history
judith.flanders
Weeds, memorably, have been described as merely being plants that grow where we don’t want them. Walking through the Wellcome’s fine new exhibition, we can conclude that the “dirt”, too, is merely material appearing out of its appropriate location. One man’s waste is another man’s fertiliser; one civilisation’s dust-heap another’s city foundations. Children first planting a window box learn that “dirt” is alchemy: stick in a seed, out of the dirt comes dinner.The exhibition sensibly does not try to cover all aspects of the subject, but homes in on specific times and places. Opening in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A chorus of "Hooray! No CGI!" has greeted Kevin Macdonald's new film version of Rosemary Sutcliff's popular novel, The Eagle of the Ninth. Not for him a Gladiator-style digital Rome, or Troy-like computer-generated navies stretching away into infinity.Laying off the gadgetry is lighter on the budget too, but Macdonald claims it was part of his plan to stick to the human scale and traditional virtues of courage and honour that drove Sutcliff's book. In fact, it's hard to see how else he could have done it, since the story boils down to two men, Roman officer Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) and Read more ...
carole.woddis
Feminism is a dirty word. Ask anybody. Do they want to be tarred with the label? Do they, hell. The word still carries connotations of man-haters. Even today’s young women fighting against harassment in tube carriages, horrified by the easy access and the violence of pornography, even they complain that fessing up to being “feminist” lays them open to ostracisation and isolation. Yet with rates of violence against women, unequal pay, the lack of women on boards, pregnancy as a cause of job dismissal, sex trafficking - rightly or wrongly, feminism is on the march again.I know, I’ve seen Read more ...
josh.spero
The two are not wildly far apart in their appreciation of the wonder of the West; indeed, Ferguson's accompanying book is subtitled The West and the Rest. Clark saw the peak of culture in the judiciously spent gold of the Medici, while Ferguson wants to understand quite why the Medici became so rich in the first place. What made the West power ahead after 1500, when China and the Islamic states had previously been so successful? After all, most Western "inventions" are easily confounded by an Eastern antecedent.It is almost as if he sneers at his modern Western audience while illustrating why Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Processed through the screenwriting circuitry of Andrew Davies, TV's novel-adapter par excellence, it has emerged as a superior soap tailored with mercenary expertise for that demographic sweet spot that is 9pm on a Sunday night.Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel, which was published the year after its author's death, is a story of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a while in the 1990s, the NASDAQ of polar exploration knocked Scott off his plinth and installed Shackleton as Britain’s favourite Antarctic hero. To a modern sensibility, survival seemed a more laudable pursuit than sacrifice. Better a live donkey, as Shackleton phlegmatically put it when turning home 90 miles from the South Pole, than a dead lion. For decades Scott has been comprehensively, even vindictively rubbished by the revisionist historian Roland Huntford. He was the one who pointed out that someone would have had to undo those tent ties for Oates to go outside and be some time, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a strange mixture, this Tudors malarkey. The opening episode of the fourth and supposedly final series spent an age spinning through the back story as if earnestly trying to educate us in the history of the bloodthirsty English ruling family. Then the credits rolled and everything returned to business as usual, in other words murder, lust, sadism, gluttony, treachery and avarice.It makes for a televisual mixture bursting with calories and MSG, especially when combined with the opulent camerawork and Kerrygold Country Irish locations. It's a formula which has plainly rubbed off on other Read more ...
josh.spero
The Egyptian Government is investing in the arts, which would normally be a cause for celebration. However, in building the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, it feels like the country’s cultural budget is being spent on another new display case for its past rather than on encouraging a contemporary arts scene. The NMEC, which was first mooted in 1982 (the year after Sadat was assassinated, if that signifies anything today), will open this year in south-east Cairo, after seven years of construction, nine years since the foundation stone was laid.It has been designed as a tour d’horizon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty-five years after Rose Buck took what she thought was her final nostalgic stroll through the empty rooms of 165 Eaton Place in Belgravia, where she had served the Bellamy family for four decades, Jean Marsh has brought Rose back home in the BBC’s three-part remake of Upstairs Downstairs. Also aboard for this much-anticipated revival is Eileen Atkins, who was Marsh’s co-creator of the original version for LWT but was prevented by stage commitments from appearing in it. They were going to call it Behind the Green Baize Door and then Below Stairs before the familiar title was finally Read more ...
judith.flanders
The National Portrait Gallery is a national treasure. Not because it has nice pictures (although it does have that too), but because it has the most amazing archive. An archive that is, almost literally, a treasure trove. It is, of course, out of sight and therefore out of mind to the casual visitor. But for a history buff, there is a visceral thrill knowing that there are a million or so objects (the number is give-or-take), many of them only superficially catalogued. Anything may turn up.But even the NPG staff were a little startled to find that they were unknowingly storing part of a Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s amazing what you might have found in your average bathroom cabinet 100 years ago. For those niggling aches and pains, what could be more effective than a bottle of Bayer’s Heroin Hydrochloride? Or how about a soothing spoonful of Sydenham’s Laudanum? If you’re simply in need of a quick pick-me-up, a sip or three of Hall’s Coca Wine – the “Elixir of Life” (basically liquid cocaine) - might put a jolly spring in your step. Oh, and don’t forget those cocaine eyedrops after a particularly long day staring at the officer ledger.In your great-grandmother’s bathroom cabinet, you’ll find Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s taken 20 years for Ken Follett’s doorstopping saga to storm the little screen in the corner of the room. According to Rufus Sewell, playing a stonemason who knows about these things, it takes only 15 to knock up a spanking new Gothic cathedral complete with the latest in flying buttresses. Not that it would be fair to compare The Pillars of the Earth with the pillars of any of the great churches erected in England in the period under observation here. You don’t get lifeless gargoyles of this quality in the Middle Ages.In the restless pursuit of authenticity, a British cast has been hired Read more ...