Arts Reviews

Roma is the latest film from Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity,Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and you’ll probably already have heard that it’s wonderful, a masterpiece, magnificent, Oscar-worthy. But as I know you won’t believe it until you hear it from me (sigh, the responsibility is too much sometimes) I can confirm all of the above. At this point I should note that many cinephiles have complained that it deserves to be seen at the cinema, on a full-sized screen with full-sized sound, but as it’s a Netflix film (sneer, sneer) most won’t be able to watch it this way. I did see it at the

This week on the Green Room, I’m talking the blues with Grammy-winning blues artist Chris Thomas King. Earlier this week, King wrote for Spectator USA a scathing criticismof the policies of the Grammys’ Blues category. King is an African American from Louisiana. He is the son of a blues musician, and grew up in his father’s juke joint. He was one of the last blues musicians to be ‘discovered’ by anthropologists from the North. He has won two Grammy awards, in 2001 for the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which he starred as a blues singer who has sold his soul to the

On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big Biba. It sold the dress designer Barbara Hulanicki’s distinctive look in furniture, paints and wallpaper, sports equipment and food, as well as her familiar fast fashion. If you had to define that aesthetic then, you’d have said it was campy and kitschy. But above all you’d have said it was deco, an increasingly familiar word for the between-wars moderne style in everything from buildings to jewellery. Derry & Toms itself was a 1933 moderne temple of commerce, slathered in stylised ironwork and bas-reliefs. It had a ‘Rainbow Room’ upstairs, which

James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for peace, he was an appeaser. Inheriting the English throne after Elizabeth, whose foreign policy was defined by breaking Spanish dominance, James appears to have seen the purpose of his own Whitehall government as being to facilitate every Spanish demand. The first high-profile victim of James’s Iberophilia was the war hero and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Within four months of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, Raleigh was on trial for treason under the new regime. His death sentence was commuted until 1618, when it was carried out at the direct request