history
Poor Clare, Orange Tree Theatre review - saints cajole us sinnersFriday, 18 July 2025
What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons linen jackets, Church brogues and Mulberry shades? It’s 1987 and I do wear it well though…Chiara Atik’s comedy... Read more... |
Nye, National Theatre review - Michael Sheen's full-blooded Bevan returns to the OlivierFriday, 11 July 2025
The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the... Read more... |
Bradford City of Culture 2025 review - new magic conjured from past gloriesTuesday, 03 June 2025
Botanical forms, lurid and bright, now tower above a footpath on a moor otherwise famed for darkness and frankly terrible weather. But the trio of 5m-high contemporary sculptures grow in place here, drawing life from limestone soil. These metallic... Read more... |
The Last Musician of Auschwitz review - a haunting testamentTuesday, 13 May 2025
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was... Read more... |
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, Tate Modern review - memories are made of thisFriday, 02 May 2025
A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that,... Read more... |
Howard Amos: Russia Starts Here review - East meets West, via the Pskov regionTuesday, 01 April 2025
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination of the borderlands of a bellicose nation. Focusing on the Pskov region, which juts out into eastern Europe, his... Read more... |
Henry Gee: The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction review - survival instinctsSaturday, 15 March 2025
Henry Gee’s previous book, A Brief History of Life on Earth, made an interestingly downbeat read for a title that won the UK’s science book prize. He emphasised that a constant feature of that history is extinction. Disappearing is simply what... Read more... |
Edward II, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford review - monarchs, murder and mayhem from MarloweMonday, 10 March 2025
“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and... Read more... |
Hylozoic/Desires: Salt Cosmologies, Somerset House and The Hedge of Halomancy, Tate Britain review - the power of white powderMonday, 03 March 2025
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the... Read more... |
Philip Marsden: Under a Metal Sky review - rock and aweTuesday, 11 February 2025
Working on materials was basic to human culture from the start: chipping at flint to make a hand-axe; fashioning bone or wood; drying hides. In time, people discovered that some materials, especially when put to trial by fire, were special: harder,... Read more... |
Mrs President, Charing Cross Theatre review - Mary Todd Lincoln on her life aloneWednesday, 05 February 2025
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a powerful man, bringing them out of their silent tombs and energising them and, by extension, doing the same for the women of today. Its... Read more... |
The Lonely Londoners, Kiln Theatre review - Windrush Generation arrive in a London full of opportunities, but not for themFriday, 24 January 2025
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a... Read more... |
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