At the Berlin Staatsoper, the evening after he conducted Parsifal Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen, a sequence that would have had a strong appeal for Nietzsche, who advertised the Mediterranean virtues of the latter’s music over the ‘tragic grunts’ of the former. Whether Nietzsche would have approved of Barenboim’s way with Carmen is more doubtful. Though
This is the fourth of the Holburne’s recent exhibitions devoted to 18th-century British portraiture, a series which has done much to put the Museum on the map of enlightened gallery-goers. Previous subjects have been Love’s Prospect (dealing with the marriage portrait), Pickpocketing the Rich (portrait-painting in Bath) and Every Look Speaks (portraits of David Garrick).
There was a time, half a century ago, when vegetable gardening was the preserve of old boys on allotments and jobbing gardeners in spacious suburban gardens. No longer. These days, the vegetable grower is as likely to be a 30-year-old female social worker with a small urban garden and a Point of View about pesticides
When you’ve seen how much vilification Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have endured from the tabloids and the republican broadsheets over the years, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see or hear the Prince’s muttered comments about the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell in Klosters last week. Witchell, known inexplicably among his colleagues as
Did any of you catch me being rubbish on BBC4 last week? I was one of the talking heads on a series called TV on Trial, where various critic types argued over which of the past six decades produced the best TV. My job was to be rude about the Eighties, with David Aaronovitch defending
There are 13 Canalettos and 19 Guardis in our National Gallery; there are no paintings by either artist in the Rijksmuseum. The Dutch, having been painting landscape views for years, had enough of their own by the 18th century not to bother with Venice: canals were not exactly a novelty to them. So while the
