Andrew Lycett: Wilkie Collins, A Life of Sensation (Hutchinson, 544 pp.) A nondescript street near Regent’s Park in London bears a blue plaque. It uses the old, postwar style, with a minimum of information: ‘Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), novelist, lived here’. Whenever I pass it, I always wonder, if I only
Category: Journalism
In 2007/8 the Tate had a splendid Peter Doig show. In honour of his Edinburgh retrospective, I am resurrecting my TLS review. *** One of the quietest but most resonant presences on the art scene since the early 1990s has been Peter Doig. He is resolutely unfashionable: not just a
Akram Khan Company: iTMOi Royal Ballet: Hansel and Gretel Royal Ballet: Raven Girl, Symphony in C Audrey Niffenegger, Raven Girl (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) The hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring may, for dance-goers, have inspired a certain dread. The rhythmic power of Stravinsky’s music is
The hot exhibition ticket in London is the British Museum’s Pompeii show. For the rest of the summer, many dates have only late-evening tickets available. So the expanding reach of cinema experience of live events (previously confined to opera, dance and theatre) is very welcome. We open to hustle-bustle music,
Van Gogh at Work: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Marije Vellekoop, with Nienke Bakker; translated by Ted Alkins, Michael Hoyle and Beverley Jackson (304pp. Brussels: Mercatorfonds. £40) On May Day, thousands of Amsterdammers queued in the spring sunshine as the Van Gogh Museum formally reopened its doors after a seven-month refit,
My great-grandmother used to say, “In the fall, leaves fall,” meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a
Poor Nijinsky. Poor sad, mad, vanished Nijinsky. His career was astonishingly brief, the trail that was left in his meteoric wake so persistent it is hard to believe he danced for little more than seven years. He was born in 1889 or 1890, to Polish dancers working in Russia (Nijinsky
Marketing leaves nothing untouched in the twenty-first century. Tamara Rojo, the newly appointed director of English National Ballet, knows this well and proficiently plays the game. Thus for her first piece of programming, she has linked three works by an overarching title, appearing to give coherence to an evening that