It is hard to imagine the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood as the same man. In 1958, Truman Capote wrote the story of a social butterfly whose anxieties are banished by a trip to Tiffany’s; in 1959, he began his dark examination of a quadruple murder, In Cold Blood, a book
Southwark Fair by Samuel Adamson. Ever heard of it? Nor me but it sounds like a sprawling comedy of manners written by some forgotten Enlightenment wag. I trotted along to the Cottesloe full of expectation but I was in for a let-down. Samuel Adamson is no wag. Nor is he enlightened. And as for forgotten,
Welsh National Opera’s Der fliegende Holl
When a Bostonian wit remarked, ‘Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris’, he was merely expressing the secure place the French capital occupied in the nation’s heart. Paris represented a dream (or reality for the increasing number who travelled there) of happiness, a spiritual or physical home, the premier destination for thousands of American
Where have I been all these years? A listed Francophile managing to miss the utter delight of Bizet’s la jolie fille de Perth! Not averse to Carmen, tickled by the dusky oriental charms of The Pearl Fishers, diverted by the precocious brio of the 18-year-old’s sole symphony, enchanted and moved by the music for l’Arlésienne;
