wed 25/12/2024

landscape

Monet and London, Courtauld Gallery review - utterly sublime smog

In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on...

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This Is The Kit, Barbican review - familiarity and charm

Coming at the end of a long year’s gigging, This Is The Kit’s performance at the Barbican on Saturday night was an excellent demonstration of the whole band’s familial, compelling musicianship.Support came from The Raincoats’ Gina Birch (and friends...

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Christine Tobin, EFG London Jazz Festival, World Heart Beat review - an enchanting ode to home

This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human...

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A Year in a Field review - exemplary eco-doc

A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the...

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Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes

On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.Masud is, amongst other...

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Extract: The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture by Andrew Mellor

“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite...

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Annie Proulx: Fen, Bog & Swamp review - defending the wetlands' bounty

Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp sees the Pulitzer-winning novelist join a number of authors decrying the ecological devastation we’re wreaking on the planet. James Rebanks’ English Pastoral argued for radical agricultural rethink. Journalist...

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Bronwyn Adcock: Currowan review - a fire foretold, a warning delivered

In 2019 Australia endured the hottest, driest year since records began and their bushfire season escalated with unprecedented intensity. The fires and pyro-connective storms that swept the country claimed 33 lives (and a further 400 from smoke...

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Phoebe Power: Book of Days review - the clack of walking poles, the clink of scallop shell

The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a...

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Extract: Where My Feet Fall - Going For A Walk in Twenty Stories

I began work on Where My Feet Fall a few months into the pandemic of 2020. After lockdown was announced we all became better walkers, and the collection took on greater resonance.The writers I selected were invited to do one of two things – recall a...

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Wuthering Heights, National Theatre review - too much heat, not enough light

“If you want romance,” the cast of Emma Rice’s new version of Wuthering Heights say in unison just after the interval, “go to Cornwall.” They’re using the modern definition of romance, of course – Emily Brontë’s novel is full of the original meaning...

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Extract from Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe, introduced and edited by Duncan Minshull

Wandering, ambling, sauntering. The last, least heard of the three, captures a sense of leisurely aimlessness: a jolly meander unbound by destination, admitting none of the qualms of timekeeping or pacing. In his latest anthology, sequel to Beneath...

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