Archive
Jasper Rees
Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the most inscrutable. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan – you know where you are with them, and have done for years. But the unifying theme of Barnes’s work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it’s an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.The one time I met Auberon Waugh, founder of The Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years’ time. This would have been about 20 years ago Read more ...
Ismene Brown
"It was more than just 'I love you'," Suzanne Farrell, America's nonpareil ballerina, the love and inspiration of 20th-century ballet's greatest choreographer, is telling me at breakfast in a little bar in Lee, Massachusetts. "When people ask me to explain about George Balanchine and myself, I can't put it into words. As Mr B said, 'You don't ask a rose to explain itself.' Some things are unexplainable. Perhaps if you analysed it, you would destroy it."On her 15th birthday, this ballet-crazy Cincinnati girl auditioned in New York for Balanchine, the world-famous choreographer-director 41 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If you tell a tall, whisper-slim young woman of 31 that she has been described as "the soul of Russia", it is understandable that she looks startled. Two huge, smoke-grey eyes cast a doubtful glance at me, and she murmurs in Russian. Her translator announces: "That is a very serious declaration."So it is. And yet Uliana Lopatkina, despite her tender age, is now lionised almost universally as the greatest ballerina today in Russia, a country where they know about such things. Effortlessly, it seems, in the 10 years since a 5ft 9in beanpole with a square jaw and an apparently boneless body Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Clowns are supposed to be chubby, grinning, funny, with anarchic hair and big red noses, like Coco. Or they are Chaplin-types, oppressed little city folk mutely combating the vast machines of the working life. They are not generally shaven-headed skinny men and women with beaky noses, starved cheekbones, and a way of life so severely monastic that it would drive you or me stark staring mad.But then Derevo are not ordinary clowns. If you have seen either of this Russian company’s two productions that have visited London and Edinburgh in recent years you will know this. The Red Zone was an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wayne Eagling was famous for many things in his 25-year career at the Royal Ballet - not least for his rich girlfriends. There was Isabel Goldsmith, daughter of the late Sir James; there was Francesca Thyssen, with whom he lived for five years. "Who's now the Archduchess of Austria... Yes," he says, with a note of surprise in his voice, "I could ask myself, why aren't I retired in luxury, sitting in Saint Tropez right now?" Instead of sitting in Amsterdam where he has no social life whatever.Probably because Eagling was not a man for a comfortable life - which was why the Royal Ballet sacked Read more ...