Apr 2, 2020 | Blog
Historian and biographer with a Bloomsbury background who unearthed forgotten writers of the First World War Hugh Cecil wrote The Flower of Battle Hugh Cecil had a special sympathy for the lost generation of young soldiers and writers of the First World War. When he...
Mar 31, 2020 | Blog
A pre-lockdown magazine feature The Amazon delivery guy rang the bell, then scampered off to safety behind the garden gate, a good distance, but not so far that he couldn’t hear and acknowledge my “thank you.” My wife is so far coping with her duties as a Parish...
Mar 5, 2020 | Blog
Self-portrait in a cap, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, 1630 When you walk down one corridor in the current Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition of Young Rembrandt you see half a dozen tiny-to-small, though not quite postage stamp-size etchings, which are self-portraits of the...
Feb 24, 2020 | Blog
A scene from Luisa Miller by Giuseppe Verdi @ London Coliseum. An English National Opera production. Directed by Barbora Horakova. Conductor, Alexander Joel. ©Tristram Kenton The English National Opera company is having a tough old time. Its personnel keep changing,...
Feb 23, 2020 | Blog
There’s something a bit ho-hum, mean and pinched about the reception of Sir Tom Stoppard’s new (and, he says, perhaps final play), Leopoldstadt. A minority has treated its opening this February in the 1899 Wyndham’s Theatre as a perfectly ordinary event, nothing...
Feb 5, 2020 | Blog
February 5, 2020 by Paul Levy Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe in Rough for Theatre II (Photo Manuel Hardan) For one reason or another, we hadn’t been to the Old Vic since the daft unisex loos were installed, and, said my wife, “Something else has changed.” It was...
