Arts and Culture

The meaning of the word have has changed over the centuries to denote more dynamic activities, says PETER TRUDGILL At Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, passengers are often urged – in announcements made by Dutch people speaking English – to keep their boarding-passes ready. At British airports, passengers are generally asked to have their boarding-passes ready. American […]

The great city is known for melding different cultural influences, says SOPHIA DEBOICK, but that does not mean it lacks a voice of its own. Mumbai is the entertainment capital of India, the home of a film industry that has become one of the country’s cultural touchstones. Yet Bollywood, like the city itself, is the […]

A new film, to be broadcast on Holocaust Memorial Day, tells the little-known story of a group of children taken from the death camps to the Lake District. JASON SOLOMONS talks to the team behind this moving story. A scene from the production. Photo: Helen Sloan / BBC – Credit: Archant In August 1945, Britain […]

RAGS the musical had a great deal of potential, but the latest performance was an open-heart surgery gone wrong, writes TIM WALKER. Often considered to be one of the worst songs of all time, MacArthur Park has a special place in my heart. Jimmy Webb wrote a big, bold and beautiful score, but also the […]

TIM WALKER reviews Coming Clean – a performance at Trafalgar Studios in London until February 1st. If there’s one actress it’s always enlightening to interview, it’s Dame Eileen Atkins. “Infidelity,” she told me, “is one of the last things you should fall out with someone over.” That’s not the modus vivendi agreed by Tony (Lee […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles on the Frenchman rescued from obscurity by a chance discovery in a Normandy dairy shed. By the spring of 1929 Jean-Placide Mauclaire had grown used to being given old reels of film. The previous year he had opened Studio 28, an art house cinema in the Montmartre district of Paris that quickly […]

The city’s legendarily sweaty pub circuit has produced some unforgettable rock sounds, some macho, some political and some sentimental. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. For thousands for years, Sydney was the dominion of the Eora nation, but it took only 100 years for that to be irrevocably changed and for the rich musical culture of indigenous Australians […]

The great European astronomer Caroline Herschel discovered more than eight comets. CHARLIE CONNELLY adds to her star-borne legacy “At the heavens there is no getting, for the high roofs of the opposite houses.” It was Boxing Day, 1822, when Caroline Herschel wrote these words in a letter to her nephew. She was 72 years old […]

The German city has had a long association with elegance and fashion, and a more recent one with ground-breaking music. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Berlin might have a reputation as the gritty home of Germany’s musical cutting edge, but on the other side of the country is a small, chic city that has produced some of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a rural region of Ireland where a dialect took root and remained for centuries The English language came into being in Britain, and spent its first 700 years on this island. When it did then start spreading beyond these shores, this was to the neighbouring island of Ireland. This first expansion of […]

TIM WALKER says theatre is vital for national morale – and lists his favourite musicals, dramas, and everything stage-centric from the last twelve months. This is the time of year when theatre critics get to say what productions they most enjoyed over the preceding 12 months, and, if you bear with me, I’ll come to […]

Privilege can have drawbacks, as one member of the Italian aristocracy who wanted to carve out her own legacy found. CHARLIE CONNELLY reports on the life of Maria Teresa de Filippis. Maria Teresa de Filippis was the youngest of five siblings, the daughter of an Italian count who had made a fortune in engineering. She […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the archipelago which helped develop the language now spoken in Greece. Great Britain started decolonising its imperial possessions in a significant way in 1947, when British India became the two independent states of India and Pakistan. But there is a very interesting example of British decolonisation which comes from well before that […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the sounds of the Scottish capital Princess Street Garden and Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland When: 16 Jul 2015 – Credit: Archant In the 17th century, Scotland rediscovered itself, and Edinburgh was the centre of that rediscovery. The 1739 publication of A Treatise of Human Nature, by the city’s own David Hume heralded […]

TIM WALKER reviews a performance of the Three Sisters at the National Theatre. Quite possibly in response to the vacuity of the times in which we live, the National Theatre seems to have adopted a policy of staging very long, cerebral and earnest productions. Inua Ellams’ adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters – running to three […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles the great Dane Victor Borge. During the last year of the 20th century Victor Borge played 60 concerts. He was 90 years old. His material, a mixture of deft musical sketches and parodies interspersed with drily humorous quips and monologues, hadn’t changed much since he first began performing it in his native […]

A dilution of Dickens, TIM WALKER reviews a stage production of A Christmas Carol. There’s a peculiar intimacy to A Christmas Carol. It’s Charles Dickens holding his readers by the scruff of the neck, saying he knows about the weaknesses of each and every one of them, and warning that if they don’t mend their […]

Never mind the musicians the capital has produced, SOPHIA DEBOICK concentrates on the songs it has inspired. While London has been an international musical hub since the days of Handel, the legendary albums made and visionaries born there countless, it is as a songwriting subject that the city has been most intriguing. London’s landmarks have […]

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD on a new exhibition seeking to revive the reputation of Jessica Dismorr and others eclipsed both by their male counterparts and global events. The electricity was off because the bill was unpaid, the friends sat on crates scavenged from the nearby fruit and veg market in old Covent Garden, but when the first […]

In English, the word can be frustratingly imprecise. As PETER TRUDGILL reports, other languages have gone to greater lengths to ensure exactitude. A few years ago, the Greek translator of a book I had written got in touch to ask if a “cousin” I had referred to in the text was a man or a […]

Phil Spector was responsible for one of the greatest Christmas records ever made. SOPHIA DEBOICK tells the story and asks if we must reassess it in the light of his later murder conviction. He was the one producer deserving of the overused term ‘genius’, but Phil Spector will spend Christmas – and his 80th birthday […]

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD on the new exhibition showcasing the influence of two Roman artists who pioneered the exuberance and ebullience of the ornate style. A portrait of the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Picture: Biblioteca Marucelliana – Credit: Archant The goddess Medusa had a look so poisonous it turned men to stone. But she met […]

charlie connelly attempts to buck the current trend for cultural stalemates, by picking the best.. and worst of 2019’s literary offerings. The Capital by Robert Menasse. Picture: MacLehose – Credit: Archant As politics grows ever more cutthroat, with grandmothers climbed over, ambition getting ever more naked and politicians competing with each other to tell the […]

Max Sebald was a writer who never experienced the horrors of the 20th century but in his writings he could never escape them. CHARLIE CONNELLY reports on his life. Author and academic professor WG ‘Max’ Sebald, 57, who was killed after his car was involved in a head-on collision with a lorry in December 2001. […]

Jamaica’s capital not only gave the world one of its greatest music stars, it produced a sound that has taken root around the globe. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports Kingston teenagers Althea and Donna had a No.1 with Uptown Top Ranking in 1977. Picture: Fin Costello/Redfems – Credit: Archant Since the middle of the last century, music […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the languages of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and how they interact. The Baltic States are, from north to south along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We often refer to them by this collective name as if they formed some kind of unity – and in […]

The Russian city has not only produced brilliant music, but – amid horrors of war – one of history’s greatest performances. Saint Petersburg is a city of beauty and brutality. Peter the Great founded his grand capital in 1703 as a Baltic port city that “hack[ed] a window through to Europe”. But while it took […]

The big budget spectacular is lavish and extravagant – but is failed by its lack of heart. Shaftesbury Theatre, London, until May 30 Even down to the trendy ampersand in the title, & Juliet appears to have been created not by lyricists and composers, but advertising men and focus groups. It’s great of course that […]

Duke of York’s Theatre, London, until February 29. On a local newspaper, I once reported on a Townswomen’s Guild’s attempt to re-enact the Battle of Britain. I sat for nearly an hour transfixed as about a dozen old girls, with papier-mâché wings attached to their shoulders, threw themselves into the ambitious project with manic intensity. […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life and tragic fate of Etty Hillesum, who turned down opportunities to go into hiding before her murder at Auschwitz. On a hot day in early September 1943 a train moved slowly across the flat Dutch countryside, clanking slowly along rails that shimmered in the heat. For the thousand Jews crammed […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the origins of many of our most common surnames… and much more besides There are quite a lot of people in Great Britain, and in other English-speaking parts of the world, who have surnames ending in -kins or -kinson: Atkins, Dickinson, Jenkins, Parkinson, Simkins, Tomkinson, Watkins, Wilkinson – and plenty more. If […]

Classical music may have played a central role in Finland’s history, but so has classic rock. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Finland is a land of extremes. With a population of five-and-a-half million, it is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union, and it is also the EU’s most northerly country, its northernmost third lying […]