Forty years after his first drug bust in 1967, Keith Richards is still testing the limits of the law. But, as one would expect of a 63-year-old, the substances in question have changed over the years. So it was that, before an enraptured audience at the O2 Centre on Tuesday night, the pirate-captain of the
The weirdest moment on A Royal Recovery (Radio Four, Tuesday) was not hearing the astonished reaction of the Palace to the dramatic flip in public opinion in the days and weeks following the death of Princess Diana or the simmering hostility and blatant criticism of the Queen from Joe Public, but listening once again to
Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day
A few years ago, the director of a London-based ballet company publicly challenged the way ballet is taught in Britain. More recently, additional havoc was caused by an article by an equally prominent journalist who lamented our schools’ apparent inability to produce first-rate stars. In each instance, British ballet teachers and directors of prestigious ballet
Shakespeare, as we all know, served up English history as entertainment and instruction for the Elizabethans. Factual accuracy was subservient to a view of the jungle truths of sovereignty and political ambition that was as uncomfortable and relevant then as it remains today. The eight major Histories from Richard II to Richard III have been
TV or not TV, that is the question pondered by Edinburgh every year. An unseen faultline divides the audiences from the performers. Audiences want to get away from TV while performers — especially comedians — want to embrace it. Les Dennis, who has done telly already, transcends the rift in his new hybrid show which
The Edinburgh International Festival got off to a shaky start this year. As usual, there was a large-scale orchestral and vocal work in the Usher Hall, but whereas it has normally been a choral blockbuster, this was Bernstein’s Candide, in a narrated version, with Thomas Allen doubling, or trebling, as Narrator and Pangloss and Martin.
If you feel strong enough to postpone for a while the pleasures of the bookshop and the restaurant (without which it seems no self-respecting art gallery can exist these days), proceed upstairs at Camden Arts Centre into the light and welcoming hall, where the visitor is offered an introduction to the work of Kenneth and
At Edinburgh this year I caught a show I usually miss. The festival attracts a shifting underclass of cadgers, dodgers, chancers and scroungers, and each has a tale to tell that’s as fascinating as any of the ‘real’ entertainment. The show is free. All it takes is a little inquisitiveness. There’s a cobbled lane just
