fri 18/07/2025

Ismene Brown

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Bio
Dr Ismene Brown designed and launched the original version of The Arts Desk in 2009, and was the Site Coordinator and a board director for three years, as well as its dance editor. A musician trained at the Royal College of Music, she has been dance critic for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, and has also written for TAD on classical music, theatre, TV and film. Since then she has gained an MA at UCL and DPhil at Oxford University for work on the Soviet politician and arts minister Ekaterina Furtseva.

Articles By Ismene Brown

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'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Harvest review - blood, barley and adaptation

Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like...

Poor Clare, Orange Tree Theatre review - saints cajole us si...

What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons...

That Bastard, Puccini!, Park Theatre review - inventive comi...

Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the...

Hamlet, Buxton International Festival review - how to re-ima...

Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a...

Friendship review - toxic buddy alert

The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have...

Album: Slikback - Attrition

In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the...

Interview: Quinteto Astor Piazzolla on playing in London and...

“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered...

Sir Brian Clarke (1953-2025) - a personal tribute

Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, ground-...

S/HE IS STILL HER/E - The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documen...

“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile...