World War One
alice.vincent
The battlefields of the First World War are frequented most by secondary school groups and military history enthusiasts. And by David Grindley: a man for whom the play Journey’s End is an obsession, and his direction of it award-winning. RC Sherriff's play follows a group of British officers preparing for battle in frontline trench warfare, and which places “ordinary men into extraordinary circumstances”. This month sees Grindley’s production returning to the West End. It’s the seventh incarnation of the production since he celebrated the 75th anniversary of Journey’s End’s first night in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The history of maths and music is the history of early Greek philosophy, medieval astronomy, of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the two World Wars. While mathematics at its purest may be an abstraction, the quest for its proofs is deeply and definingly human, charged with biological, theological and even political motive. Whether through performance or discussions about music, this year’s Cheltenham Music Festival (which begins this week) explores the mathematical processes that have both shaped and echoed the history of Western Europe and its art, tracing musical development from the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the quintet of Hungarian Jewish photographers who are acknowledged as among the greatest of the last century. Kertész, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi and Brassaï are the most familiar among the staggeringly accomplished Hungarian photographers who feature in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Eyewitness.It is to the Transylvanian Brassaï, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings never survived the First World War, and nor did one of its most talented supporters, the precocious French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; two of the most talented artists who did – David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein – were never signatories to its manifesto, and Epstein, for one, distanced himself; and, in its short life, there was only one Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The tiny Kussuluk airport, halfway up the jagged eastern coast of Greenland, caters mostly for intrepid climbers. Like all airports it sells mementoes and knick-knacks that nobody needs, including in this case a set of classic polar pipes. No matter that it’s the pole at the other end of the Earth they’re talking about. The pipes are named after famous explorers: the Scott, the Amundsen, the Shackleton and - a good one, this, for Antarctic trainspotters - the Crean. Unless you know your polar literature, it’s likely that the name Crean will have passed you by, and with it his remarkable story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Captain Scott's doomed 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole has become one of the enduring myths of the later British Empire, a paradigm of pluck, grit and a refusal to surrender in the teeth of hideous odds. Subsequently, some historical revisionists have reached a different conclusion, that Scott was in fact an ill-prepared amateur who committed a string of fatal errors.A new generation of splendid chaps has been revisiting the bitter, haunted wastes once trudged over and sometimes died in by our great explorers. Jasper Rees wrote majestically about James Cracknell's programme The Great Read more ...
judith.flanders
The National Gallery has done it again: a small but perfectly formed exhibition in their little Room 1, now a by-word for intelligent show-making. Something new, something revelatory, something profoundly beautiful – what more can the gallery-goer ask? The Ashcan School is not widely known outside the USA, and I can think of no better introduction than this dozen-canvas-strong showing of some of the highlights (and, it must be admitted, a couple of low-lights as well).The highlights include The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison) (pictured right, courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum, MACI Purchase Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Since breaking through with her 1992 debut album Dry, PJ Harvey has constantly been on the move, changing and evolving, both musically and sartorially. Last night at the Troxy in East London was no exception. As she walked onstage dressed in a long black frock with a riot of matching feathers exploding from her head, she resembled Lady Gaga's bonkers West Country Edwardian ancestor.The music, on the other hand, was less harebrained, but frequently breathtaking, as Harvey worked her way through her new album. Let England Shake explores the nature of war, concluding that we do not seem capable Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What a time of ferment of artistic revolution the 1920s were in the Soviet Union. Pioneering arts techniques overlapped for an all-too-brief period with the progressive ideology of communism. Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal and Zvenigora were at the forefront of such trends, but as a Ukrainian his feelings about Moscow’s new leaps forward were ambiguous. Dovzhenko had a deep visual love for the old order, even while he celebrated the dynamism of the new.Dovzhenko’s 1930 film Earth is widely considered his classic, completing the loose silent “Ukrainian trilogy” that began with Zvenigora in Read more ...
carole.woddis
Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong has reached phenomenon status: number 13 on a recent BBC Big Read competition, part of the school curriculum along with World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, three million copies sold worldwide. Its lyrical, descriptive writing, dense and subtle in detail, consistently moves people to tears.It tells of a young 20-year-old Englishman, Stephen, who, finding himself in Amiens in 1910, falls passionately in love with Isabelle, the wife of his host, before being pulled into the horrors of the war and the Battle of the Somme. Somehow he survives Read more ...
rachel.wagstaff
I remember walking into the Hawthorn Ridge cemetery, seeing a grave of a 20-year-old boy who died on 1 July, 1916, and knowing for the first time why Sebastian Faulks needed to write Birdsong, and why I desperately wanted it to live and breathe and be brought back to the public consciousness again.I first approached Sebastian four-and-a-half years ago. I got his email and asked him if he’d be interested in discussing it as a possibility. Sebastian sent a very gracious email back saying pretty much "Thanks, but no thanks" because he thought Working Title owned the theatrical rights. But he Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Gounod's Faust is many things: vaudeville act, sentimental romance, Gothic tragedy, Catholic catechism, in short, a wholly unrealistic but winningly schizophrenic work that should be taken about as seriously as an episode of Sunset Beach. Director Des McAnuff's attempt to marshal this melodrama into revealing truths about Nazism, war crimes and the morality of modern science was always going to be a bit ambitious.Gounod's Faust is many things: vaudeville act, sentimental romance, Gothic tragedy, Catholic catechism, in short, a wholly unrealistic but winningly schizophrenic work that should be Read more ...