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Arts

Robbie Robertson – R.I.P.

Time passes, we all get older – and then we die. Today I want to pay a small tribute to Robbie Robertson, the humble Canadian who played a fundamental role in the development of rock music through his association with Bob Dylan and others from the 1960s onwards and who passed on 9th August at the [...]

August 15, 2023 // 0 Comments

Saturday TV-watch: football and rugby union

Yesterday, largely by chance, I watched passages of both the England Lionesses playing their quarter-final clash in the Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and also the men’s England rugby union team playing their second Rugby World Cup warm-up game against Wales in seven days, this time [...]

August 13, 2023 // 0 Comments

Farleys House & Lee Miller

Sussex is well blessed with places of the arts to visit. I have visited and reviewed Charleston, the Bloomsbury outpost where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant painted and had a brief affaire, and Batemans – the home of Rudyard  Kipling at Alfreston. By bad luck my planned trip to Farley Farm [...]

August 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

Barbie: a sort of a movie review

In keeping with the traditions of this great organ – one of which is that any contributor can write upon any subject – I feel it incumbent upon me to begin today’s offering with the twin admissions that personally I am neither the Rust’s film correspondent, a title which rightly [...]

August 10, 2023 // 0 Comments

Isata Kanneh-Mason & the Proms

The Proms are a welcome and regular feature of the British summer. They are experimental and a platform for new and younger talent but not too woke-ish. Last Sunday I watched on the TV a prom featuring Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky. The virtuoso pianist for the Prokofiev piece [...]

August 9, 2023 // 0 Comments

Combating the Lockdown/Poirot

I am no admirer of Boris Johnson but I will concede that – in having to deal with three seemingly contradictory Covid issues, namely the risk to physical health, its economic consequences and the mental consequences of locking the population up – he was on new ground for a Prime [...]

August 7, 2023 // 0 Comments

A Very English Deceit/Malcolm Balen

This is an account of one of the biggest financial scandals in England’s history – The South Sea Bubble – and well told, briskly but informatively by Malcolm Balen. In brief when George I acceded to the the throne as the first Hanoverian at the start of the eighteenth century the [...]

August 4, 2023 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/Eating out in Chichester.

Chichester is renowned for its cathedral, theatre and art gallery – but not its restaurants. I accompanied Alice (Mansfield) on Tuesday to the Pallant Gallery.  I enjoyed the Gwen John exhibition and particularly her draughtmanship. Can one use that word now or should it be [...]

August 3, 2023 // 0 Comments

Gwen John/Art and Life in London and Paris/Pallant Gallery

Most art critics are women and most of these carry a feminist agenda which runs that female artists  were oppressed and unrated by their male counterparts. Thus, the conventional narrative is that Gwen John’s more celebrated younger brother Augustus deliberately overshadowed her career though he [...]

August 2, 2023 // 0 Comments

Thunderclap & The Man who made Vermeers

Thunderclap by Observer Art Critic Laura Cumming is the story of the life and death of Dutch 17th century artist Carel Fabritius. In fact much more is known about his death in 1654 when his house collapsed after a gunpowder  depot explosion in Delft. As for his life, he was born in the village of [...]

July 25, 2023 // 0 Comments

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