Just in

Arts

You won’t catch me doing that!

Yesterday I made a personal breakthrough of a kind. Being a television sports addict – and faced with a Saturday schedule including Liverpool v Arsenal at lunchtime, followed by two Six Nations matches fascinating in prospect – I had made a deliberate strategic decision to avoid all coverage of [...]

February 9, 2014 // 0 Comments

American Hustle

Friends and colleagues have urged me that my innate dislike of contemporary American films could be cured by The Wolf of Wall Street or American Hustle . I saw the latter and it was not. Its a con/caper movie and the first rule of such a genre is that the audience is fooled. You have that [...]

February 6, 2014 // 0 Comments

Nordicana

Yesterday I went  to the Truman Brewery in Shoreditch for a symposium on Nordic drama. It was extremely well-attended, which reflects the popularity of The Killing, Borgen and The Bridge. Unfortunately the organisation bordered on the shambolic, which prompted me to say to one rude event hostess [...]

February 3, 2014 // 0 Comments

Another one leaves the stage

Having awoken at my usual ungodly hour this morning – not to tune in to live coverage of the Super Bowl but simply because I went to bed at 8.30pm last night – I dressed, made my jug of coffee and came to the computer, where Radio Five Live was awash with the ‘breaking’ news of the [...]

February 3, 2014 // 0 Comments

Everything has structure or it has nothing

Anyone who has ever worked in the creative industries, most specifically theatre, film or television, gains some understanding of the importance of ‘structure’ in presenting the fruits of their labours to the public audience in an entertaining fashion. Novels, plays and television pieces [...]

January 31, 2014 // 0 Comments

The Watts Gallery

The Watts gallery which I visited yesterday with Dominic, a collector of Victorian painting, houses the work of George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), one of the most celebrated artists of his day. Watts married first the actress Ellen Terry when she was just 16 and Mary Seton Fraser herself 42 years [...]

January 30, 2014 // 0 Comments

The kind of thing that passes me by

This week the world has been mourning the passing of highly-respected banjo-plucking folk music legend Pete Seeger at the age of 94. I’ve been reading a range of obituaries setting out the highlights of his long career and the extent of his influence upon American society that extended way [...]

January 29, 2014 // 0 Comments

Britain’s Great War

I trust our regular National Rust readers – 57,000 per day, according to the latest figures – will forgive me beginning this review of the first episode of BBC’s first World War One centenary offerings, Jeremy Paxman’s Britain’s Great War series [BBC1, 9.00pm Monday 27th January], with a [...]

January 28, 2014 // 0 Comments

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse

Back in the days when – unravaged by the cumulative effects of time, drink, drugs, sloth and dementia – I still had the brain power to surprise even myself with my intelligence and improvised perspicacity, I once travelled to Canada to attend a family wedding. One evening, drinking beers with [...]

January 27, 2014 // 0 Comments

Stand to, chaps!

The opening salvos in the major campaign to mark – we mustn’t say ‘celebrate’ – the centenary of WW1 are about to begin. Yesterday I had business to attend to in central London. After I had returned home, I relaxed by reading another passage of Max Hastings’ Catastrophe – [...]

January 25, 2014 // 0 Comments

1 … 174 175 176 177 178 … 184

Copyright © 2026 The National Rust | Design by Premonition