Celebrating identity
Last year, when I reviewed The Sum of Parts, the community-oriented piece produced by Connect, Sadler’s Wells Creative Learning department,…
Bookends: Pure gold
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so.…
Latham’s law
Each year with the commemoration of Anzac Day, there are some fascinating reflections on our national culture. I think the…
Wild life
Laikipia, Kenya Darkness was closing in and one of the sheep was lost. A search party formed. On my Kenya…
From street to stage
Breakin’ Convention, now in its ninth year at Sadler’s Wells, offers a feast of hip hop for all-comers, be they…
Magic chemistry
Artifact was the first work that the groundbreaking dance-maker William Forsythe created in 1984 for the legendary Ballet Frankfurt. It…
Bookends: … and the inner tube
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was…
Bookends: Tilling tales
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The…
Latham’s law
There is a story, apocryphal perhaps, about the meeting between John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in…
Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife,…
Latham’s law
A common lament in political commentary is how parliamentary life has changed beyond recognition. The end of Cold War ideology…
Latham’s law
No one could accuse the Queensland Labor Party of over-intellectualising its political tactics. At a time when academics and commentators…
Wild life
I looked at the bomb craters and their shrapnel blast patterns. Dozens of metres away, rocks and tree trunks were…
Bookends: Terribly Tudor
History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be…
Triple triumph
Not many ballet companies convey young love as credibly as Birmingham Royal Ballet. And I am not talking about select…
Bookends: A matter of opinion
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia…
Latham’s law
Some of the new television programming for 2012 has been hard to follow. Last Sunday, for instance, I tuned into…
Succulent pleasures
It was about time a dance-maker exacted revenge on dance academics. In Alexander Ekman’s 2010 Cacti, a voiceover explains the…
Bookends: A life of gay abandon
Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex…
Latham’s law
One of the mighty tales of American politics concerns the populist, Depression-era Governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. Campaigning for office,…
Bookends: Down on the farm
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at…
Latham’s law
The Gillard-Rudd struggle is not just about party politics. It is also about media politics. At the Sydney Morning Herald,…
On the ropes
‘Aerial’ ballets were all the rage in late-Victorian London. It mattered little that they were more circus acts than actual…
Bookends: Wasp without a sting
‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of…
Latham’s Law
Kevin Rudd’s resignation as Foreign Minister is consistent with every other scene in this Rudd-inspired soap opera. The man who…
