education
Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earths review - a whole new worldThursday, 18 April 2024Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a few hundred of our human years ago. Ever since, in... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Beautiful ThingTuesday, 19 March 2024Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct... Read more... |
Brian Klaas: Fluke review - why things happen, and can we stop them?Saturday, 27 January 2024One day in the early 90s I accepted the offer of a lift from a friend to a university open day I hadn’t been planning to go to. I ended up attending that university and there met my wife, and if I hadn’t done that my life would have been very... Read more... |
Caspar Henderson: A Book of Noises - Notes on the Auraculous review - a call to earsThursday, 05 October 2023Have you ever considered the sheer range of sounds? You may think of deliberate human efforts to move the air: music and song, poetry or baby talk, cries and whispers. Other human-made noises come to mind: sirens, bells, fireworks; the hum of the... Read more... |
Helen Czerski: Blue Machine review - how the ocean worksTuesday, 06 June 2023If you cannot even step into the same river twice, how to take the measure of the ocean? Dipping your toes at the beach is irresistible, but uninformative. Sampling stuff out at sea helps more, but you have to get serious. Consider the Continuous... Read more... |
First Person: Royal Academy of Music Principal Jonathan Freeman-Attwood on why a conservatoire should make recordingsWednesday, 11 January 2023Why is it important for a music conservatoire to make recordings? What is the educational context? These are questions we have continued to reflect upon at the Royal Academy of Music – celebrating its bicentenary this year – since we took our first... Read more... |
First Person: composer and co-founder of The Multi-Story Orchestra Kate Whitley on car-park creativityMonday, 07 November 2022We started The Multi-Story Orchestra back in 2011 with a group of friends when we’d left university. Conductor Christopher Stark and I basically wanted to find new ways to play orchestral music that would escape formal concert halls and be more... Read more... |
The Corn Is Green, National Theatre review – Nicola Walker teaches a life lessonMonday, 25 April 2022Let’s talk repertoire. Over the past decade the range of British plays, especially those from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, has shrunk in state-subsidized theatres. You can no longer easily see work by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Restoration... Read more... |
Playground review - bleak but brilliant schoolyard dramaThursday, 21 April 2022Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground... Read more... |
The Teacher, Channel 5 review - inappropriate behaviour in the school environmentTuesday, 01 February 2022Having had her own problems with alcohol and anxiety, Sheridan Smith no doubt felt some kinship with Jenna Garvey, the central character she plays in The Teacher. Evidently a talented educator who inspires loyalty and enthusiasm in her pupils, Jenna... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Another RoundTuesday, 05 October 2021Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen left me dumbstruck in the cinema in 1998 with its brilliant depiction of an incestuous, viciously glamorous family imploding over a family celebration. At the time, I hoped that my Danish mother never saw what looked, to... Read more... |
Blu-ray: To Sir, with LoveTuesday, 27 April 2021To Sir, With Love is a very loose adaptation of ER Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel. Reflecting on his experiences as a teacher in London’s East End in the late 1940s, Braithwaite’s commentary (one of two provided here) advises us that “as you... Read more... |
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