Books features
Extract: Bred of Heaven - Learning the Welsh languageSunday, 07 August 2011
When the sun rises on the Welsh Language and Heritage Centre, I step out into crisp morning air and a sort of Welsh plaza, a large walled lawn flanked on two sides by cottages. In all directions but one there is a sense of enclosure, rocky slopes... Read more... |
Extract: Bred of Heaven - George Borrow's Wild WalesSunday, 31 July 2011
George Borrow, embarking on the journey which would become the classic Victorian travel book Wild Wales (1862), sped towards the country by train in, he reports, a melancholy frame of mind “till looking from a window I caught sight of a long line of... Read more... |
Horrid Henry - the MovieWednesday, 27 July 2011
It’s perhaps best to start this review by stating that I miss Horrid Henry's target demographic by about, ooh, a decade or three. But it’s also right and proper to say that while I wouldn’t recommend it for grown-ups, those youngsters whose opinions... Read more... |
Extract: No Off Switch - A Bluebottle at Radio 1Monday, 18 July 2011
I walked in to find my new Radio 1 producer standing on our secretary’s desk – she was on the phone – wearing a sombrero, a huge rubber ear, and playing the trumpet. Around him, in the third floor typing pool of the Nation’s Favourite – unable,... Read more... |
The Night Watch, BBC TwoTuesday, 12 July 2011
Sarah Waters’s highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no... Read more... |
Art Gallery: The Worlds of Mervyn PeakeTuesday, 05 July 2011
Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were... Read more... |
War and Peace at the Circus, Giffords CircusMonday, 04 July 2011
A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic... Read more... |
Fever: Little Willie John and the Birth of SoulWednesday, 22 June 2011
Because Little Willie John died a lonely death in a Washington state prison cell in 1968, much of the baby boom generation grew up only half-knowing who he was. You’d occasionally hear that effervescent but distant voice on the radio, buried by... Read more... |
Seven Angels, The Opera Group, CardiffTuesday, 21 June 2011
Imagine you are at a study day being run by Friends of the Earth. They mount a play in which a group of angels who somehow got left out of the Book of Genesis fall to a completely barren earth, look around, and start reconstructing, re-enacting its... Read more... |
Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, BBC TwoTuesday, 14 June 2011
The argument in Terry Pratchett's BBC Two documentary Choosing to Die boiled down to the sanctity of life versus the quality of life. Pratchett's own reasoning, that he has Alzheimer's disease and would prefer to choose the manner and timing of his... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Hay: Books EtceteraThursday, 02 June 2011
Watching bookaholic punters tramping down windswept country lanes in hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks instantly alerts you to the singular quality of the Hay Festival, though it's surprising that nobody has grasped the glaring opportunity to... Read more... |
David Ford, Cabaret Voltaire, EdinburghThursday, 05 May 2011
Earlier this week, in my review of Shelby Lynne, I suggested that the record industry’s one-way ticket on a fast train to oblivion is, at least, proving to be the mother of invention. Everyone has to work a little harder and smarter for our... Read more... |
