When I heard that they had covered Trafalgar Square in grass my reaction was that it was a ghastly gimmick. But having seen it, I’ve got to admit that it looks fantastic. Even though the weather hasn’t been the best in London these past few days, it has created the best type of summer-time
I’ve been having a Wagnerian time of it lately, organizing a festival of events to coincide with the Royal Opera’s performances of the Ring cycle in October. On Wednesday I was deep in the Nibelheim-like bowels of the Royal Opera House, recording extracts from Wagner’s letters with Simon Callow. He read with the most spine-tingling
One of the guests at our third Elgar concert at The Spectator’s offices in Old Queen Street last night shrewdly pointed out the oddity that the great composer does not seem to travel as well as, say, Vaughan Williams. Listening to Madeleine Mitchell (violin) and Nigel Clayton (piano) perform the sublime Violin Sonata (Op. 82)
Why does David Cameron keep insulting his party? It’s a question plenty of Tories are asking and the answer is buried on p33 of The Times today. Its new chief political correspondent, Francis Elliot (he of the indispensable Cameron biography) has disclosed that the party’s research shows its voters are suspicious of “the same old
Thirteen of the last fourteen nominees from the two major US parties have won the first primary state of Iowa. The odd one out? A certain Bill Clinton in 1992, who only won 3% of the Iowa vote, to Iowa local Tom Harkin’s 76%. The Hillary campaign have now officially rejected the strategy of “skipping”
Peter Wilby thinks he might in an effort to establish his middle England credentials. Can’t see it myself, though.
If you want to know how much the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has changed since people thought that Hillary just had to turn up to win, read this story about how Team Clinton is contemplating skipping the first contest of the season in Iowa. The strategy actually makes some sense given Hillary’s relative weakness there
A hot, hot night in a Portobello Road boookshop for a poetry reading (see my earlier post) hosted by the excellent Pass on a Poem and Oxfam, in aid of Darfur and Chad. As I stand up to read “The Day He Died” by Ted Hughes, I notice Saffron Burrows sitting in the back row
DVD release of the week is Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final instalment of the boxing saga. Yes, I know the idea of the 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone climbing into the ring again is innately absurd, but all of the Rocky movies, including the first which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, have been
According to the Youth Justice Board, most teenage “gangs” should be referred to less abrasively as “groups”. Which makes me think how very different Martin Scorsese’s movie would have been if it had been called Groups of New York. I doubt Goodfellas would have made such an impact if it had begun with the line:
Some people think that the only tomato worth eating is the one you’ve grown yourself but this isn’t actually true. I can think of loads of tomatoes – eg the cherry ones grown at the foot of Mt Etna and sold at I Camisa in Old Compton Street, Soho – that are much nicer than
What a wonderful afternoon it was! Who can imagine a theatre jammed full of the most famous thespians in London honouring that despised creature, a theatre critic? But they — Miriam Margolyes, Corin Redgrave, Patricia Hodge, Simon Callow and many others — all came. Actors loved the late Sheridan Morley, for they realised that Sherry
If you want a quick guide to whether Al Gore will end up running for president or not read this piece by Ben Smith, one of the savviest US political reporters. The thing with Gore, as one politics watcher from his home state of Tennessee told me, is that he’d like to be president but
The issue that ends up rendering asunder the American right will not be Iraq but the other i-word, immigration. George W. Bush and Karl Rove have long believed that the future of the Republican Party depends on appealing to Hispanics, the fastest growing minority group in the US. They argue that with their strong family
Leonardo di-Caprio and Blood Diamond gave men an excuse not to buy their wives and girlfriends diamonds on the grounds that they were ethically tainted. Now Julia Roberts is going to star in a movie that will do the same for flowers, reports New York Magazine. The film, based on the Vanity Fair essay ‘A
Fascinating piece in today’s Washington Post about Republican’s fears that they are “losing the Web.” What was once a side-show for political geeks is becoming core electoral terrain. Actually the best thing about Gordon Brown’s “listen and learn” campaign is his website.
Few people have a good word to say about Don Rumsfeld right now and there is little doubt that he was an absolute disaster in his second stint at the Pentagon. The Rumsfeld doctrine—just enough troops to lose, as one Washington wag dubbed it—is largely responsible for the Coalition’s inability to bring order to Iraq
If man-made global warming is killing Africans, as the climate change alarmists suggest, shouldn’t we reduce our carbon footprint? Tesco did just that, says Dominic Lawson, and reduced by two-thirds their fruit and veg imports from East Africa. The result: poorer Africans. “All it does is make Tesco look better in North London. I find
Today’s news that Gordon Brown will back the next generation of nuclear power plants is further proof of his desire to put the Tories on the back foot. Nuclear power is one of the issues that divide the opposition with Alan Duncan declaring himself “instinctively opposed” to it while many others see it as the
From our US edition
More power to Kazakhstan Sir: Elliot Wilson rails against the alleged bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism that he argues are strangling business opportunities for foreign investors in Kazakhstan (Business, 28 April). But his three examples of Western companies who have ‘decided to leave’ are misleading. PetroKazakhstan, which emerged from nowhere as Canadian-based Hurricane Oil, was very