It’s amazing what the movies can do. In 1986, the John Hughes teen flick Pretty in Pink — the one where poor girl Molly Ringwald and rich kid Andrew McCarthy get it together despite their friends’ disapproval — took its title from a Psychedelic Furs song, which featured heavily in the film. Whoosh! Suddenly they
‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see. You may think she’s happy and free from care; she’s not though she seems to be.’ When the British lyricist Arthur J. Lamb first offered the lyrics of ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’ to the Tin Pan Alley tunesmith Harry Von
Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead and buried atheist dream. The dream first took shape among Russian radicals of the mid-19th century, to whom the prospect of mass atheism seemed the key to Russia’s salvation. When Lenin seized power in 1917,
Manon: minx or martyr? There are two ways to play Kenneth MacMillan’s courtesan. Is Manon an ingénue, a guileless country girl, pimped by her own brother and corrupted by Monsieur G.M.? Or is she a pleasure hunter, a man-manipulator, a schemer out for all she can get? In the Royal Ballet’s revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s
The Man in the White Suit, famously, is a yarn about yarn. A brilliant young boffin stumbles across an everlasting polymer thread but when he tries to profit from his discovery he faces unexpected ruin. There are only three beats in the story — breakthrough, triumph, disaster — so it needs to be elaborated with
One of the many great things about The Capture was that we could never be sure whether the British authorities’ capacity for virtually blanket surveillance was a nightmare vision of the future or a nightmare portrait of the present. Celebrity Hunted, though, suggests a third possibility: that virtually blanket surveillance is simply proof of how
In the early 1660s, Pieter de Hooch was living in an area of what we would now call urban overspill surrounding the commercial boom town of Amsterdam. It wasn’t the best of neighbourhoods. Nearby was a little street nicknamed ‘whorehouse alley’ (het hoerenpad). Tanners plied their trade thereabouts, which involved soaking hides in urine. But
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is the sequel to the 2014 film Maleficent, and it will certainly come as a relief to all those who, in the interim, have been worried that Disney might let a potential franchise go unexploited. Did that keep you awake at night, as it did me? Well, now we can all
There was something really creepy about listening to the ten-minute countryside podcast released last weekend by Radio 4 supposedly transporting us to Marneys Field in Ambridge. Two worlds colliding. The fake countryside of Borsetshire was transfigured — no longer pretending to exist but existing, as if to make us all pretend we believe in it
Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered
