Victorian
Prince Albert: A Victorian Hero Revealed, Channel 4 review - dramatic documentary filled with intelligent detailSaturday, 24 August 2019
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (... Read more... |
Blu-ray: My Brilliant CareerTuesday, 11 June 2019
Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen... Read more... |
Victoria, Northern Ballet, Sadler's Wells - A queen re-instated, once againThursday, 28 March 2019
Given that the life of Queen Victoria spanned the best part of a century, the first task for any biographer is to hack a path through the mountain of facts. It ought to help that the queen was a prolific diarist. Too bad for choreographer Cathy... Read more... |
Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Britain review - time for a rethink?Monday, 12 November 2018
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up... Read more... |
The Sweet Science of Bruising, Southwark Playhouse review - boxing cleverSaturday, 06 October 2018
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past. Joy Wilkinson's superb new drama, The Sweet Science of Bruising, comes to the Southwark... Read more... |
Victorian Giants, National Portrait Gallery review - pioneers of photographyThursday, 15 March 2018
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel. The... Read more... |
Jenny Uglow: Mr Lear - A Life of Art and Nonsense review - a lonely Victorian life, so richly illustratedSunday, 17 December 2017
Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and immensely energetic life of a polymath artist. She builds her narrative on an enormous plethora of primary sources – his marvellous illustrated... Read more... |
The Exhibition Road Quarter review, V&A - an intelligent and much needed expansionMonday, 03 July 2017
Oh those Victorians! Hail Prince Albert whose far-sighted ambition led to Albertopolis, embracing museums, galleries, universities and the Royal Albert Hall. And what in the early 21st century do you do with the Victoria & Albert Museum... Read more... |
Highlights from Photo London 2017 - virtual reality meets vintage treasureSaturday, 20 May 2017
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost... Read more... |
Timeshift: Flights of Fancy - Pigeons and the British, BBC FourWednesday, 08 February 2017
Pigeons were described in this riveting programme as man’s best feathered friends, as well as an urban pest: the 35,000 of them that used to flock round Trafalgar Square deposited some 390 tons of unharvested guano – bird poo, in simpler words –... Read more... |
Lockwood Kipling, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 21 January 2017
From India, here is a hoard of what really looks like treasure, much of it emerging into the light of day after decades, if not a century. Jewellery, sculpture, textiles, paintings, carvings, architectural fragments, domestic interiors, metalwork,... Read more... |
Dark Angel, ITVTuesday, 01 November 2016
Having served her time as dutiful, self-effacing Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, here's Joanne Froggatt grasping with both hands the role of Mary Ann Cotton, "Britain's first female serial killer". No more wearing herself out desperately trying to save... Read more... |
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