biography
howard.male
Apart from the fact that it’s a razor-sharp piece of writing, what most delights and impresses me about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is how it gets under people’s skin. It has generated several books in fevered opposition to it and, needless to say, countless abusive emails land in the poor man’s inbox every day. If it wasn’t such a lucid, incisive and relentlessly powerful piece of work I doubt it would have got such fierce and sustained opposition.But what poor Richard needs now is not some other despiser of organised religion like myself singing his praises, but a well conceived Read more ...
josh.spero
He was uncompromising, honest, personal. He didn't like doing what he was told. He never followed fashion. Is this an accurate picture of Lucian Freud, or is it a description of almost every great artist who ever lived? The intensely banal voiceover for Lucian Freud: Painted Life on BBC Two which contained these insights (at least in the rough cut I viewed) made it seem like a painter out on his own, stringent in his artistic pursuit, was something we had never seen before. Thankfully the talking heads, intimates of Freud, created a properly personal portrait.The tension between the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize” - but there can surely be no debate about whether Dame Judi Dench deserves her status.Geoffrey Palmer said of his co-star for several years on the BBC sitcom As Time Goes By, “She's everything that everyone says about her” - and what they had to say about her in Charlie Stuart's The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench was overwhelmingly nice Read more ...
Claire Tomalin
Over their lifelong friendship Dickens sometimes mocked Forster and quarrelled furiously with him, but he was the only man to whom he confided his most private experiences and feelings, and he never ceased to trust him and rely on him. It was not a perfectly equal friendship, and Dickens sometimes took Forster for granted, and went through periods of coolness towards him, turning to another friend for a time; but when he was in real need of help it was always Forster to whom he went.They were always at ease with one another, with no need to pose or pretend, and much in common. Each knew that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not every evening one is invited to take A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, and the 90 minutes spent in the company of England’s greatest wit and original lexicographer pass in a whirl of aphorisms and expostulations, with a fair smattering of historical grandees thrown in for good measure. That this production is a two-hander is no impediment to appearances from Joshua Reynolds, Flora MacDonald, the Prince Regent and Oliver Goldsmith (“He goes on without knowing how he is to get off”), not forgetting Johnson’s beloved cat Hodge. It’s the kind of densely researched, lightly delivered evening Read more ...
hilary.whitney
The career of acclaimed tenor Ian Bostridge (b 1964) has taken a somewhat unusual trajectory. He was reading for a PhD on witchcraft at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before he decided to turn his hobby of singing into his profession, despite not having any formal musical training – he has admitted that he probably picked up several bad habits singing along to records of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.Initially he was best known for his performances of German lieder but his extensive repertoire also embraces opera - his operatic debut was as Lysander in Benjamin Britten's A Read more ...
charles.farley
Bobby Bland had waited through three difficult years, recording for three different labels with no hits and not much to show for it. He had waited through more than two boring years in the Army with no more than an honorable discharge and a bus ticket to Houston. And he had waited still another two years, practising, performing - persevering more than anything - before finally recording a hit record. But now, it seemed, they were coming fast and furious. Bobby had prevailed and his dream had finally come true. He was at last a star.On the strength of the number one hit "Farther Up the Road" Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a lovely moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Peter Quince assigns roles to his company of rude mechanicals. Unsatisfied with the part of the hero, Bottom interrupts, insisting he be allowed to play not only Pyramus but heroine Thisbe too, as well of course as the murderous lion. It’s hard not to see just a little of Bottom’s eagerness in Simon Callow’s Being Shakespeare – a one-man show penned by Jonathan Bate that casts Callow as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Lear, Falstaff and Puck.Originally conceived and performed as The Man From Stratford, Bate’s play has now been reworked Read more ...
fisun.guner
Albert Speer was Hitler’s most high-ranking war minister, but just how much was he complicit in Nazi atrocities? Thirty years after his death, and 16 after Gitta Sereny’s controversial biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Speer remains a most enigmatic figure. Made in 2005 and now released on DVD, Speer and Hitler: The Devil’s Architect (dir: Heinrich Breloer; English subtitles) is an award-winning three-part docudrama that attempts to unravel that enigma.Sebastian Koch, who starred in the outstanding Lives of Others (dir: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; 2006), plays Speer as the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics, religion and scientific philosophy, Donne’s life under James I holds up a mirror to the conflicted age that produced this extraordinary work of scholarship. Meshing the poet’s biography, his work and social history, Jonathan Holmes has produced a play whose scholarship and subject matter may be serious, but whose theatricality is poignantly, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found authority and expression in novels the world would have them unfit to read, let alone write. It’s an attractive legend, one that leans over the shoulders of Jane Eyre, of Cathy, Heathcliff and Helen Graham, reflecting their virgin-born passions back with all the greater intensity. Reversing this process, Polly Teale’s Brontë invites us instead to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.Henry’s ethnicity plays a big part in Cradle to Rave: A Musical Journey, as well, of course, his Read more ...