The opera season at ENO began with a new production of Carmen. It was an occasion so dispiriting that I’ve been toying with the idea that the management had decided on provoking a mass act of critical suicide in order to solve the seemingly endless crisis that the house has been in for several years,
Wherever I go, I hear that music in schools is not what it used to be. By this it is not meant that the music which used to be taught is now taught according to different principles, but that the music which used to be taught is now not represented at all. School choirs no
One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney
Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do
If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily,
You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode
A poem At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon after Rimbaud I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail to Guadalupe as far as Hidalgo. At Casa Verde I ordered a bottle of beer and the special: greasy tortillas, fried cactus, chillies con carne. I cooled my feet on the dirt floor under
So the big question this week is: is the Today programme a viper’s nest of evil pinkoes, all of whom should be put in sacks and dropped into a deep well? And the answer is: yes. Shame, though, really, because wrong and bad though it is I do have a soft spot for Today. I
Malindi I watched a nest of baby turtles hatch on the beach in front of my mother’s house recently. What a hellish start to a life, I thought. You burrow up through sand and plastic rubbish discarded by tourists. On the race towards the sea everybody wants to eat you: ghost crabs, herons, crows and
Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression. Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma’s story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta. Mae Sot, Thai-Burma borderThe family had come from one of the villages along the border and their story of
A meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria on 6 September may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved. Even more curious is
At 7.40 a.m. on 2 April the Solomon Islands were struck by a major earthquake and a large tsunami. At least 52 people were killed, more than 900 homes were destroyed, and thousands of people were left homeless. Little attention was paid to this at the time and not much more since. After all, they
When we were students, a professor of public health once told us that the death rate declined whenever or wherever doctors went on strike. This was an even stronger argument, he implied, than the purely ethical one against doctors resorting to such action, or inaction. No profession should lightly expose its uselessness to the public
A light rain drifts down over Kintbury village, blurring the surface of the Kennet and Avon canal. It gleams on the railway tracks, pools into fat drops under the roof of the station shelter on the London-bound platform and drips on to Robert Harris’s new suede shoes. Look, I say again, please don’t wait. I’ll
Before sidling off into history last month, the Commission for Racial Equality published a final report. Decades of multiculturalism, it revealed, had left Britain a fractured and unequal nation at risk of splitting up. The Commission’s chairman Trevor Phillips stated several years ago that multiculturalism had failed. His commission waited till its final hours to
The wedding of the author’s wing-woman The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish
Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. ‘Myxomatosis’ by Philip Larkin Aldbourne, Wiltshire I saw the rabbit, a young doe, 50 yards or so down the path. ‘Look,’ I said to the kids, ‘a bunny.’
I have no real interest in the SCHIP brouhaha and am puzzled by Bush’s to veto a bill that would expand children’s health insurance. This can’t be a very sensible move, politically-speaking. Anyway, my only interest in the matter was in the proposal that it be funded by taxes on tobacco. I was interested to
Yay! Friday Night Lights returns this evening. If I hadn’t already seen the first episode of series two online I’d be setting the Tivo. If you haven’t seen the first series yet I highly recommend you do so soon because, alas, I fear the second series may prove a disappointment. If I’m right, it will
Gordon’s decision just got trickier. The latest figures from The Guardian / ICM poll show that 48% of voters want a November poll compared to 43% who don’t. However, 58% of Labour supporters don’t want Gordon to go early. Tory backers are 17% more certain to vote than their Labour counterparts the poll reveals and