‘The really tricky thing,’ says Clive Anderson as we discuss the topic of being recognised in public, ‘is when they say, “I love your programmes —that thing you did with Margarita Pracatan…” Do I say now that that wasn’t me? Because if you let them carry on about how they loved your Postcards From…, and
The new Emma film by Autumn de Wilde is the latest in a very long line of Austen adaptations, but by no means the strangest. Even in Austen’s lifetime there were pirated editions and translations of her books that took liberties with the originals, and the first illustrated editions raised howls of objection, too, at
We know tantalisingly little about Jan van Eyck, but one thing is sure. He once spent a week in Falmouth. In 1428 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent a formal delegation of nobles and courtiers to negotiate his marriage with Isabella, daughter of the King of Portugal. One of these was Van Eyck. The
In 1622, Elizabeth Joscelin wrote a letter to her unborn child. This was fairly common practice in Elizabethan England; pregnant women were encouraged to write ‘mother’s legacy’ texts in case they did not survive the birth. ‘It may… appear strange to thee to receyue theas lines from a mother that dyed when thou weart born,’
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the official end of slavery in the United States. He grew up among a small, tenacious business- and property-owning black middle class who had their own newspapers, their own schools and universities, their own elected officials. After graduating with a PhD
In November last year, an internet video made by a 17-year-old American went viral. The video was less than a minute long and began with its creator, Feroza Aziz, looking directly into the camera and talking viewers through a makeup tutorial. ‘The first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler. Curl your
Ludwig van Beethoven isn’t just my favourite composer: he’s my household god. There’s a bust of him on my mantelpiece. It took ages to find something that did him justice. This one was made in Italy about 100 years ago; it’s painted to look like black marble, his features are modelled on his life mask
For a good deal of this autumn, I was living in Venice. This wasn’t exactly a holiday, I’d like to point out, but a suitable place to work while beginning a new book. The result was, though, that week after week, when I had finished writing, I went for a stroll around the neighbourhood, Dorsoduro,
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its cave, most likely because the pattern of lines and holes on its surface looked beguilingly like a face. Perhaps this was the birth of art. Or perhaps not. Maybe art arrived in this world later.
It’s a summer day at Llangenydd station, and the afternoon train is already late, not that anyone seems to mind. A smartly dressed man has leaned his bicycle against the station’s water tower, and his terrier jumps up as he unwraps his sandwich. A commercial traveller, perhaps, or a professor from Liverpool University on a
What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder the top ten jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe are starting to sound as though they were banged out in a cracker factory. But this one, from Ross Smith, did make me laugh: ‘Sleep is my
‘Bigger,’ said Sir Osbert Lancaster when asked the difference between his work for the page and for the stage. ‘Definitely bigger.’ For almost 40 years Lancaster was the ‘pocket cartoonist’ for the Daily Express. He had remarked to the features editor that no English newspaper had anything to match the little column-width cartoons of the
It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there actually,’ he says, pointing. ‘One blew over in a storm in ’99. But I was able to plant on both sides and create a vista. It’s getting there.’ He gestures across topiary and lawns and
Heinrich Schliemann had always hoped he’d find Homer’s Troy. Although he had no archaeological background to speak of, he did have money, and spades, and in the 1870s this would do. Tipped off as to the probable location of the ancient citadel — beneath Hisarlik on the west coast of modern Turkey — the Prussian
What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not with joy, but horror. More often, though, pop stardom is sought, sometimes to make up for things that are missing in life, and the newly minted star embraces all the benefits fame brings, until those
‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café. ‘You and I for instance. What have we done this morning that is good? What have we done to resist the ruination of our planet? Nothing. It is terrifying!’ Peter Brook fixes me with blue
What does it mean to be a successful comic? Richard Herring isn’t sure. He’s been a ‘professional funnyman’ for nearly 30 years, yet — as he’s the first to admit — he’s largely unknown beyond the circuit. Even then he has doubts. ‘I’m never in those top-100 stand-up lists,’ he says, when we meet in
‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see. You may think she’s happy and free from care; she’s not though she seems to be.’ When the British lyricist Arthur J. Lamb first offered the lyrics of ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’ to the Tin Pan Alley tunesmith Harry Von
On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile protégé, Paul Gauguin, who had explained to him how artists in the future would ‘find salvation by replenishing themselves’ from the works of remote peoples and places. Pissarro was not convinced. Gauguin, he grumbled, was
Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only flounder in antiquity for appropriate descriptions. We see a black and white photograph that shows a swarm of tiny figures, ant-like in their relentless pursuit of some mysterious purpose around the edges of a dark,