‘No matter what I’m writing,’ says Colm Tóibín, ‘someone ends up getting abandoned. Or someone goes. No matter what I’m trying to do it comes in.’ It’s a reflection, he says, of his own consciousness. It makes ‘its way into everything’. If Tóibín is on close terms with the ache of loss, few writers have
The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI parts (I), (II) and (III), which is thought to put people off. If you see one why not see all? If you miss the opener will the sequels confuse you? The solution is to condense
There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given, but what about opera? English Touring Opera’s autumn tour sets out a tasting plate of the nation’s Romantic finest, hoping to persuade audiences that there’s more to France than just Carmen. Debussy’s delicate tragedy Pelléas
The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’. The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game
One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a spider’s web, but made of dust’, an object that was both ‘very, very fine’ and in constant motion, like a snake except that ‘no animal’, he thought, had ever made such movements: ‘light and sweeping
Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of
‘I’ve never met a human being who doesn’t appreciate being listened to, being taken seriously,’ said Asbjorn Rachlew, the Norwegian homicide detective who one afternoon in the summer of 2011 found himself listening to Anders Breivik, who had just killed 77 people in a shoot-out on an island near Oslo. His job, Rachlew explained, was
