They’re back. In August the capital fills with bored, dim-witted, half-naked semi-vagrants who have nothing to do here but get in the way of Londoners who do have things to do here. Tourism is an invitation to robbery. If you aren’t going to a place to work, you’re going there to get worked over. The
We owe Giverny to the generosity of Americans Whoever coined the famous aphorism ‘When good Americans die, they go to Paris’ didn’t tell the full story. For American plein-air painters, Paris was never more than limbo. Heaven, they eventually discovered, was Giverny, presided over by the Impressionist deity Monet. It was 1887 when the first
It is 50 years since what was formerly known as the Kirov Ballet — now Mariinsky Ballet — paid its first, legendary visit to London. Thanks to the commendable efforts of Viktor Hochhauser, the impresario who made that first visit possible, the company has become a familiar focal point of the London summer dance season.
Take one chip pan full of cooking oil, one crippled old lady and one strong-framed Irishwoman in her prime. Let the younger one heat the oil till it’s scalding, and pour it on to the older one’s trapped hand so she screams and screams (make the older one her mother, for good measure…). When she
Everything is there – except the central character English Wagnerians really can’t complain about what they’ve been offered this year, so long as they can get around the country, and particularly around the countryside. In London we have only had ENO’S Parsifal, but that was musically magnificent. Many of us found Glyndebourne’s Meistersinger tremendous both
After rootling in the BBC archives on the internet recently I started thinking, wouldn’t it be good if more programmes from the past were shown in full? The online archive contains less than a tenth of the total footage stored by the BBC (which would amount to nearly 70 years of TV if you watched
When a major artist dies while an exhibition of his or her work is up and running, there is inevitably a surge in visitor numbers. Consequently, the death of Cy Twombly at the beginning of last month has sent along to Dulwich a number of people who didn’t know his work to find out what
It’s difficult to believe that John Hoyland is dead. He was a man so full of life, with such appetite for living, that his absence from our midst makes no sense. Even when grievously ill in the past months, he was more likely to engage in anecdote and tell jokes than complain of his increasingly
Project Nim is a story about man and chimp in which chimp comes out of it well, man does not and, I’m warning you, it’s fascinating, but not pretty. The starting point is an Oklahoma lab in 1973 when Nim, a male baby chimp, is taken from his mother at a fortnight old and sent
It took just ten minutes for the secret of Nadia Comaneci’s extraordinary success at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal to be revealed. Comaneci achieved the first-ever perfect score when she was given a clean sweep of 10s from all the judges for her performance on the uneven bars. ‘What I remember is the dead
