More from Arts

According to some textbooks, one thing the fathers of Soviet choreography hastened to remove from ballet was that awkward-looking language of gestures generally referred to as ‘ballet mime’. Which explains why most Russian versions of Swan Lake lack familiar mime dialogues. And when it came to creating new ballets that required silent acting, such as Lavrosky’s 1940 Romeo and Juliet, the early Soviet dance-makers opted for a more naturalistic form of expressive gestural solutions. Yet, as is often the case with theatre practices, what was once innovative and naturalistic now looks as trite as 19th-century pantomime.

One fight that seems to have been won is that spearheaded by the War Memorials Trust to preserve the thousands of memorials — monuments, statues, plinths, tablets — erected across the country to honour our war dead. Through conservation grants and hard graft, and a clampdown on the scrap-metal trade, many decaying and vandalised memorials have been rescued. Inventories are being compiled, guides published, and now English Heritage is staging an exhibition atop Wellington Arch (until 30 November) that explores the history of six London memorials in its keeping. Two are visible from the arch: Jagger’s Royal Artillery masterpiece (above) and Derwent Wood’s more controversial David, commemorating the Suicide Club, aka the Machine Gun Corps.

‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of Mr Pope in twenty Noblemen’s Houses,’ wrote Voltaire in 1733. Alexander Pope’s start in life was not promising. A crippled hunchback, suffering chronic ill-health, he was, as a Catholic, excluded from Court, allowed to live no closer to Westminster than Chiswick. His ‘Rape of the Lock’, a mock epic satirically inflating a ludicrously minor incident in polite society, became the first bestseller after the 1710 Copyright Act, but brought him a mere £22.15s. Yet the poet who, according to Samuel Johnson, ‘never drank tea without a stratagem’, knew how to exploit his work’s succès de scandale.

Since spring this year, art venues across Scotland have been dedicating themselves to a gigantic project called Generation. Involving more than 100 artists and 60 venues, the programme is a celebration of Scottish artistic success over the past 25 years, a multifaceted retrospective that recreates lauded exhibitions of yore and puts together new ones by old faces. The scale and ambition are impressive. There are fine artists involved and a clutch of Turner champions, too. But this is an event that demonstrates there’s more to Scottish art than the ‘Glasgow Miracle’ and lays out its case all across the country.

There are festivals of everything, everywhere. So why get excited about the Ryedale Festival (11–27 July) apart from the fact that it happens on my Yorkshire home ground — and I used to be its chairman? Every summer music festival proclaims the richness and variety of its menu. Ryedale, under the artistic directorship of Christopher Glynn, competes with the best, from its opening Monteverdi Vespers in Ampleforth Abbey to its Royal Northern Sinfonia finale at Hovingham Hall. But what’s really special about this one is the opportunity to pass an extended fortnight tootling across what I truly believe is England’s loveliest landscape, picnicking en route.

Bridges aren’t necessarily something you think of as being beautiful, particularly if you consider them primarily as the means to cross a river, rather than as works of art. London, however, has always been famous for its bridges, many of which are architectural marvels. From medieval London Bridge, piled high with shops and houses, to the gothic beauty of Tower Bridge, their variety is one of their most interesting assets. The capital has built itself up around the river over thousands of years, and its bridges offer contrasting viewpoints of the city. This is all emphasised in Bridge at the Museum of London Docklands (until 2 November).

Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan Lake attended, I’d be a few centuries old. Obviously, the list includes many revisions and re-creations of this quintessential ballet, which is the second most revisited in history after The Rite of Spring. In her 2010 take on the 1890 classic, Johannesburg-born Dada Masilo uses a striking combination of choreographic genres and a politically dense storyline. Those who have seen scores of Swan Lake know that the ‘gay’ slant is not new.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Mannenberg, the seminal album by the Cape Townian jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand). Recorded against a backdrop of forced removals as the apartheid government evicted Coloured families from District Six, the title track was inspired by and named after the township of Manenberg, where many of those who had been displaced were resettled. An instant hit, the song swiftly became identified with the valiant struggle against apartheid. Notable for the haunting tenor saxophone solo by Basil Coetzee, and with Robbie Jansen on alto sax and Monty Weber on drums, the 13-minute title track is threnodic, passionate and ethereally beautiful.

The Royal Court Theatre, the Young Vic Theatre and the London Library (above) are buildings of varied character and rich history. What they have in common is that each has been unpicked and reassembled by the architects Haworth Tompkins, recently announced as winners of the RIBA London Architect of the Year. This firm, founded in 1991, often gets chosen to make practical improvements to existing institutions and manages to make them work with a panache that allows the original building to retain its character. In an architectural world where severe contrast between old and new confronts the alternative of invisible and seamless extension, they have always managed to get somewhere in between.

It’s rare for the public to be given access to the Royal Archives. They are housed in the forbidding Round Tower at Windsor Castle, and direct contact with them is normally reserved for erudite academics adept at buttering up the Keeper. With about two million documents relating to 700 years of the British monarchy, it is quite the trove. To celebrate the centenary of the creation of the archive, a few pieces have been put on display. Treasures from the Royal Archives (until 25 January 2015) is a bijou blend of the cheerful and the solemn. A young Princess Elizabeth captures her parents’ coronation in 1937, writing that she thought it ‘very, very wonderful’ and that she expected ‘the Abbey did too’.

Eighty-seven Hackford Road, SW9, is unremarkable but for a blue plaque telling the world that Vincent van Gogh once lived there. The building has been empty since 2012 but now the Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers has filled it with voices. ‘Yes, these Eyes are the Windows’ (until 22 June) is an Artangel-commissioned installation that explores the line between fact and fiction by telling the story of this terraced house from when a 19-year-old van Gogh was a tenant there in the 1870s to the present day. As a visitor, you enter a dimly lit hallway. You are held there for what can be only a few minutes but feels much longer. Already the tension is palpable. A door opens, seemingly of its own accord, and you step into an eerie parallel universe.

‘The natural aids to horsemanship are the hands, the legs, the body and the voice.’ But a Thelwell pony sometimes required some, er, additional aids. Norman Thelwell’s first pony cartoon was published in Punch magazine in 1953 and struck a nerve with readers; so much so that the editor asked Thelwell for a double-page spread of ponies. ‘I was appalled. I thought I’d already squeezed the subject dry,’ he later recalled. But of course he hadn’t, and Penelope and her pony Kipper went on to become his most popular characters. It may be in pony cartoons that Thelwell found his niche, but he wasn’t just a one-trick pony.

Soldier scribes are rare, soldier artists rarer still, and soldiers who can write and draw rarest of all. General Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) was one such polymath. He scribbled and doodled as he fought his way around Victoria’s empire. He was a decorated veteran of the Siege of Sebastapol, the Second Opium War, India and the Anglo–French march on Peking in 1860. In the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879 (Rourke’s Drift and all that) Crealock commanded First Division and sent sketches of the campaign to the Illustrated London News. His work provides an invaluable account of the history he helped to forge. After retiring in 1884, Crealock spent his declining years stalking deer in the Highlands.