19th century
Cotton: Global Threads, Whitworth Art GalleryMonday, 23 April 2012
Manchester was once known as Cottonopolis, since the city was once at the centre of the vast global industry reponsible for its growth and prosperity.The Whitworth Art Gallery, which is part of Manchester University, has in its collection a... Read more... |
DVD: Wuthering HeightsSunday, 08 April 2012
Andrea Arnold’s starkly naturalistic reboot of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece of 1847 isn’t the first costume drama of the last 20 years to scorn the heritage-culture approach. In 1995, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, one of the best but least fêted of the... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Dvořák, Ravel, Garth KnoxSaturday, 07 April 2012
Dvořák: Symphony No 7, In Nature’s Realm, Scherzo capriccioso Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics) Each of Dvořák’s last three symphonies is a wonder, and the Seventh is possibly the best of the lot. It’s a work... Read more... |
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, BBC TwoWednesday, 11 January 2012
You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much... Read more... |
Opinion: do we really need more classic novels adapted?Monday, 09 January 2012
Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19th-century but 18th will do, or early 20th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.Is there a crisis in the... Read more... |
Great Expectations, BBC One / True Stories: Sarah Palin - You Betcha!, More4Wednesday, 28 December 2011
Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip... Read more... |
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of ShadowsFriday, 16 December 2011
So overt it’s covert. That’s how the famous detective explains away the crassness of his disguises. In this newest instalment of the latest cinematic incarnation of the Holmesian myth, the detective rummages through the dressing-up box for silly... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Arts TheatreMonday, 12 December 2011
That a tale confronting society’s most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexpected: testimony either to the moral deviance of the general... Read more... |
Mysteries of LisbonSaturday, 10 December 2011
“This story is not my child, or my godchild. It is not a work of fiction. It is a diary of suffering,” a title says at the beginning of Raúl Ruiz’s magnificent Mysteries of Lisbon. A sombrely beautiful 19th-century costume drama spanning decades and... Read more... |
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, EdinburghFriday, 09 December 2011
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in... Read more... |
The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 09 December 2011
I don't want to get the blues at The Nutcracker of all ballets. It should be all snow and Christmas, flowers and presents, firelight, moonlight, candlelight and unearthly brilliance. What with the lush magic of the Birmingham Royal Ballet Nutcracker... Read more... |
A Hankering after Ghosts, Dickens and the Supernatural, British LibraryWednesday, 30 November 2011
Well, if you haven’t yet realised that 2012 is Dickens Central, there’s no hope for you. The 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth is still two months away, but Claire Tomalin’s biography has scampered out of the starting gate already, as has Robert... Read more... |
