wed 24/04/2024

medieval

Too Much, Too Young: Children of the Middle Ages, BBC Four

'Too Much, Too Young''s Dr Stephen Baxter. A rare moment at rest

Although billed as “a fresh look at the Middle Ages through the eyes of children”, presenter Dr Stephen Baxter had to admit the bulk of historic evidence for how medieval children lived their lives was written by adults. Unfiltered accounts from a...

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The Globe Mysteries, Shakespeare's Globe

From 69 hours of King James Bible reading over Easter Week to this racy evening of adapted medieval pith as we head towards Assumption Day, the word they tell us is God moves in fluid if not necessarily mysterious ways around the Globe. “Mysteries”...

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Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500, National Gallery

Andrea Mantegna’s 'Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint John the Baptist'

Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the...

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Your Highness

In the end, the media-industrial complex which takes responsibility for entertaining the planet doesn’t put your needs and mine near the top of the pile. But I think we know this already. Why am I even saying it? Saying it again. Bears make their...

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CD: Tansy Davies - Troubairitz

'Troubairitz': There’s a satisfying darkness to Tansy Davies’s imagination

Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious...

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Winter Wassail, Gabrieli Consort & Players, Shakespeare's Globe

The great Globe itself is not enough: McCreesh and company in a convivial setting

Vienna has its New Year's Day concert, conducted this year with some style but not quite enough sensuousness by Franz Welser-Möst. London could do worse for a more modest equivalent than let the Wooden O play host to a well-spiced small package of...

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The Pillars of the Earth, Channel 4

It’s taken 20 years for Ken Follett’s doorstopping saga to storm the little screen in the corner of the room. According to Rufus Sewell, playing a stonemason who knows about these things, it takes only 15 to knock up a spanking new Gothic cathedral...

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Francesca da Rimini, Opera Holland Park

They're having a laugh at Holland Park, surely: offering 700 pay-what-you-like tickets to hook newcomers on the wonderful world of opera, and then serving up a Pythonesque staging of an immoveable Italian dinosaur. Three fine singers wasted, a...

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Tim Marlow Meets Terry Jones, Sky Arts

Terry Jones and Tim Marlow engage in a polite conversation about art

He may be a writer, a director, an actor, a historian, and, of course, a former member of Monty Python, yet rather than being a Renaissance man, Terry Jones is clearly a mediaevalist at heart. We know this not only because he has written well-...

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Black Death

When were you last horrified by a horror movie? Really horrified, that is, as opposed to merely creeped out, or disgusted, or amused. Black Death is a proper horror movie, for grown-ups rather than ADD-afflicted teens, and I'll wager grown-ups will...

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BABEL (words), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Antony Gormley, Sadler's Wells

Collaborations for dance, theatre and other things are coming thick and fast at Sadler’s Wells nowadays - these are not halcyon days for pure choreography. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has become a regular at Rosebery Avenue with his mixed-theatre works FOI...

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Art Gallery: Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, V&A

Detail of the War of Troy tapestry, woven in wool and silk, Tournai, France (1475-1490)

After the opening earlier this autumn of the reconfigured Ceramic Galleries, the Victoria & Albert Museum's renovation continues. Here is a selection of exhibits on permanent display in the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries -...

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