Despite its rise China remains an enigma for many in the West. As fiction can provide a way to get under a culture's skin - the short story doing so in immediate and concentrated fashion - we thought Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China sounded intriguing. The anthology is an upcoming production ... Read More...
Month: April 2012
Following his look at our geography, David Cohen continues his series giving a US perspective of the English by tackling our sporting pastimes... The English have two great sports, not-baseball and not-football. They also play golf, but that’s an artifact of Scottish colonial rule we’ll visit later in discussing English ... Read More...
This week the domestic world is turned inside out as we go looking for wild things in forest rooms. In 1498, at the insistent request of his patron, Duke Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci decorated the vault and ceiling of a room of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan with a grove ... Read More...
Every month we award a bottle of Glengoyne 10 year old single malt - the finest whisky available to humanity – to a commenter who tickles our fancy… Jonathon Green has an incredible facility for evoking an era. Slang obviously helps - words, rather like smells, seem to have the ability to mark ... Read More...
To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, we're serialising The Pickwick Papers... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we're exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser. The latest episodes can be heard below. You can catch up ... Read More...
A real treat for art-lovers here, as the inimitable Malty takes us on a tour of three great paintings that make effective use of dark backgrounds. Part two will follow next week... A darkened backdrop in the right setting can be very effective, witness Gmail's latest inbox offering, very sexy, looks ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman does some musical forensic work, and uncovers a shocking tale of plagiarism. It turns out that no less than three supposedly 'great' composers - all now dead - borrowed directly from a living American one... When does artistic franchise tip over into plagiarism in the musical landscape? If ... Read More...
Some people pose naturally. Others go out of their way to pose for certain reasons – to make money, for fame, for art, to be noticed for a cause. On the Continent, the poseurs’ evening stroll along the main street, or promenade, is something of a national sport. Then there ... Read More...
On Samuel Johnson's twice-immortalised tabby... Somehow, I had always visualised Dr Johnson's favourite cat, Hodge, as a big lump of contented tabby. So I was surprised to learn that this famous cat was black. The cat-averse Boswell doesn't bother to describe Hodge, and clearly finds his hero's fondness for a cat ... Read More...
A sentimental, lamp-based memoir is in Frank's cupboard this week... One of the more bewildering features of my childhood was my father's fondness for saying, whenever I behaved in a foolish manner, “You're as daft as a Toc H lamp”. (My father had grown up in Manchester, and never lost his ... Read More...
