Arts Reviews

Two films about women this week. One, Funny Cow, is about a woman who daringly takes on men at their own game while the other, Let the Sunshine In, is dressed up in French art-house garb but basically has Juliette Binoche tirelessly running round Paris in thrall to every fella she encounters. I certainly know which I preferred. However, if you look at review aggregate sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see Sunshine achieves the far higher score. But then most film critics are male and probably wouldn’t mind Juliette Binoche tirelessly chasing them round Paris, or anywhere else. (I have just asked a man if this is so and he

Viv Albertine, by her own admission, hurls stuff at misbehaving audiences. Specifically, when the rage descends, any nearby full cup or glass is likely to be decanted over the object of her ire. She’s remembering an incident a few years back, at a gig she played in York, when she felt compelled to introduce some persistent talkers to the contents of their pint glasses. ‘There’s such a fine balance there, because you don’t want to sound like a schoolmarm. Johnny Rotten used to walk offstage if there was spitting. The Slits [the groundbreaking punk band for whom Albertine was the guitarist] couldn’t do that because we would have looked like

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of British military field hospitals. Ten times more soldiers were dying from diseases like cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Shocked, the War Office commissioned 49-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design the world’s first prefabricated hospital. Components were manufactured to Brunel’s specifications in Gloucestershire then rushed to Turkey for erection. He took the commission on 16 February 1855 and fewer than five months later, the new Renkioi Hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 by March 1856). Infection rates collapsed. Nightingale called it ‘magnificent’. The new architecture of prefab had triumphed.

Over the rainy bank holiday weekend, I decided I would go to see what I assumed was a ‘feel good’ film, Isle of Dogs, a stop-motion animated comedy. I love dogs so much that it looked like my ideal film, despite being aimed at kids. I get to see a story with a serious slant being told by cuddly canines, translated into human language. Instead, from the first five minutes, I was raging with anger about the blatant sexism at the heart of the film. I have long been irritated with the default position many people have to refer to dogs as male and cats as female. I am always a bit bemused

I have been faithfully watching Civilisations. It is not at all dumbed down. Indeed, the series suffers from the opposite fault. It is too intellectual — pressed into the service of its presenters’ theories rather than telling a story which the common viewer can follow and enjoy. One finds oneself excited by a particular idea — Mary Beard on the ‘lack of light’ which is often a feature of religious art, David Olusoga on the way that Vermeer never opens windows on the wider world, yet contains symptoms of empire — globes, rugs, a beaver hat — in his interiors. But then one doesn’t learn where it is all tending. The

‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens transcribes the sound of 1,200 men building the first iron-clad frigate Achilles at the Royal Dockyard, Chatham, in the 1860s. A Chatham boy, Dickens lived to see — and hear — the age of sail turn into the age of steam, when the creak of ropes, the flap of canvas and the ding of bells gave way to the hiss of steam, the chug of motors and the shriek of whistles. As soundscapes go, both strike the modern imagination as more musical than the roar of road traffic. So they