Lorraine Pascale’s Fast, Fresh and Easy Food, 40 of Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals and 25 of Hugh’s Three Good Things — truly a basket of plenty. Two cooking competitions
I once asked Donald Sutherland what it was like filming the famous naked love scene with Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. He said, ‘It was just so horrible.’ I was telling this anecdote over a bacon sandwich to the freckled actor Eddie Redmayne, who, if he is hit by a bus tomorrow, will be
Wow! Just: wow! Life of Pi may be the most ravishingly beautiful film I have ever seen. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. Its visual inventiveness made me want to weep for joy. It is magical realism made magical and realistic. The palette of colours is extraordinary. You will feel you are in the sea and above
It’s like being a fly on the wall (or maybe an earwig) at one of those fantasy dinner parties where a group of people who intrigue, infuriate or fascinate us are brought together just so we can see how they will get along. 6 Music, as a Christmas treat for listeners, has put Bradley Wiggins
