Joanna Lumley bears a distinct resemblance to the delectable Mrs Algernon Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who, while still in bed of a morning, supervises the painting of a mural, fills in the crossword, offers useful advice on matters of state, attends to pressing correspondence, corrects a child’s construing of Horace and deals with a
It’s always a pleasure to visit Pallant House. At the moment, it seems particularly good value: three separate exhibitions plus the permanent collection, not forgetting the restaurant and excellent bookshop. William Roberts (1895–1980) is one of those forgotten giants of British Modernism who has been crying out for reassessment, and now here’s the perfect-sized exhibition
Handel’s Orlando, apparently one of his greatest operas, is much more impressive in the first revival of Francisco Negrin’s production at the Royal Opera than it was at its first outing in 2003. Though my visual memory is most unreliable, I remember it as revolving dizzyingly, with characters whipping through door after door as the
‘How I hate!’ is the first line of Torben Betts’s new play. Not a promising start. A teenage Goth with a scowl like a squashed spider crouches in her bedroom ranting against her smugger-than-smug parents. A revolution erupts. The Goth cheers and is then raped by a mad soldier. The civil war ends and order
One of the most persistent and tiresome misunderstandings about how sacred music was performed in the past is that boys’ voices were always involved. In any number of places this was simply not true: male voices, yes, always; children’s voices, not at all necessarily. The country where boys seemed to have been used most standardly
Just to remind you, this is the week my splendid anti-Left polemic How To Be Right is published and if you Speccie readers aren’t its natural constituency I don’t know who is. So buy it, please, or I’m never going to be able to put Boy through that brilliant prep school I mentioned a few
‘Keep your angels about you,’ was the inspiring advice given by William Blake in Peter Ackroyd’s Drama on 3 (Sunday), based on ‘the story’ of the visionary poet and artist who was born 250 years ago in 1757 and who is famous for giving us ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’ and ‘Tyger tyger’.
