Image: Wikimedia Commons RICHARD DOVE relives a wonderful Last Night For some it is all about vexillology. For some the study of the flags being waved defined the evening. For the Daily Mail, the plentiful EU flags were a clear and obvious betrayal of Brexit. But they chose not to notice the quite resplendent union…
MARTIN GODLEMAN witnesses Sir Simon Rattle's LSO swansong Sir Simon Rattle. Image: Monika Rittershaus. Wikimedia Commons I should have had a more pronounced focus on advanced ticket sales of Prom 56 when I casually noticed that Simon Rattle would not only be present at the eight week festival of music, but there to conduct Mahler’s…
Image: Stuart Millson STUART MILLSON (celebrating his 43rd season) reports from the 2023 Proms ‘Where are the Proms of my youth?’ asked Barrie Hall’s now almost forgotten book, The Proms and the Men Who Made Them – a title that would be unlikely to pass the sensitivity readers of today’s London publishers. When I first attended the Proms, one joined a queue (along…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39 Florian Illies, Simon Pare (trans.), Profile Books, June 2023, 336 pages, £20 KEN BELL says Weimar-era Bohemians failed to respond to the Nazi threat On one level, Florian Illies’ Love in a Time of Hate: Art and…
Arctic Elegies Peter Davidson, Carcanet, 2022, pb., 72pps. £11.99 DEREK TURNER feels impelled to look to the north There are poets associated with particular places, or special states of mind, but Peter Davidson has made a geo-poetical genre of his own, as celebrant of a cardinal point. His interests are wide-ranging, but magnetized in one…
Image: Derek Turner The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber, 2022, 524pps., £20 LIAM GUILAR is disappointed by a would-be biography of the landmark poem If any twentieth century poem deserves a biography, it is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. First published in 1922, it was, and is,…
Nietzsche, by Edvard Munch Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Hulse (trans.), Notting Hill Editions, 2022, pb., 312pps + xiv, £12.99 Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul S. Loeb, David F. Tinsley (eds., trans.), Stanford University Press, 2022, pb., 576pp + xii, US$30 Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” Keith Ansell-Pearson,…
Spare Prince Harry, Bantam, 2023, 416pps., £20 KEN BELL finds the Prince’s blockbuster book unexpectedly engaging There can be few people in the English-speaking world who have not read a review of Spare, the memoir written by Prince Harry, and it is a pity that so many of those reviews seem to have been written…
Beer-makers, Clapham Common, 1877. Wikimedia Commons Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London Charlie Taverner, Oxford University Press, 2023, 256pps, £30 KEN BELL remembers the street-traders who fed a burgeoning city The image of London street food is a trendy one, with well-paid hipsters eating what they sweetly tell each other is authentic, usually…
Ravenser Odd Michael Daniels, Poets House Pamphlets, 2022, 26 pps, £7 LIAM GUILAR admires an evocation of the eroding East Riding This is Michael Daniels’ first collection – the traditional slim pamphlet. The publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, of Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated, subtle artwork to enhance the…