Enthusiasms & Aversions:
Andrzej Krauze comes to London
November 17th, 2007 | Enthusiasms, Art & its applications, Articles General
In 1987, some five years after he and his family settled in London, Andrzej Krauze made a large and memorable drawing called ‘Refugees from East Europe’. It showed a couple, with suitcases and a pair of young children, standing on the platform of a London Underground station, apprehensively gazing around at the new world into which they had just been discharged. It is a stark image: autobiographical yet also evocative of a wider history of displacement…
Alan Yentob’s ‘Imagine’ or ‘Take this man off the telly’
July 2nd, 2003 | Kulchur, Aversions, Articles GeneralOne day in June 2003, the arts editor of the Guardian asked me to review the first three films in BBC1’s new arts strand ‘Imagine’. I watched them in dismay and wrote this piece. It was published on 2 July 2003. For the BBC’s reaction see ‘Who are you…’ under ‘Conversations with Patrick Wright’, pp. 26-8. Read article here»
Zaha Hadid in Cincinnati
June 6th, 2003 | Enthusiasms, Art & its applications, Articles General
On the opening of Zaha Hadid’s Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Published as ‘Look what I built’, the Guardian, 2 July 2003, pp. 12-13. Read article here»
News & Previews:
1968: where have all the thinkers gone?
May 10th, 2008At 7.30 on 20 May 2008, I will be at the Purcell Room in the South Bank Centre, London, chairing a discussion on ‘The History and Future of Radical Thought’. The event is part of SBC’s ‘All Power to the Imagination’ series, and features Mark Kurlansky, Ernesto Laclau, Jacqueline Rose, Peter Dews and Goran Therborn. Find details here»
Iron Curtain at the Hay Festival
May 10th, 2008I will be speaking about Iron Curtain: from stage to Cold War at the Hay Festival, 12.30, 30 May 2008. Download programme»
Nostalgia and the Shapes of History
May 10th, 2008On Friday 13 June 2008, I will be presented a lecture entitled ‘Heritage and Danger: the Place of Criticism’ at a conference organised by the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London. Details here»
English Takeaway - reflections on the Anglo-Chinese encounter
May 9th, 2008I’m writing four short talks to be broadcast in the 11pm ‘Essay’ Slot, on BBC Radio 3, 16-19 June 2008. Details to follow…
‘Hallaig’ - a film about Sorley Maclean’s Raasay and a discussion with Sir Harrison Birtwistle at the Aldeburgh Festival
May 8th, 2008At 3pm on 27 June 2008, I will be at the Aldeburgh Festival, introducing a rare screening of Hallaig, Timothy Neat’s excellent film about the poet Sorley Maclean and the inner Hebridean island of Raasay. After the screening I will be discussing Maclean’s legacy and influence with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, who lived on Raasay in the 1970s. Birtwistle’s new string quartet, ‘The Tree of Strings’, receives its British premiere performance by the Arditti Quartet later that evening. It is named after a poem by Maclean. Find details here»
Recently added:
Time to rewrite your lecture notes, Charles King »
A letter published in the Times Literary Supplement.
Real England? Reflections on Broadway Market »
Over the years many people have tried to list the essential characteristics of Englishness, but what about the sense of threat and danger that so often serves to frame such lists? I wrote this article for Made in England, a website based on a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England and launched on 23 April 2008
Lighten up on the khaki - Solomon J. Solomon’s advice to the War Department »
‘It has to be remembered that throughout this war our men are moving in a more or less easterly direction…’
Solomon J. Solomon was a prominent Anglo-Jewish artist and portrait painter who went on to pioneer various schemes of camouflage in the First World War. It was in this letter to the editor of The Times, published on 27 January, 1915, that he first indicated the contribution that artists might make to a war in which traditional methods of concealment had been invalidated by the coming of aerial photography. Here applied to the question of military uniform, his novel recommendations are indebted to the idea of ‘countershading’ developed by the American artist Abbott H. Thayer in the earlier study, Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). Solomon’s letter is followed by another, written by an ‘artist and big-game shot’ who signed himself ‘W.W.’, and printed two days later. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘camouflage’ did not enter English usage until 1917.
‘The Führer gives a village to the Jews’ »
A Nazi propaganda film made in Terezin (Theresienstadt), a fortress and town in the Czech Republic where the Nazis concentrated Jewish prisoners before transporting them to Auschwitz. The director, Kurt Gerrin, was himself a prisoner. Like the rest of the cast, he was taken to Auschwitz and murdered shortly after these scenes were shot in 1944.
On Peter Fleming’s rook rifle »
‘Mr. Money-Coutts evidently belongs to the “keep a bullet for the woman” school, and has no doubt shot his way out of many a tight corner among the savage nomads of Hertfordshire…’
A correspondence from The Times, London, 20 November - 2 December, 1935.