Arts Reviews

On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way of silencing the expectant crowds. Estimates vary, but the audience was reckoned to number between 50,000 and 100,000; in all, there must have been a minimum of 70,000 people present. This month’s Oasis reunion only played to 80,000. The result, in an age before modern amplification, was much as you might expect. ‘A fearful racket

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath did something British groups had not done before. Before them, the British Invasion groups – from the Beatles, the Stones and The Who down to Herman’s Hermits and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – had taken American music and sold it to the British public as the American dream, as exotica. And when they exported it back to the States, the Americans – most of whom had never heard the music the groups began by copying – heard in it something fresh and exciting and joyful. Sabbath instead sold the American nightmare back to the United States, filling arenas across North America, a much bigger

Back in the 1990s, if you were disabled in the UK or US, and you believed that being disabled was more about self-determination and less about being left in care homes, you might have protested with banners declaring ‘Nihil de Nobis, sine Nobis‘ (‘Nothing about us without us’).  The call – allegedly first used by a 15th-century Polish political party – was taken up by disability activists who wanted the non-disabled world to consider how the material world was rarely designed or included disabled people. This fact itself was ‘disabling’.  Thus, they asked, why not build a ramp, instead of a staircase, so we can all use it? Or make print

Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? ‘Vapes,’ says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. ‘Lots of vapes.’ Mudlarking – the practice of scavenging at low tide for washed-up historical treasures, oddities or mundane objects – has become a well-gatekept hobby over the past five years. More than 10,000 people are now on the waiting list for mudlarking permits. Of course, anyone can go down to the foreshore to look around and