The Great Melt By Alister Doyle Published by Flint Books My only churlish quibble with Alister Doyle’s highly readable distillation of years of meticulous research into climate change and sea level rise is that it might make the reader desperate for the kind of far-flung adventures we can no longer undertake lightly.
Barbara Lewis
Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. By Peter Stott. Review by Barbara Lewis.
A year before the Kyoto Protocol committed the developed world to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, Britain’s Education Act of 1996 incorporated the Thatcher government’s 1986 Education Act that was designed to deal with a perceived issue of left-wing teachers indoctrinating school pupils. Two decades on, mathematician Peter Stott found himself defending climate science against its deniers, who used Thatcher’s legal legacy to take to the High Court their objections to Al Gore’s climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth being streamed in schools.
Dürer’s Journeys, Travels of a Renaissance Artist. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Billed as the first major UK exhibition of Albrecht Dürer in nearly 20 years, ‘Dürer’s Journeys’ explores how travel filled him with wonder, stocked his mind with images and shaped not just his art, but that of his contemporaries.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Review by Barbara Lewis. For those in any doubt, the first retrospective in Paris of Georgia O’Keeffe overwhelmingly makes the case that there is even more to the first woman artist to be taken seriously by critics, collectors and art museums than her gigantic sensual flowers.
Thesmophoria in ancient Greek religion is a festival typically held in late autumn in honour of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. A celebration of human and agricultural fertility, it has been interpreted as the carrying on of things laid down.
Scottish stand-up comedian Daniel Sloss is a centurion by his own admission – in other words, he has slept with at least 100 women. One triggered the dark outpouring Jigsaw, which became a Netflix sensation, notorious for causing more than 300 divorces, 350 cancelled engagements and 120,000 breakups – so far.
The Norwich School of Painting at Norwich Castle. Founded in 1803 by John Crome (1768-1821) and Robert Ladbrooke (1768-1842), the Norwich Society of Artists, later joined by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) was the first English artistic movement outside London. Of far greater than merely regional influence, it can be credited with establishing the views […]
The Regency Wardrobe at Firle Place. Review by Barbara Lewis. Two centuries after the Regency period officially ended, Jane Austen adaptations and the U.S. series Bridgerton have revived passions for Empire waistlines, corsets and fetching bonnets.
Mustard is the only English thing in the rural Irish home of the young protagonist, named as E, of writer-performer Eva O’Connor’s one-woman show. Review by Barbara Lewis.
The Reichstag is Burning …matches songs, ranging from the 1920s to the near contemporary, with the crucial stages of Hitler’s ascent to dictatorial power, not least the burning of the Reichstag. Black Box Live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe by Hartstone-Kitney Productions.
Head First: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of Mind and Body by Alastair Santhouse.
Santhouse has found his destined niche in an NHS office, with mismatched furniture and absolutely no view, where he tries to fathom the very adult issues of desperate people on the edge of our society, many of whom have flummoxed every other medical department.
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Gianni Schicchi. Review by Barbara Lewis. Gianni Schicchi, the protagonist of Puccini’s only wholly comic opera, was a 13th-century Italian knight immortalised by Dante in the Circle of Impersonators for pretending to be the rich gentleman Buoso Donati and dictating a testament highly favourable to himself.