Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Controversy of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! His new book, Churchill’s Bust, will be published next year. (March 2019)
How to perform a man who himself did nothing else? “From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands,” W.H. Auden wrote in a perceptive, if strikingly critical, essay in 1963.1 Oscar Wilde famously told …
A whole great city is ablaze. After two nights of intensive bombing with high explosives and incendiaries, several square miles burn for hours at hundreds of degrees Centigrade, an inferno consuming every living creature. At least 40,000 civilians—mostly women or girls, more than 10,000 of them children—die awful deaths. This …
Although British local council elections are often dissected, like the American midterms, for possible clues to the next general election, it’s very rare for the media to focus on the result in a single borough. But that was what happened on May 3, when Labour failed to take Barnet, a …
There are other dangers than gunfire for the war photographer, almost more than for the war correspondent: the temptations of angry partisanship or aestheticization of horror. Don McCullin is innocent of the first. “No one was my enemy, by the way,” he says, in the companion book to the show. “There was no enemy in war for me. I was a totally neutral, passing-through person.” The second hazard might be more problematic. Biafran children with bellies distended by hunger, two dead Khmer Rouge sprawled in almost gymnastic postures, a Bengali father holding the body of his young son who has died of cholera, all come close to being artistic creations like the gyrations of athletes frozen for a split second for the sports pages.
By the end of the two-day symposium at Trinity, a more measured and nuanced appreciation of this extraordinary man was clear than during much of his life, or even at the time of his death. Cruise O’Brien has been called one of those people whose role it is to be brilliantly wrong. He was certainly wrong some of the time, as in his anti-anti-communist days when he speciously downplayed the character of Soviet tyranny, or later when he, likewise speciously, opposed a boycott of South Africa, which gave his enemies an opportunity to label him, wrongly, as an apologist for apartheid. But the two most impassioned speakers suggested that he was right often enough.
There is a palpable mood of nostalgia in England at present. This may have been expressed politically in Brexit, but it is also visible in the popular taste for “heritage” and lost worlds. In particular, Britain is awash with books and films about World War II, which all these painters lived through and which became part of their artistic legacy. The England that Ravilious and Bawden evoked so powerfully reflected neither reactionary sentiment nor aimless aesthetic ideals. Their rural vision was not about an escapist rural retreat or nostalgic nationalism, but about a precious common heritage, something worth fighting for.
Even those with no interest in bike racing might try watching the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the Vuelta a España, which starts on August 19, on television: they are the best possible travelogues, with aerial shots of three countries ravishingly beautiful in different ways, landscape of mountains and valleys, meadows and vineyards, castles, cathedrals and churches, great cities and pretty little towns. It might make even the most zealous Brexiter or American Firster warm a little to the glories of Europe.
They say there are some musicians who are admired, and some who are loved. Imogen Cooper is very much admired, not least by other pianists, but as she marks her seventieth birthday on August 28, there can scarcely be any musician alive who is more truly loved.
Bernard Haitink will celebrate his ninetieth birthday with two concerts of Mozart and Bruckner, featuring Till Fellner, at the Barbican Hall in London and at the Lucerne Easter Festival.
Recent exhibitions in London, Vienna, and Venice on Bellini and Mantegna, and Tintoretto and Bruegel, reveal familiar and unexpected artistic kinships.