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Arts

Damnation of Faust/ Glyndebourne

Critics of live performances in the arts rarely give you the audience reaction. Sportswriters more commonly include the crowd – in football, the reaction to a substitution, to tactics or even an individual performance. This does not happen with arts reviewers even though I would suggest that [...]

June 20, 2019 // 0 Comments

Appeasing Hitler

Tim Bouverie has written a measured, well researched account of the Appeasement years. He cites several reasons for the appeasement policy of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain: 1) the country was ill-prepared for war; 2) there was a mood of pacifism in the country which may well have resulted [...]

June 19, 2019 // 0 Comments

Overnight plucking

Here come further contributions to our continuing series of “items of potential interest to Rusters spotted on the internet”. Few things make me laugh more than a classic malapropism and/or inadvertent mix-up of words. My own grandmother was capable of both, sometimes in the same [...]

June 18, 2019 // 0 Comments

Still Killing Eve

For reasons which need not concern us here I was obliged to spend a number of hours watching the television over the weekend which partly explains why today I have departed from my normal areas of interest to report upon the second episode of Series 2 of the drama Killing Eve, broadcast on BBC1 on [...]

June 17, 2019 // 0 Comments

Flogging a dead horse

Today I begin with a declaration of interest: I have long held the view that the BBC had outlived its original “Voice of the Nation” (inform, educate and entertain) purpose by about 1970 and, underpinned by its unique position and funding privilege, has been abusing it ever since. Let me [...]

June 12, 2019 // 0 Comments

What’s possible – and what is not

One of the Rust’s regular topics returned to the top table this week with Tom Hollingworth’s piece yesterday on the ‘woke’ BBC’s slavish craven politically-correct devotion to the promotion of women in sport presumably under the guise of ‘equality of opportunity’. Inevitably, this [...]

June 11, 2019 // 0 Comments

Then and Now

On the back of such as this week’s 75th commemorations of the D-Day Landings it is not hard to be left reflecting upon aspects of the randomness of life. In a sense there was no irony in the “Don’t call us heroes …” pleas made by several of them in their television and [...]

June 8, 2019 // 0 Comments

You didn’t see it here first

Hard on the heels of our columnist Neil Rosen’s excellent piece on his love of war films, here comes an entry in one of the Rust‘s ongoing series of lists. Graeme Ross offers his selection of the Top Twenty WW2 movies of all time – see here, as appears upon the website today of [...]

June 8, 2019 // 0 Comments

Defending war films

Whenever I meet my fellow film reviewers at the Sundance Film Festival rest assured when we take a latte after some indie film of indescribable tedium and conversation turns to our favourite genres and films I’m under bombardment for enjoying war films most, yet I continue to defend them not [...]

June 6, 2019 // 0 Comments

The Barber of Seville/ Glyndebourne

Mark my words: in Hera Hyasang Park a star is born. The South Korean soprano played Rosina in The Barber of Seville at Glyndebourne last night. Her voice was the model of clarity and tone; she could act; she looked winsome and delicate. It was not just her suitor Count Almaviva and the ageing Dr [...]

June 5, 2019 // 0 Comments

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