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Moor pride

The province of Extremadura is as different from the brochure-bright picture of tourist Spain as it is possible to be. Stretched along the Portuguese frontier, it has a sombre, restrained dignity, with mile upon mile of grassland like vast lawns studded with evergreen holm oak and cork trees, each handsome, solemn, monochrome in its private

Magical touch

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut occupies a special place in the history of ‘alternative’ versions of The Nutcracker. Created in 1991, it is an outstanding, wittily irreverent and thought-provoking example of choreographic revisitation. Without departing too radically from the familiar narrative of the 1892 ballet classic, Morris moved the action to the mid/late 1960s and

Rough stuff

The red spot for ‘Sold’ has appeared beside most of Julian Cooper’s mountain paintings at the Art Space Gallery. ‘I’ve always managed to sell work,’ he said in a previous catalogue, ‘since I was a child. That’s the way I was brought up: seeing art not just as a cultural thing, but in practical terms.’

Degas Revealed

Once upon a time, before masterpieces cost millions, a museum director could win a modicum of immortality just with his acquisitions policy. Even now, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, has just paid $45 million for a Duccio. Usually, however, in the absence of Napoleon’s sword or Paul Getty’s bank balance, a public gallery director is

On the trail of Beauty

In desolate Ventnor on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, alongside ‘antique’ shops selling yellowed and scratched plastic buckets and broken digital clocks, there is a hairdresser with a fascia board that elegiacally proclaims ‘Beauty’. The world’s largest cosmetics business runs a global campaign with the strapline ‘Defining Beauty’ in pursuit of mascara

James Delingpole

Clash of egos

A few years ago on a Caribbean island, I tried smoking crack. It tasted absolutely delicious, like toffee bananas, and for about ten minutes I felt quite fantastic. But I still don’t think it’s nearly as stupid or addictive or bad for you as I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here (ITV1). I promised myself,

Glinka tribute

‘His music is minor, of course; but he is not’— thus Stravinsky characterised his compatriot and artistic ancestor Mikhail Glinka, whose bicentenary this year has passed virtually unnoticed: no Life for the Czar at Covent Garden (well suited to such a prevailingly Italianate work); no Russlan and Ludmilla at the Coliseum (well suited because of

Botched effort

ENO’s Siegfried is not a disaster, but the margin isn’t as large as one might wish. Seeing it hot on the heels of Opera North’s Cos

Poetic eye

It is not Robert Frank’s fault, but one might think from the hype — ‘arguably the world’s greatest living photographer’, etc. — that he had invented documentary photography. When Humphrey Spender, who did for Mass Observation and Picture Post in the 1930s and 1940s what Frank did for social documentation in the 1950s, was similarly

The great divide

Watching North and South (BBC1, Sunday), I reflected how much life had changed in Mrs Gaskell’s location. Some years ago I was doing What the Papers Say in Milton — sorry, Manchester — and during a delay I overheard the crew talking about restaurants in the wealthy commuter towns that fringe the city. One of

On the trail of Herzog

At 8.30 a.m. on a crisp autumn Sunday a group of 20 huddled on King’s Cross station’s platform nine and three-quarters — empty but for a smattering of camera-toting Japanese Harry Potter enthusiasts — ready to embark on a journey inspired by the iconoclastic German film-maker Werner Herzog. In the harsh midwinter of 1974, Herzog

Museum without a soul

Roger Kimball on how Yoshio Taniguchi has transformed New York’s Museum of Modern Art We are told that our individualist art has touched its limit, and its expression can go no further. That’s often been said; but if it cannot go further, it may still go elsewhere.André Malraux, The Voices of Silence ‘An institution,’ said

Past master

The lack of great dance-makers that characterises contemporary dance has prompted a number of reconstructions of long-lost ballets, often with questionable results. It is utterly refreshing, therefore, to see how Frederick Ashton could evoke the past without getting entangled in an artistically sterile quest for authenticity. Few people in the history of ballet had his

Welcome escape

Out of a cardboard box on the exhibition poster which heralds Christmas and welcomes visitors at the gates guarding the soothing lawns of the Dulwich Picture Gallery springs a typically Quentin Blake ensemble. There are two children, three dotty adults, one of them wearing ‘specs’, and a big dog. At the top of the poster,

Genteel ghetto

From time to time, people to whom I am introduced mishear and mistake me for a Guardian journalist. I can’t always quite be bothered to put them right. I am not ashamed of being a gardening writer — far from it — but my profession has, in recent years, become something of a genteel ghetto.