It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We knew how to fly before we realised it was no longer necessary to huff-and-puff baggage by hand. Even odder, steam and electricity were well understood before anyone got around to developing the ingeniously simple pedal-and-crank
Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like Clueless and Manhattan. He’s also a playwright whose new script has received its world première at the National Theatre. Lucky chap. He spent three or four years writing Evening at the Talk House and it
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed. Those dark days — caught between Baroque
The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt and turn on their evil captors, Ant and Dec. The sparky Geordie comedy duo will be imprisoned in a semi-submerged, rat-infested cage like the one in The Deer Hunter, fed on a diet of liquidised
‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing and portrait-painting.’ This doesn’t sound like a bad set of cultural baggage, even for those who don’t care for the races. There is clearly a lot to be said for trial by
Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard film to feel anything for. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, this is a love story that, here, doesn’t venture below the waist, literally, emotionally or metaphorically. It glides across
It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign in Syria — and not a word was spoken. Martha Kearney called it an ‘audio graphic’ on the World at One on Monday and explained how Neal Razzell and James Beard for the World Service
