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 Counsellor by attending meetings online. I am writing, as usual – all too-regular obituaries, entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and occasional … [Read more...]
Obituary Hugh Cecil
Search The Times and The Sunday TimesToday’s sections Past six daysM articlesTimes+My account RegisterOBITUARY Historian and biographer with a Bloomsbury background who unearthed forgotten writers of the First World War Thursday April 02 2020, 12.00am, The TimesBooksHistory Hugh Cecil had a special sympathy for the lost generation of young soldiers and writers of the … [Read more...]
The Young Rembrandt: not a prodigy
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 twenty-something artist. My favourite of these is a posturing 1630 “Self-portrait in a cap, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.” You can just imagine how many hours it took of him looking in a … [Read more...]
She was just a Miller’s daughter: ENO revives a middle-period Verdi
The English National Opera company is having a tough old time. Its personnel keep changing, its huge building, the London Coliseum is a headache to maintain and fill, and its audience is too old. It has resorted to cast list handouts whose reverse patronises newcomers by telling them how to behave at the opera. And its big problem is its bone-head commitment to singing in English. With the … [Read more...]
From caftan to opera hat: the greatest living playwright takes on the Jewish bourgeoisie and its destruction
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 special in the long history of the British theatre or, indeed, in the chronicles of theatre. This misses the significance, not of the … [Read more...]
Beckett: A bit of Rough at the Old Vic
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 very noticeable that the press night audience for the Samuel Beckett double-bill was much younger than when I last reviewed a production here: it is, of course, the “Harry Potter” effect. I am a Harry Potter virgin; but I can understand why the … [Read more...]
The Mystery/History of the Bottle in the Box
On Thursday, 23rd January, we had a small party at Millwood Farm. Though as it happened all our guests had our recovered good health to celebrate, that was not the reason for the gathering. Our excuse to dine on foie gras, tomato salad and burrata, and long-cooked shoulder of salt marsh lamb with borlotti beans from the garden, was to drink a special bottle, one that had been in my cellar for a … [Read more...]
How Brilliant Are My Friends, After All?
As I’ve relished all four volumes of the identity-mysterious Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, I was more than willing to sit through the four/five hour double-bill of the National Theatre’s production of My Brilliant Friend Parts One and Two – and today I’ve got the sore bum to prove I finished the drama marathon. I love Naples, from discovering its hardware-shop-front restaurants, to walking … [Read more...]
La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, Or did it ever do anyway?
Jean Giraudoux’ 1935 play’s title in English claims “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place,” but his tragedy’s use of the future tense is actually a denial of Cassandra’s prophecy – in the face of all the evidence that an even worse war was to begin shortly. For the sharp-witted French playwright the Homeric/Virgilian parallels were with the foibles, follies and bad faith of the intellectuals and … [Read more...]
Not Such A Little List
ENO revives Jonathan Miller's 1986 Mikado Despite some newsworthy casting, there don’t seem to have been many reviews of the current revival of Sir Jonathan Miller’s bankable production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the English National Opera. Which is a little odd, because the title part of the emperor of Japan is being sung by Sir John Tomlinson. It is the 50th operatic role sung … [Read more...]