history
Jasper Rees
When television goes off exploring classical civilisation, you can hear those lines from The Life of Brian chiming in your head. “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?” Such has been the glut of Roman TV in recent times that no couch potato is in any further doubt. The Romans have kept the plebs royally entertained. But what of the Greeks?The ancient ones, that is. (Of their modern descendants we know quite enough from the financial pages.) What Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a prequel to the BBC's panorama of all things Tudor, Sunday night's new 10-part drama The White Queen (BBC One) whisks us back to the Wars of the Roses. Adapted from Philippa Gregory's novel, the series tells the story of how Edward IV, scion of the house of York, married the beautiful and widowed Elizabeth Woodville, from the rival house of Lancaster. In the opening episode, the pair first meet when Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) petitions the king, as he rides past with his retinue, for the return of her lands. These were lost when her husband, Sir Richard Woodville, was killed in battle Read more ...
David Nice
An operatic truism still doing the rounds declares that for Verdi's Il trovatore you need four of the greatest singers in the world. For Don Carlo, his biggest opus in every way, you need six. Nicholas Hytner's Covent Garden staging hits the mark third time around with five, the exception being a very honourable replacement for what would have been an interesting piece of casting. Add to the mix the experienced command of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, supportive of the singers but also attentive to every instrumental detail, and it's as near to Verdian perfection as we're Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was an important 18th-century figure, a pioneer whose achievements still resonate. But a genius?The historian, biographer and author AN Wilson has no doubt about this. Presenting this perambulation through Wedgwood’s life and vessels, Wilson began in Burslem – “a muddy village in the middle of nowhere” – and climaxed in the royal palaces of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Ten years ago Peter Nicholson made a BBC drama about Pompeii and its destruction. This fictionalised reconstruction, depicting made-up characters in togas saying made-up things, sounded cheesier than a pound of Brie, but was actually completely gripping: you knew what was coming, but you rooted for the characters all the same. And while it had all the ingredients of a tense thriller, nothing got in the way of telling the story clearly and intelligently.One decapitated marble head of a goddess had hair that was painted Titian-red and eyes of limpid greenWith the British Museum’s Life and Death Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Catching rabies from a corgi, living on a council estate, becoming an uncommon book addict, painting the town red, incognito on VE Day, parachuting into East London on a date with James Bond... what a strange fantasy life our Queen has led.*Now Peter Morgan and Helen Mirren, the writer-actress team whose film The Queen remains a very high-ranking entry in this fictional league, enlarge the canon with The Audience, loosely inspired by the weekly confidential meetings between the Queen and Prime Minister, of whom there have been 12 (so far) over her six-decade reign.The reason to see it is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the Sixties, self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals were pretty steamed up about bingo. More so even than about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fyfe Robertson, the BBC’s bewhiskered roaming chronicler, said the game was “the most mindless ritual achieved in half a million years of evolution.” His own brainlessness mattered not a jot.The winner of £47,000 – and two shillings – declared: “I’m so excited I could do with a drink of whisky.” She wasn’t going to be swayed by finger-wagging and noses being looked down. This enthralling canter through the history, sociology and quirks of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A rum aspect of the Oscar nominations has been the inclusion of two films that concern American slavery, and which could not be more different: in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino gives the American slave exactly the sort of empowerment he offered the Jews in Inglourious Basterds – blood-splatter violent and fantastical; in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg is happy to lean on the history books, for a respectful biopic. Lincoln might not be as inventive, or as much fun as Django, but its seriousness and maturity are a welcome alternative to Tarantino’s excess.Spielberg is no stranger to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Recipe for Follett Without Finish, a popular broth. Ingredients as follows. One History of Medieval England. One crown, preferably tarnished. Axes, in abundance. Similar quantities of sword. Drawerful of knives. Much rope. A couple of dozen pieces of timber (human). Some French accents. One patch of Hungary. Goodly supply of Saturday night primetime.First, dress Hungarian patch to look like muddy, woody shire. Plant timber (human). Next, rip up History of Medieval England and replace with codswallop supplied by Follett. Wrongfoot audience by showing funeral of Edward II but tastefully Read more ...
Laura Silverman
“What should it matter to us if a few words, then a few more and then a language just go,” asks Iain Finlay Macleod’s richly textured play. Somersaults may end in a shrug of inevitability, but its thrust is that language defines identity. In losing a few words, we do not just lose sounds. We endanger traditions, memories and relationships.The play, which was first staged at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in March 2011, centres on James, an entrepreneur in his thirties from the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. James has a beautiful wife, a plush flat in Hampstead and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They muck one up, one’s ma and pa. Later this year, all being tickety-boo, a royal uterus will be delivered of the third in line to the throne. The media in all its considerable fatuity will ponder the best way to bring up such an infant in the era of, for instance, Twitter. Full marks go to the BBC’s history department for mischievously lobbing this cautionary little gem into the pot. Queen Victoria’s Children is a three-part manual in how not to raise a future monarch.Queen Victoria was of course a paragon of fecundity. Sadly, her womb was also a factory for discord, misery and, ultimately Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian in a hurry - as well he might be when there’s a whole millennium to fit into an hour. A year ago we had his three-parter Jerusalem - The Making of a Holy City, now we’re well into Rome - A History of The Eternal City: no mean feat, given that these are major, impeccably researched and made projects. At least there’s no need for a costume change: Montefiore is back in his panama and chinos, outfit of choice for summer filming that lends him an almost Forsterian élan.Rome - or at least, things loosely Roman - has been cropping up a fair amount recently. The Read more ...