history
Frank Bowling, Tate Britain review - a marvelWednesday, 05 June 2019
In a photograph taken in 1962, Frank Bowling leans against a fireplace in his studio. His right hand rests on the mantlepiece which bears books, fixative and spirit bottles, his left rests out of sight on the small of his back. His attire is... Read more... |
Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad review - a Soviet national epicSunday, 02 June 2019
Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on its (re)publication in English a decade ago was acclaimed as one of the greatest Russian (and not only Russian) novels of the 20th century. For its sense of the sheer... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Best of British Transport FilmsTuesday, 28 May 2019
The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,... Read more... |
salt., Royal Court review - revisiting the Atlantic slave tradeSaturday, 18 May 2019
Most of the facts about the Atlantic slave trade are well known; what is less easily understood is how history can make a person feel today. A question which invites an experimental approach in which you test out emotions on your own body. In 2016,... Read more... |
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain review – exhilarating reminder of industrial mightThursday, 21 March 2019
Mike Nelson has turned the Duveen Galleries into a museum commemorating Britain’s industrial past (pictured below right). Scruffy workbenches, dilapidated metal cabinets and stacks of old drawers are pressed into service as plinths for the display... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill the Truth review - taut thriller of big ideasSunday, 24 February 2019
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam... Read more... |
Richard J Evans: Eric Hobsbawm - A Life in History review - mesmerisingly readableSunday, 17 February 2019
This is an astonishing book: in its breadth, depth and detail and also in its almost palpable, and sometimes unpalatable, admiration of its subject, the controversial, long-lived Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012). But if you want to... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Actor Bruno Ganz on playing HitlerSaturday, 16 February 2019
There is nothing quite like the Iffland-Ring in this country. The property of the Austrian state, for two centuries it has been awarded to the most important German-speaking actor of the age, who after a suitable period nominates his successor and... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Rosa LuxemburgThursday, 31 January 2019
Barbara Sukowa won Best Actress at Cannes in 1986 for her title role in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, and the power of her performance looks every bit as engaging and insistent today. A century after Luxemburg’s death (she was... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: AlphaTuesday, 22 January 2019
Keda’s already in trouble for not living up to his father’s expectations. And then there’s an unfortunate clash with an angry bison which sends him careering down a steep cliff face and left for dead. Welcome to Upper Paleolithic Europe. Albert... Read more... |
Mary Queen of Scots review - Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie excelSaturday, 19 January 2019
Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is... Read more... |
Boris Akunin: Black City review - a novel to sharpen the witsSunday, 16 December 2018
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as... Read more... |
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