Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished...
I write at the end of a week in which Mike Gatting overslept in his hotel room and pleaded jet lag, in which England finally managed to overcome an Australian state side but there was nobody...
London, 30 January. A meeting at the Royal Court re Kafka’s Dick, now put off until September. Their next play is an adaptation by Howard Barker of Women beware women, and the production...
The earliest buildings in the 42nd volume of the Survey of London are late 17th and early 18th-century houses in Kensington Square. The market gardens and nurseries which surrounded this urban...
Roy Shaw will not have expected an easy passage as Secretary-General of the Arts Council, but the weather worsened steadily during his tenure, and the discomfort exceeded all rational...
The Mende are a forest-dwelling West African people, numbering about a million, one of the two principal ethnic groups in Sierra Leone. They owe their existence to the 16th-century diaspora of...
David Robert Jones, alias David Bowie, is now in his 40th year. His creepy, chilling phrases pop out of pub jukeboxes, and extracts from his movies catch the eye on pub videos, whether he is...
Alan Winnington, a member of the British Communist Party from the early Thirties, went to China in 1948 as a correspondent for the Daily Worker, and lived there for most of the next 12 years. His...
In three of the Royal Academy’s exhibition rooms, the Pace Gallery of New York (presumably a commercial organisation but revealing nothing about itself) has displayed in perspex boxes some...
Sated with hermeneutics, weary of metacriticism? No head for the heights of abstraction – vertigo hits you as soon as you set foot on the gossamer constructions of current art theory? You...
As the bombs go off in Belfast, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, New Delhi, Beirut or wherever and the police start shooting ordinary citizens in order to preserve the peace, the television...
From the general reader’s point of view, this tome – a scrupulous, detailed inventory of Beethoven’s pocket and desk sketchbooks, locating every extant leaf – is about as...
The first chapter heading of this book asks: ‘Is Botham in?’ The answer is yes, he is – just. He was selected for England in the last Test against New Zealand, but only...
In 1909 there appeared a small book by Montgomery Carmichael modestly entitled Francia’s Masterpiece and dedicated to reconstructing the content, purpose and original setting of a single...
Broadcasting should be allowed to go on being both balanced and unbalanced, while public-service broadcasting should be both popular and unpopular. This could be a way of scaling down the BBC, and it...
‘Miss Sawyer, you listen to me ... and you listen hard. Two hundred people, 200 jobs, $200,000, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend on you! It’s the lives of all those...
Mozart the letter-writer, like Mozart the composer of virtually every form and species of music, is the supreme non-bore. The ‘daughter of Hamm, the Secretary for War’, must, he...
Michael Leapman has chosen what seems a presumptuous title for his book about the BBC. After all, the BBC is a bit like Russia – with an endless capacity to absorb criticism, punishment,...