history
Ananyo Bhattacharya: The Man from the Future review - the man, the maths, the brainTuesday, 05 October 2021
Suppose I’m a novelist plotting a panoramic narrative through world-shaping moments of the first half of the 20th century. I’ll need a character who can visit a bunch of key sites. Göttingen in the 1920s, where the essentials of quantum mechanics... Read more... |
Anne Boleyn, Channel 5 review - whispery and weepyFriday, 04 June 2021
"Get out!" The order, spoken some way into the third and final episode of Channel 5's entry into the Tudor drama sweepstakes, Anne Boleyn, certainly seizes one's attention. Not only is our doomed heroine snapping under pressure on the way to one of... Read more... |
Domina, Sky Atlantic review - a little less conversation, a little more action requiredSaturday, 15 May 2021
Ancient Rome has always been a popular playground for film and TV, whether it’s Ben Hur, Gladiator or the 2005 TV series Rome. This Italian-made series for Sky Atlantic was shot at the renowned Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where Visconti, Leone,... Read more... |
Kate Lebo: The Book of Difficult Fruit review - a rich, juicy delightTuesday, 27 April 2021
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from... Read more... |
Michael Spitzer: The Musical Human review - charting our age-old relationship with musicWednesday, 21 April 2021
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become. Time structures music, rhythmically and in its implied narratives. From outside, we place it in biographical... Read more... |
Memories of My Father review - the richness of childhood, the cruelty of historySaturday, 27 March 2021
Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Memories of My Father adapts the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 family memoir, which was published in English as Oblivion: the Spanish-language title of both book and film, El Olvido Que Seremos (“... Read more... |
My Father and Me, BBC Two review - Nick Broomfield's moving voyage around his familySunday, 21 March 2021
Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker. It has ranged from early films on British... Read more... |
Extract from Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe, introduced and edited by Duncan MinshullMonday, 15 March 2021
Wandering, ambling, sauntering. The last, least heard of the three, captures a sense of leisurely aimlessness: a jolly meander unbound by destination, admitting none of the qualms of timekeeping or pacing. In his latest anthology, sequel to Beneath... Read more... |
The Terror, BBC Two review - nightmare in the Arctic wastesThursday, 04 March 2021
Admittedly, Antarctic explorer Captain Scott was at the other end of the earth from the protagonists of The Terror (BBC Two), but they would surely have concurred with his anguished observation: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Based on Dan... Read more... |
CD: Cunning Folk - A Casual InvocationMonday, 02 November 2020
As this review goes live on the internet – an invisible medium even more pervasive than coronavirus – we’ve just enjoyed All Hallow’s Eve with not only a Blue Moon but October’s Hunter’s Moon, too, gazing down upon us from the constellation of... Read more... |
The Trial Of The Chicago 7 review – blistering docudrama that speaks to our timesThursday, 01 October 2020
Aaron Sorkin’s latest powerhouse drama couldn’t come at a more opportune moment. Rife with the director’s rapid-fire dialogue, this courtroom drama is set in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and bubbles (sometimes... Read more... |
Nick Hayes: The Book of Trespass review – a leap over England's wallsSunday, 16 August 2020
Since snobbery and deference have a big part to play in Nick Hayes’s exhilarating book, let’s start with the obligatory name-drop. I have lunched – twice, in different country piles, and most enjoyably – with one of the principal villains of The... Read more... |
