London
Adam Sweeting
The prolific Lord Fellowes returns with this six-part adaptation of his own novel (for ITV), a niftily-wrought yarn (originally issued in online instalments) about the old aristocracy and the rise of new money in the early 19th Century. Some are inevitably calling it the “new Downton”, but it really isn’t.Fellowes, the assiduous social historian, has planted his story firmly in factual soil. It opens at a pivotal moment in the Napoleonic Wars, when the Duchess of Richmond held her celebrated ball at her temporary home in Brussels on 15 June, 1815. This was days before the battle of Waterloo, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
When all around you is chaos and depression, an afternoon spent listening to acoustic music in a small club is as cleansing and restorative as a warm bath. At Camden’s Green Note on Saturday afternoon, two superlative folk music talents shared the small stage: Reg Meuross, a very English singer-songwriter who grew up in the south of the country, traded songs with David Massengill, who has made his home in New York’s Greenwich Village these past 40 years, arriving there from Bristol, Tennessee carrying the Edsel Martin Appalachian dulcimer his mother had bought him as a child.The two men met Read more ...
Lauren Brown
The relationship between Joe, Robin and Ruth is far from your average love triangle. On the face of it, Robin loves Ruth, but after introducing her to his charismatic friend Joe – an artist and renegade – their affair reroutes all of their lives forever.We know Robin and Ruth end up married, and as a reader we must piece together how we got from A to B. But at the core of the novel is the belief that life isn’t linear and causality certainly isn’t that clean-cut. A story which initially seems anchored in a London pub slowly unfurls into a collection of memories that, when slowly puzzled Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Elvis Costello is arguably – perhaps unarguably – the most enduring and genuine talent to emerge from the mid-Seventies pub and punk scenes, and his two-hour set on Friday night demonstrated that he’s still a compelling performer, full of energy and passion. The voice isn’t quite what it was, off-pitch at times, though it retains its distinctive timbre and vibrato.The artist formerly known as Declan MacManus had reinvented himself as Elvis just before Presley died, putting together one of the classiest bands of the day and proceeding to pour out a string of memorable songs which, for those of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
From Tom Cruise soundtrack hit singer to self-described “pansexual, polyamorous, gender-fluid dyke”, and from LA country-punks Lone Justice to a Blakean songwriter in thrall to London’s phantom spirits, Maria McKee’s 13-year musical absence has ended in personally spectacular fashion.La Vita Nuova’s title is from Dante, and its new life is traced in this song-suite’s pursuit of a muse-lover, partly intended to be McKee’s younger, idealistic self. The mix of strings, brass and electric guitars also honours her late brother, Love’s co-founder Bryan MacLean, and there is an LA swagger to an Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Bill Brandt’s photographs and Henry Moore’s studies of people sheltering underground during the Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941) offer glimpses of a world that is, thankfully, lost to us. A year and a half after the end of the bombing campaign, the work of the two artists was published side-by-side in the December 1942 edition of the pioneering illustrated magazine, Lilliput. As a caption beneath a sleeping woman reads, “It is interesting to note how often Brandt and Moore, working quite independently of each other, chose very similar subjects for their work.” The magazine’s full-page Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Les Enfants Terribles is the theatre company behind several interesting immersive projects, including Alice's Adventures Underground and Inside Pussy Riot. Now it has joined forces with Historic Royal Palaces to tell the story of two women integral to the Georgian crown – George II's wife, Queen Caroline, and his mistress Henrietta Howard.The scene is set for the King's birthday party in 1734, and a lowly servant (Christina Ngoyi) leads the audience – guests of the King for the evening – into Kensington Palace, where we will be immersed in the court's business, its behind-the-scenes intrigues Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Great writing about – or set in – London has one thing in common: voice. It’s tuned into the city’s multiple frequencies, its sometimes marvellous, sometimes maddening mix of different registers and rhythms. It adopts and adapts the capital’s various insider and outsider codes, and recognises and reproduces their translation across neighbourhood and postcode, political and class lines in a process of osmosis which proves London to be more of a melting pot than New York ever was.In this sense, academic and three-time novelist Michael Nath’s latest book, The Treatment, is a great piece of Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss are not the composers you'd hear at a typical chamber music concert. Their early efforts at piano quartets made up the first half of an evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Benjamin Grosvenor and friends that was, in any case, far from typical. Topped off with the mature Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, wasn’t it going to be too much rugged Alpine rocky road? In the hands of these youthful musicians, it wasn’t. The audience couldn’t get enough of them.The four performers, who have recently been touring together, are soaring individually towards the top of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Around the turn of the millennium, when Dan Snaith started releasing music – initially as Manitoba, then Caribou, and latterly also Daphni – he tended to get lumped in with the folktronica movement. In fact, the closest he came to actual folk was a heavy influence from the more delicate side of late 60s psychedelia. But, as with many of the other acts tagged with the f-word like his friend and ally Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden, it was really a clumsy signifier for people who were refusing to accept the artificial separation between “electronic music” and the rest which had become reified with the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some menus never change. In 1910, the Loyal British Waiters Society came into being, prompted by “xenophobic resentment at the dominance of foreigners in the restaurant trade”. London’s German Waiters Club, one symptom of the alien rot the bulldog servers aimed to stop, was itself founded in 1869. Almost anywhere, at any period in the capital’s history, from Tudor times until the present day, what Panikos Panayi calls “a backlash from nativist sentiment” has sought to halt and reverse successive waves of immigration. Those Loyal Waiters yearned, in words that today’s immigrant-descended Home Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Nobody could deny that this was a weekend when we needed cheering up. The place for that was the Wigmore Hall, which played host to a recently formed “shape-shifting” ensemble of superb young soloists. The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective was launched in 2017 by the violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster (incidentally, they got married last summer). For their Wigmore Hall residency they gathered a starry team of clarinettist Mark Simpson, bassoonist Amy Harman, cellist Laura van der Hejden, horn player Alec Frank-Gemmill, violist Jean-Miguel Hernandez and double bassist Joseph Conyers. Read more ...