Culture

‘The only way you can help us,’ said the young student on the archive recording, his voice thin and wavering through the ether, as if emasculated by the Soviet tanks that had just invaded his native city, Prague. ‘Don’t forget Czechoslovakia.’ The streets were filled with young people, who were bravely trying to talk with the soldiers, many of whom could not speak Russian but were brought in from the far reaches of the Soviet territories and had more in common with their Chinese neighbours than the Mittel Europeans. But active resistance, they knew, was pointless. ‘We are a small nation. What chances do we have against the Red Army?

Andrew Lambirth on the artist’s profound and far-reaching influence For a certain generation of English artists, there have been enough Cézanne exhibitions to last more than one lifetime. These are the painters who had the gospel of Cézanne rammed down their gullets at art school, and who feel that the world has other things to offer. Roger Fry was the first great apostle of Cézanne in England, who at every opportunity lectured the unwary on the principles of ‘significant form’ and the consciousness-changing gifts of the master. Henry Tonks (who, as head of the Slade, resisted the siren call of modern art as forcefully as he could) caricatured him mercilessly in a 1922 painting called ‘The Unknown God’.

Julian Sanchez explains why you should never read your old copy. Unless you do actually crave either a) embarrassment or b) mortification.

Andrew Lambirth on our continuing fascination with the Orient Almost everywhere you look these days there’s an exhibition to do with China or the Far East. Tinselly young oriental artists are fêted as if they were better than their limp-brained occidental counterparts, and scarcely a considered brushstroke between them. The East is Big Business and there’s more than one specialist agent concentrating on bringing over Chinese contemporary art to deluge the already schmaltz-surfeited English market.

If you like The Wire you should definitely read this piece in the Washington Monthly. And if you don't like The Wire that must be because you haven't seen it yet. If that's the case, you have a treat in store: 60 odd hours of the best television series ever made. I mean this sort of thing is horrific. Yet also horrifically compelling: What would become the fifth and final murder charge in the case of Willie Mitchell and his cohorts took place two months later. This time, only Mitchell’s friend Shawn Gardner was directly involved. It began with a man named Darius Spence, who had found out that his wife, Tanya, was cheating on him with a local drug dealer everyone called “Momma.” Spence decided to have Momma beaten up severely.

Lloyd Evans on the esotericism of the Festival and the ragamuffin risk-taking of the Fringe Here we go again. Like some vast, hairy, attention-seeking arachnid, the Edinburgh Festival has settled its gross and gorgeous shape in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Ever since its inception in 1947 the Festival has grown steadily and spawned a rowdy litter of symbiotic events. Comedy, literature, classical music, film, ballet, modern dance, jazz and blues and even ‘spirituality and peace’. All are represented. But the Festival’s heart, its alpha and omega, is the theatre. Whenever I flip through the International Festival brochure I’m staggered and slightly alarmed by its strenuously esoteric contents. Daring. That’s the word.