”Life is a predator; you’ve got to eat it before it eats you.” This is the motto the legendary and age defying Joan Collins lives by. This was a very enjoyable and intimate evening in which Joan reminisces about her vast career in television and Hollywood’s golden era. It is a very slick production tied together [...]
By Rachel Helen Smith Lichtenstein is often referred to as the most intellectual of the artists who championed American Pop Art. His most iconic paintings are comic-book images with bold outlines and primary colours. Whaam! and Drowning Girl are two of the best known examples. They show stereotypical figures entangled in melodramatic stories of love [...]
Railway travel for pleasure is, from recent experience having much of a revival. I regularly take the train from Paddington to Cornwall. Last year, I encountered a pensioner, whose holiday’s central feature was to travel from Inverness (the station connects by bus to John O’Groats) to Land’s End. “How long do you spend at the [...]
It wouldn’t be Christmas without The Nutcracker. The majestic Royal Ballet performing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, visiting the Land of the Sweets and telling the great battle between the Nutcracker and Mouse King – the Edwardian Christmas Eve tale, set to Tchaikovsky’s instantly recognisable score, is still thrilling generations. But for some people, [...]
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at the Royal Academy until 13 January 2013 Rejecting Royal Academy traditionalism established by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and creating works far removed from Consta- ble’s pastoral evocations and Turner’s proto-Impressionism, the Pre-Raphaelite ar tists were a radically controversial force in mid-Victorian Britain. Rejecting the Industrial Revolution celebrated at the 1851 Great Exhibition, [...]
She was married to one of the most successful Rock’n’Rollers of all time – if not the most successful — and this Christmas and New Year she steps into the limelight to star in New Wimbledon Theatre’s latest extravaganza, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Following in the footsteps of David Hasselhoff, Pamela Anderson and [...]
By Peter May If you have a love of fashion and film, then look no further than a trip to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, locally known as the V&A. It is located in South Kensington, opposite the Natural History Museum and conveniently close to the nearby Science Museum. This latest exhibition features the most [...]
Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 National Gallery, Edinburgh, until October 14 Whether Italianate settings of Renaissance Biblical themes, aristocratic 18th-century images of idealised English countryside, quasi-spiritual Romantic visions of Nature or Impressionists’ delight in its colours and light, landscape has been a constant preoccupation of artists for 500 years. Now a [...]
Catherine the Great National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, until October 21 Catherine the Great of Russia (1762-96), most successful of 18th-century ‘Enlightened Despots’, followed Age of Reason principles to reform state and church, develop industry, pursue social reforms, advance national prosperity. Making Russia a major European power, she yet found time to beautify St Petersburg, [...]
By Stephen Kuhrt One of the concerns most often associated with parenthood is that of giving one’s children the opportunities you never had yourself. Just as often, however, parents can be equally motivated to provide their children with experiences similar to those that they consider themselves extremely fortunate to have possessed during their formative years. [...]
