It is all the fault of John Tusa. He’d been slated to give a lecture to launch the RSC’s autumn festival of new work. This year’s focus has been on the West’s relationship with what is usually called the developing world. The talk was to have been at 11.00 a.m., and I’d booked into a
English Touring Opera began its autumn tour, as usual, at the Hackney Empire, a place I haven’t been to before, and shall hesitate about going to again, not so much because of the tropical temperature inside as the rigours of getting there and back into the centre of London. It was good to see it
Mark Morris Dance Group has long been a regular feature of London dance seasons. Still, the power to surprise in Morris’s choreography has not waned. Take, for instance, the first of the two programmes presented last week at Sadler’s Wells, as part of the company’s 25th anniversary tour. Although signature traits informed each work’s choreography,
In 1960, writing a postcard to her friend and mentor Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus (1923–71) worried that she was ghoulish. From an early age her photographs had recorded the marginalised and dispossessed, capturing the imperfections and frailties of humanity. She was a woman with a mission — scrutinising society and chronicling the damaged or eccentric,
I suppose if I had to name my favourite children’s author it would have to be Richmal Crompton and the William stories, followed not far behind by Anthony Buckeridge and Jennings, and Enid Blyton with the adventures of the famous five. There are numerous others, of course, but I enjoyed reading these three the most
The Modern Movement in architecture had scarcely succeeded in abolishing ornament before people began to speculate about how and when it would return. In Britain, the historian Sir John Summerson, as a young journalist, found it hard to believe that architecture would be able to communicate without it beyond the initial period of purification which
‘Time of Change: Journey through the Twentieth Century’ is how one of London’s major orchestras heads its publicity for the new season. But it’s impossible not to stifle a yawn of surprise as one reads the proudly marshalled highlights. ‘Mahler’s impressive Symphony 4’ is the earliest (completed 1900); next in time comes Vaughan Williams’s Tallis
Laura Gascoigne on the Pompidou Centre’s massive survey of Dada Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism: it’s funny how many names of modern art movements originated as insults on the lips of critics. Not Dada, though. The founders of art’s first anartism were ahead of the game, pre-emptively christening their movement with a silly name designed to put
