Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the official end of slavery in the United States. He grew up among a small, tenacious business- and property-owning black middle class who had their own newspapers, their own schools and universities, their own elected officials. After graduating with a PhD
Falling In Love Again features two of the 20th century’s best-known sex athletes. Ron Elisha’s drama covers a long drunken night spent by Marlene Dietrich and Edward VIII at Fort Belvedere, near Windsor, on the eve of Edward’s abdication in December 1936. It sounds like a contrived premise for a play but Elisha, who researches
Sky’s latest bingewatch potboiler Cobra can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be an arch, knowing House of Cards-meets-The Thick Of It satire about parliamentary intrigue. Or a full-on post-apocalyptic thriller in the manner of Survivors or The Walking Dead. It ends up succeeding in neither. The premise is that a powerful
Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them — but any scrap that could inspire, support or become part of an image. He jettisoned muses like there were endless tomorrows but clung on to Métro tickets, postcards, restaurant bills, bottle labels. When the thrill
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and likeable with fantastic casting — Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick is especially sublime — it is not particularly immersive or memorable. It’s 600 pages squashed into just under two hours so it’s bound to feel
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the universe is the dream of the god Azathoth. Not unreasonably, Azathoth yearns to wake up and visit his creation. In The Whisperer in Darkness (Radio 4), a crusty coven of drug-addled neopagans seek to realise
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011,
