Oxford
CD: Foals - What Went DownSunday, 06 September 2015
Coming to Foals without the baggage – without knowing, for example, that they’re a British guitar band of mid-Noughties vintage – is a disconcerting experience, not least where fourth album What Went Down is concerned. Opening with a huge... Read more... |
The Secret World of Lewis Carroll, BBC TwoSunday, 01 February 2015
Alice is always with us; the most quoted work of literature, after the Bible and Shakespeare. In fact, Desert Island Discs should probably add Alice to the mandatory Bible and Shakespeare as an automatic inclusion for the survival kit. Now 150 years... Read more... |
First Episode, Jermyn Street TheatreSaturday, 01 November 2014
Rediscovered work offers aficionados a tantalising piece of the puzzle. Terence Rattigan’s callow debut, reborn after 80 years in obscurity, bears the hallmarks of his later plays, notably closeted ardour and the torment of unequal passion, but is... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Wilderness FestivalWednesday, 13 August 2014
Entering Wilderness is like stepping into the brain of Baz Luhrmann. It is a kaleidoscope of colours, swirling with noise and feathers, surreal in its array of vintage-bohemian-steampunk spectacle, and magical in its collaboration of the arts and... Read more... |
Endeavour, Series 2, ITVSunday, 30 March 2014
The last time the whippersnapper Morse was on our screens he was getting (a) orphaned and (b) shot. This double dose of pain seemed a bit punitive, but then when sorrows come they come not single spies. The second series of Endeavour seems... Read more... |
Master Drawings, Ashmolean Museum, OxfordSunday, 26 May 2013
Michelangelo evidently regarded drawing as the foundation of not only painting and sculpture but of “architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all science”. His all-encompassing claim is subtly demonstrated in this... Read more... |
Endeavour, Series 1, ITVMonday, 15 April 2013
Where will it end? Inspector Morse keeled over all the way back in the year 2000. Then the faintly unimaginable happened. Morse’s plodding sidekick Lewis got a promotion and started solving Oxford’s apparently inexhaustible supply of murders himself... Read more... |
Inspector Morse's Last RoundSunday, 14 April 2013
Oxford. A glum afternoon in early spring, 2000. Tourists clogging the city’s arteries. On a terrace overlooking the river Cherwell, a tour guide finishes her spiel and shepherds a flock of pensioners on to the next destination. A lone squat figure... Read more... |
Lewis, The Final Episode, ITVTuesday, 12 February 2013
I wonder if ITV ever imagined this Inspector Morse spin-off would last seven series? The opening pair of episodes in this valedictory season of Lewis still clocked over eight million viewers, though the numbers have subsided a bit since. Future one-... Read more... |
DVD: American FriendsTuesday, 20 November 2012
Michael Palin's adventures in period drama as star and co-writer, with director Tristram Powell, pass a pleasant if forgettable hour and a half. The main thread – repressed Englishman loosens up abroad – links other familiar elements: the closeted... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Ride, Juliette Gréco, Krzysztof Komeda, Priscilla ParisSunday, 19 August 2012
Ride: Going Blank AgainKieron TylerWhen Oxfordshire’s Ride arrived in the shops via Creation Records, they were the sonic little brothers to label-mates My Bloody Valentine. But their second album, 1992’s Going Blank Again, ploughed its own path,... Read more... |
Wonderland: Young, Bright and on the Right, BBC TwoFriday, 10 August 2012
In the debating chambers and committee rooms of the Conservative Associations of Oxford and Cambridge lurk the Children of Cameron. The current cabinet is to a large extent an Oxbridge Old Boys club and succeeding generations are already being... Read more... |
