mon 21/07/2025

Reviews

The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood, BBC Two

As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Bach, Berlioz, Mythos Accordion Duo

 Bach: Cantatas for Ascension Day The Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)The final volume in John Eliot Gardiner’s mammoth Bach Cantata sequence is one of the very best. Gardiner’s recent BBC2 documentary placed...

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Saloua Raouda Choucair, Tate Modern

Saloua Raouda Choucair began her career as a painter, initially studying under Lebanon’s two leading landscape artists, Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. In the late 1940s, she trained in the studio of Fernande Léger while studying at the Ecole des...

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Ecstasy and Death, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

Is it death that makes us go back to the ballet? The one artform where it is so glorified, so exquisitely reimagined as an experience of regret, hope, ecstasy or bleakest resignation that we will go to drink it in again and again, to preview our own...

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The South Bank Show: Tim Minchin, Sky Arts 1

The new South Bank Show has glided into its second season with a seemingly effortless profile of multi-hyphenate Tim Minchin. In case we’ve forgotten what exactly we admire him for these days – so varied has been his decade-long career been, through...

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Promised Land

Promised Land is much better than its poster suggests. Winning Special Mention at its premiere at this year's Berlinale, this message movie takes on some extremely sensitive topics with a gentle determination and a relatively unblinking eye: the...

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Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time

After a long break from thievery – both in the real world and in the anthropomorphic universe he calls home – dapper gentleraccoon thief Sly Cooper is back doing what he does best: pinching things. It's been eight years since Sly and the gang...

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Doktor Glas, Wyndham’s Theatre

Scandi thrillers have a lot to answer for. Ever since the small-screen success of the Swedish Wallander series, based on the books by Henning Mankell, there has been a host of other must-sees — including the brilliant Borgen — plus British...

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Romeo and Juliet, National Ballet of Canada, Sadler's Wells

The combination of Romeo, Juliet and the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky should be almost too much for the blood pressure. Those defiant lovers, that emotive yet intellectual young Russian craftsman of ballet. Hence the huge turn-out of balletomanes...

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Kurt Elling, Ronnie Scott's

OK, so you've given your copies of Rod's It Had To Be You and Robbie's Swing When You're Winning a few listens (released many, many years ago, the latter is still top of the iTunes jazz albums chart in a gazillion countries). You've memorised the...

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#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, Hampstead Theatre

During rehearsals of his new play, Howard Brenton and the company had a sudden realisation: they were willing partners in "the vast Ai Weiwei project". The Chinese dissident artist, a constant critic of his country's human rights policies, was...

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Syria: Across the Lines, Channel 4

Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were...

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