history
Owen Richards
Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season. Now available on DVD, the documentary from Daisy Asquith eschews standard storytelling for something all the more provocative.Queerama is compiled from the BFI’s huge film and television archive, one hundred years of LGBT+ documentaries, dramas, musicals and comedies, all told through the heterosexual lens of the day. Curiosity, confusion and disgust were narrative constants.But in Queerama, the narrative has been Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life. The ranks of the natives, as well as the city’s other cultural immigrants – the French have an uncanny skill at adopting those they wish to – have proved no less fascinating.In Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 Agnès Poirier has chosen an unusual decade on which to concentrate. This is a truly Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Essay collections are happily mainstream now, from Zadie Smith to Oliver Sacks, with more and more bits and bobs coming from unexpected quarters. These patchwork quilts from remarkable writers can be significant, nowhere more so than with those from Ursula K Le Guin that are collected here as her “Selected Non-Fiction”.Le Guin died in January, aged 88, and this latest selection was especially chosen for a British readership, comprising reprinted speeches and short essays from 1972 to 2014. All are underlined and anchored by her paradoxical and hard-won success which, however, never soothed Read more ...
Katherine Waters
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.The book is divided by materials, elements and concepts – “Sky”, “Clean”, “Rock”, “Force”, and “Clay” are all chapter titles – and each hones in on a particular structure by weaving together the stories of the people who built them, the social and historical context in which they were conceived and built, and the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Michael Portillo has barely been off a train since leaving politics, taking journeys blending scenery and history: it must be a relief receiving plaudits for edutainment instead of the abuse habitually heaped on politicians.Herewith the third American series, around the East Coast, its history perhaps intentionally a subtle rebuke to Trumpian values. Ten hours of film divided into 20 programmes detail an 1,100 mile journey from Boston to Toronto. Long-distance American railroad journeys in the 21st century are an odd enterprise: once a country where great fortunes were made by the railway Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What did the Romans do for us? On the evidence of new drama Britannia, they pillaged, murdered and tortured, but also found themselves mesmerised by the psychedelic Druid magic that hovered over our ancient land like fairy dust.Creator Jez Butterworth dug into a resonant, folklorish notion of British history and identity in Jerusalem, and took something of the same idea across the Irish sea for The Ferryman. Here, in cahoots with his writer-brother Tom (who co-wrote Sky Atlantic's Tin Star), he lets himself get a bit more fanciful in his treatment of first-century history. The coast upon Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Great Man theory of history is applied by Darkest Hour director Joe Wright to his star Gary Oldman as much as their subject Winston Churchill. Oldman’s performance is the sole, sufficient reason to see a film in which little else finally lingers. Kajuhiro Tsuji’s prosthetics allow his physical transformation into a jowly 65-year-old. Oldman’s vocal rhythm and tone then let the icon breathe. He is hesitant, breathless, uncertain. More than mercurial, his volcanic passion boils over in panicked rushes.“Which self shall I be today?” Anthony McCarten’s script has Churchill say. “My emotions Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Are you aware that we’re making history?” demands Alexander Hamilton in the show that has finally made the lesser-known Founding Father an international household name. And whether its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, knew it when he wrote that line or not, making history is, indeed, what Hamilton is doing. The acclaim has been pretty much universal, the hype inescapable: 11 Tonys, a Grammy and a Pulitzer; celebrity fandom, and tickets as white-hot as they are hard to get your hands on. Now Thomas Kail’s production opens in London, and we are so ready: we’ve read numerous interviews and earnest Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem. Anton Sansour, a mathematician, academic and his partner’s father, jokes that all the fruit – from apricots to lemons – grows in his garden, while the seasonings traditionally arrived in town, on camel trains, along the ancient spice route from the East. This calorific symbol of “goodwill and fellow- Read more ...
Owen Richards
Long before Barack Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, the Voyager mission left the Earth driven by something else: the audacity of curiosity. What do the outer planets look like? What are they comprised of? And what’s beyond that?Storyville: The Farthest - Voyager’s Interstellar Journey is an immersive study of NASA’s most audacious mission. Condensed by BBC Four by 30 minutes from a cinematic release, this incredible documentary looks at the infinite and infinitesimal questions that Voyager dared to answer. It makes you proud to be human, and embarrassed to still use your fingers when Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean- Read more ...