Victorian
Back in Time for the Corner Shop, BBC Two review - open all hours with the Ardern familyWednesday, 26 February 2020
Since Back in Time for Dinner in 2015, this BBC Two social history strand in which families travel into a recreated past to experience ways in which society, leisure and lifestyles have changed has proved a robust perennial. Its latest iteration,... Read more... |
The Personal History of David Copperfield review – top-drawer DickensFriday, 24 January 2020
Armando Iannucci’s move away from the contemporary political satires that made his name, first signalled by his bold, uproariously brilliant Death of Stalin, continues apace with a Dickens adaptation that feels quietly radical. It’s not just... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Old Vic Theatre review - the festive favourite mixes gloom with merrimentThursday, 05 December 2019
"Dickensian" commonly means both sentimental Victorian, apple-cheeked family perfection (especially at Christmas) and abject poverty. The story of Scrooge encompasses both as the old curmudgeon learns to mend his miserly ways and open his heart to... Read more... |
The Aeronauts review - up, up and okayThursday, 07 November 2019
Wild Rose director Tom Harper blends fact with fiction in a charming Victorian ballooning adventure that reunites Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones for the first time since The Theory of Everything.Redmayne gives an earnest performance as the real-... Read more... |
Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, National Portrait Gallery review – a fascinating glimpse behind the scenesMonday, 21 October 2019
Focusing on twelve women who played a key role in the lives of Pre-Raphaelite painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, this timely exhibition begins with a whimper and ends with a bang. First up at the... Read more... |
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... |
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