Unfortunately I was in deepest Wales on the day when TV made me briefly famous so I missed all the phone calls from friends saying nice things. I did pop into Builth Wells the next day, wearing the same glasses I wore on my TV programme, just in case anyone felt like recognising me. But
Sensory deprivation has, it would seem, become fashionable these days. As well as restaurants opening in Paris and London for seeing people to experience not seeing (dining in the dark), there is now a dating service where you meet your ‘blind’ date in the dark (supposedly avoiding image issues), and spas have created weekend packages
Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is something I have been longing to see for the whole of my opera-going life. No one, surely, can fail to fall in love with the overture, which used to be the opening item of very many concerts when they began in that kind of way. Such irresistible tunes
The other day on Radio Four David Hare set one of his namesakes running when he remarked that the RSC was ‘completely irrelevant to the theatrical life of the country’. Well, certainly in so far as it’s a company dedicated to the Swan of Avon rather than the Bard of Hampstead. Is it self-evident that
The height of summer is celebrated by the television networks telling us things we already know. Such as, Frank Sinatra was in hock to the Mafia. Actually, Sinatra: Dark Star (shown on Thursday, BBC1, though made as a co-production with American, German and French money) was a perfectly entertaining trot round a familiar block —
St Mary-at-Lambeth, built beside the walls of the Archbishop’s Palace, was once the parish church of Lambeth, until it fell into disuse in 1972. Thankfully, this handsome building was rescued from demolition some five years later by the foundation of the Museum of Garden History and the Tradescant Trust, appropriately named after the great family
Sponsored by Hubert Burda Media, the Schroder Family and WestLB AG. In the sober grey vaults of Somerset House, trunk-loads of treasures from the state art collections of Saxony shimmer and sparkle. While the reconstruction of their home in the Gr
Andrew Lambirth on Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrating our landscape art This summer seems to be developing into a season of British Art — with exhibitions of the quality of Stubbs at the National, Reynolds at the Tate and Sutherland at Dulwich, and now also with A Picture of Britain (until 4 September). This generously mixed
The curtain goes up late in Israel. Performances start at 8.30p.m. or 9p.m. On a Saturday this is considered so early by the partygoers of Tel Aviv that it is dubbed ‘the matinée’. Intervals are often dropped, too. Audiences go in for a short, sharp hit and are then released into the night. We could
Of the Royal Opera’s Verdi productions of recent years, David McVicar’s seems likely to be the most durable. It evokes and sustains an atmosphere which is entirely suited to the particular tinta of the music that pervades this work, a combination of levity and desperation, glamour and sleaziness, ardent love and lechery. The extraordinary set
Collecting art is an addiction. Neither its cost nor its supposed value as an investment has much to do with it. If you are rich you buy expensive art by recognised masters and get advice from experts, but if you are poor you follow your own taste among the lesser or little known and probably
In the first room of the Royal Academy’s Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting — a strangely mixed and muted Impressionist exhibition — a Monet ‘Haystacks’ is flanked by two lively open-air scenes by Sargent, one of them depicting Monet himself at work. This group is obviously intended to set the tone and pace of
I read an interview last week with David McVicar, director of Glyndebourne’s new production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, in which he stated that he is ‘very intense’. For the span of this production, he seems to have been seized by a ‘very intense’ fit of the giggles, which has led him to a quite hateful
Poor Robin Soans. His new play, Talking to Terrorists, opened just three days before the bombs exploded last week. Most playwrights hope that their work will have ‘some’ contemporary resonance, but not quite that much. Talking to Terrorists is a ‘documentary play’ in which actual terrorists explain why they’ve committed various atrocities. Anyone going to
What is folk art? It is usually defined as being made by ‘the people’ as opposed to by academically trained artists. Its 19th-century admirers liked to emphasise that it was made for love, not money, and was therefore beyond vulgar commodification. It was heartening to think that in Sweden a young lover would carve a
George Stubbs (1724–1806) is best remembered as the dedicated anatomist of the horse, a man who would spend weeks alone in a room with a suspended equine carcass, gradually stripping away the muscles and recording what he learnt. Neither the stench nor the decomposition deterred him, for he was as resolute and methodical as a
Quite the most important programme on TV last week — possibly all year — was Bjorn Lomborg on Environmentalism, part of Channel 5’s excellent Big Ideas series. It was well-argued, punchy, intelligent and persuasive, and it ought to become compulsory viewing in every school in Britain. But, of course, it won’t be for reasons that
When I heard of the London explosions last Thursday — I was rung shortly before leaving to catch a train to London, which I had to abandon — my first thought was, why did it take them so long? We knew the manpower was here, either coming in as bogus asylum-seekers or by using false
Sir Edwin Lutyens reckoned that there will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons, and I rather think the same is true of botanical art. The exhibition presently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art, seems to reinforce the point. Displayed are works
Last Saturday. BBC1 was showing the most exciting women’s Wimbledon tennis final for many years and Sky Sports had what turned out to be a thrilling tied one-day cricket final between England and Australia. On BBC2 you could catch the Live8 concert. In all cases — whatever the loss in atmosphere or the excitement at