Arts and Culture

The Vengaboys are perhaps Rotterdam’s best known recent export, but the city also has its very own curious genre, SOPHIA DEBOICK reports Exterior view of the Rotterdam Ahoy, the official venue for the planned Eurovision Song Contest 2020 which has been cancelled due to coronavirus. (Photo by Robin Utrecht/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) – Credit: […]

Dora Bryan was a brilliant and unpretentious British actress. But TIM WALKER says it was life’s miseries which made her a comedy genius. Dora Bryan, visiting Norfolk in 2005. Photo: Bill Darnell – Credit: Archant � 2005 Dora Bryan was cheerful, unpretentious and as British as fish and chips. She ran a rambling hotel on […]

TIM WALKER on a man who never lost that childlike need to please and to make people happy. I first met Donald Sinden in the mid-1980s when I showed up too early at his home in Golders Green in north London. He came to the door in his dressing gown and slippers and his hair […]

The music of the Big Apple is every bit as brash, bold and brilliant as the city itself, says Sophia Deboick. The musical soul of New York is the musical soul of America. The vagaries of 20th century history have rarely dented the confident, even arrogant, spirit of the music from and about the city, […]

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD on an epic Titian blockbuster exhibition almost 500 years in the making – for which we will now have to wait a little longer. Titian’s ‘Danae’ (1551-53). Picture: Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London – Credit: Archant The memo from the artist Titian to Philip II of Spain just before Christmas in 1574 is […]

TIM WALKER looks into the life and career of Christopher Lee, best known for his portrayal Dracula. There are certain parts – and Dracula is one of them – that require of the actor playing them some sense of being in on the joke with film-goers. Christopher Lee never saw anything funny about what was […]

Actor and force of nature Frances Barber talks to TIM WALKER about Twitter battles, her tangled relationship with Labour and the hedonistic thought driving her through lockdown. At about this time, Frances Barber would have got back refreshed from a yoga retreat in Sri Lanka and be beginning rehearsals for a new play that Mark […]

With the virus restrictions preventing more than a brief daily stroll, CHARLIE CONNELLY goes in search of books that provide a bit more of a sense of journey. I miss walking. I mean, I get out once a day for a mooch about but it’s the same short route every time, nodding at the same […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes surprising languages spoken by some our greatest composers. Music is sometimes said to be the universal language; and it is certainly true that the music of the great classical composers is as well known these days in China, South Korea and Japan as it is in its original European homeland. […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK explores the musical heritage of the Japanese capital through two of its most enchanting talents. Tokyo – a kaleidoscope of neon and skyscrapers – was a megacity even in the 18th century, when the population of the city then known as Edo topped one million, 50 years before London reached that milestone. With […]

A chance lockdown discovery leads CHARLIE CONNELLY down memory lane to the Danish castle that inspired the Bard. We all have little jobs around the house that we’ve planning to get around to – for years in some cases. One of mine was going through a big box of old DVDs that needed sorting out […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some of the ways Welsh and English have stayed apart. The name of the village of Betws-y-Coed in North Wales means ‘prayer-house (in) the trees’. Coed, ‘trees’, is the plural of coeden, ‘tree’. This is an intriguing grammatical fact. In the languages of the world generally, plural forms of nouns are normally […]

From the Hippodrome to the Pavilion to the Corn Exchange, Brighton’s love for music is deep-rooted in the city’s history. Brighton was a byword for hedonism long before big beat became the city’s biggest export. It was the sea that made it so, sea bathing being all the rage among the 18th century elite and […]

TIM WALKER recounts meeting Harry Andrews, an actor who never went public about his sexuality. When I arrived at the home of Harry Andrews in the Sussex countryside, I was greeted at the door by his lover of the past 30 years, who led me into the living room where the ‘tough guy’ star of […]

The city renowned as Israel’s 24-hour capital has produced music fit for its reputation, says SOPHIA DEBOICK In few places has music been so important in defining a nation as in Israel. As early as the late 19th century, well before the state’s foundation in 1948, music was seen as a way to promote unity […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a new book which takes us to a much storied corner of Europe. Confinement breeds wanderlust. If the current situation is teaching us anything positive it’s how to appreciate freedoms of which we thought practically nothing before, from seeing pasta on the shelves in a supermarket to throwing some clothes into a […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the names of English counties and US states. It makes perfectly good sense that the names of many of the counties of England should have their origins in the dominant language of the country, English. Rather obviously, Norfolk was originally two English words, north folk, and similarly Suffolk derives from south folk. […]

TIM WALKER recounts interviewing American actress Lauren Bacall, whose life remained shaped by Humphrey Bogart even after his death. Lauren Bacall’s publicist was adamant that the star would talk to me about any subject under the sun, except her first husband, Humphrey Bogart. ‘She feels she’s talked about him quite enough,’ he said. ‘So I’d […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how some ‘antiquated’ words drop out of use In George Borrow’s 1843 book The Bible in Spain, he reports one of his interlocutors, a servant, as saying to him: ‘Though I have been turned out of so many families, I was never turned out of that one; and though I left it […]

A stunning musical heritage is one of the things that keeps this disparate nation together – even through the hard times. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports ‘Music is our cotton, our gold and our diamonds,’ says Grammy-winning Malian musician Toumani Diabaté, a key ambassador for the music of his homeland. Landlocked and half desert, Mali boasts a […]

With no more plays to review, TIM WALKER reviews the stars he’s met, starting with Roger Moore and one role that really mattered to him The director Stephen Unwin has a question he puts to people who want to work for him on his productions. ‘Don’t you just love stars?’ he’ll say, smiling broadly. All […]

Even on its first night, Sebastian Barry’s powerful piece about the redemptive power of human spirit was living on borrowed time. Trafalgar Studios, London The despair at the first night of On Blueberry Hill was all-pervading, if unspoken. It was, however, clear enough on the faces of the celebs who posed for pictures on the […]

How Italians are using their shared musical heritage to get through a national crisis. Medical staff from Rome’s Forlanini Hospital step out with protective masks to join a flash mob performance of “Volare”. Picture: Getty Images – Credit: Corbis via Getty Images Across Italy, music has been connecting people as 60 million have been confined […]

TIM WALKER reviews Blithe Spirit at Duke of York’s in London – now closed due to coronavirus. So many people these days seem to want so many other people ‘to go back to where they came from’ 
that the phrase is becoming wearying, but poor old Charles Condomine has more legitimate reason to use it […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY reviews Graham Swift’s latest novel, a touching evocation of the end of an epoch Crowds flocking to a coastal seaside resort in September 1980. – Credit: Archant Brighton was characteristically busy during the summer season of 1959. As well as the ice creams, deck chairs and dodgems there was a huge choice of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes confusing way in which surnames seem to indicate nationality People with the surname Inglis are usually Scottish. That might seem rather strange, because the name is the Scots-language word for ‘English’ – and why would Scottish people have been called Inglis? But actually of course there would be no point […]

The Icelandic capital has had a cultural impact out of all proportion with its size, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Iceland’s iconic natural features belie the new dance craze taking the capital by storm. PHOTO: C Hutchinson – Credit: Archant Rarely has the world needed a silly dance craze more, and Iceland – a place of deep […]

JASON SOLOMONS talks to the director of Radioactive, a powerful film not only about the pioneering scientist but her research that changed the world Marie Sklodowka Curie (1867 – 1934) in her laboratory. She shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre for their work in radioactivity. In 1911 she became […]