history
Adam Sweeting
For all his achievements as actor and director, Kenneth Branagh isn’t immediately thought of as a screenwriter, despite his multiple Shakespeare adaptations. That may all change with Belfast, because Branagh’s deeply personal account (he’s both writer and director) of a Northern Irish childhood in the early days of the Troubles has a little touch of magic about it.It’s based on Branagh’s own personal history, which he projects through the character of nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill, pictured below, inhabiting the role like a natural). He’s the son of Protestant parents (identified only as Ma Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Californian label Stones Throw has long specialised in inseparably folding together the most profound and most wilfully foolish Black American music. And that is truer than ever on these 17 tracks from Virginian singer / songwriter / producer / multi-instrumentalist DJ Harrison. As the title suggests, this is a politically engaged record, directly addressing the dark history of Harrison’s Deep South home, where Confederate generals’ statues still stand as a reminder that slavery is not only commemorated but celebrated by many. But it’s also full of sonic and lyrical kookiness, with every Read more ...
Jessica Payn
How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins? For Les Tamplin, wife-beater, sheriff, father to three sons, it is a detective, deathly wind, "the wind that cannot be stopped" which stirs with the ghosts of all he’s killed, "come to steal [his] last breath". Since the Civil War, he has murdered compulsively, following "the urgent need to choke" for the relief it brings. The wind stalks him with the threat of retribution. It is lithe and fleshly, and "comes crawling at me on its belly like an infant’s slow slithering". He is Read more ...
Anna Parker
Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna never talked about her death. A Jewish counsellor based in an office built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, her days were consumed by work and her passion for shopping. Only once did she refer to her passing, waving her hand around her apartment and asking Wicha: “What are you going to do with all this?”Later, the bereaved Wicha sifts through “all this”: black binders full of recipes clipped from magazines, chargers for old phones, inflatable headrests, yellowed newspapers and ballpoint pens. The stacks of stuff remind him of past conversations, and Read more ...
Jon Turney
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 were thrashed out. Los Alamos in the 1940s for the fashioning of atom bombs. Königsberg in September 1930, to hear Kurt Gödel announce that Hilbert’s great programme to establish mathematics on a firm foundation is impossible, and he has proved it.Maybe my character could also catch Alan Turing in Princeton where he is correcting the proofs of On Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"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 history's most-chronicled deaths, but her command to Thomas Cromwell marks one of the very few times across nearly three largely prosaic hours that Jodie Turner-Smith, in the title role, raises her voice. For most of the rest of the director Lynsey Miller's retread of this time-honoured story, Turner-Smith speaks in an often coy, whispery purr Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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, Scorsese and Bertolucci have all worked, but sadly none of that old-time movie magic has rubbed off on it.We are transported back to 40BC or thereabouts, and it’s the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Caesar’s son Gaius (Tom Glynn-Carey, pictured below) and Marcus Antonius (Liam Garrigan) are revolting, and also planning a power grab. Read more ...
Jessica Payn
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 an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood. It was Rasputin’s favourite, he Read more ...
Jon Turney
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 time, whether cradle songs, serenades to a lover or wakes. Then music sits in history, yet somehow also apart from it, the latest sounds prone to evoke links between sonic effects and emotion that feel inexpressibly ancient. More ancient still, when we muse on bird choruses, animal cries or the thousand mile songs of whales, human music seems to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 (“Forgotten We’ll Be”), more literally catches the mood of the writer’s tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and prominent social reformer who was murdered by paramilitaries in his native town of Medellin in 1987.The writer realised that, two decades after his father’s death, his achievements were starting to be forgotten, even in close Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 social themes, through overseas journeys, often around America and more extreme subjects such as penal incarceration (1982’s Tattooed Tears, his first work outside England, and his studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row) but also his including his remarkable 1991 The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife about the white South African Read more ...
theartsdesk
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 My Feet (2018), "laureate of walking" Duncan Minshull brings together 60 writers, from Petrarch to Patrick Leigh Fermor, Edith Wharton to Edward Lear, and Edith Wharton to Robert Macfarlane, who have roamed the routes of Europe. An expansive collection, it's an ode to sauntering, in all its pleasures and variety. The below is an extract from Read more ...