SOMETIMES THE UNIVERSE has to grab you by your shirt fronts and force you to focus on what matters, regardless of the bits and pieces you may think you have to do. This, conjoined with a woo-woo tale feathered by old truths and trendy values is the central […]
HOW DID YOU keep body and soul together during the particularly grim days of Covid-19 hard lockdown? Not in terms of putting food on your table, but in terms of holding your spirit in the place where it should be, to keep you buoyant. A group of Londoners […]
SHE WAS ONE of the South African media’s darlings from the 1950s with her tales of aliens, UFOs and her own abduction and seduction, pregnancy and childbearing. It was a story too good to be true for news editors, journos and cynics alike and even if you were […]
SAY THE WORD ‘Fiddler’ in the film context to virtually anyone you meet, and they will know exactly what you mean. Fiddler on the Roof is like Van Gogh’s ear or Beethoven’s Fifth, in a broader cultural sphere. It’s also up there as the pinnacle of shlock culture […]
IF YOU DIDN’T know it was true, you’d deem it unbelievable. That’s Angela Merkel’s charmed life: It fits the parameters of a classical fairy tale. Clever girl born into marginalised village grows up to see democracy happen and later to become the country’s chancellor and lead it on […]
A BUILT-UP PLACE is so much more than a dot on a map. It’s a repository of history and emotions, of architecture and lives. But how do you catch its essence: the stuff of which it is made, today and yesterday? How to you portray the energy that […]
SHE WAS A feminist before it was fashionable, a French Impressionist born in Pennsylvania, a woman painter in a man’s world. She took intaglio printmaking by the horns and created arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of images. This was Mary Cassatt. Her story Mary Cassatt: […]
DO YOU REMEMBER a time when the world was a different place culturally, and the careful curation of an exhibition could be allowed the time and energy of nine whole years in its inception? The Cézanne exhibition central to this Exhibitions on Screen documentary ticks all those glorious […]
WHAT POWER DOES a government have in whitewashing filthy sins of the past? When Lithuanian officer Jonas Noreika was killed in 1947 by the KGB, he was revered as a martyr for his country, and the celebrations of his life ran so thick with enthusiasm, that his crimes […]
GLOWING, YET UNDERSTATED magic comes of a particular kind of candid, descriptive writing that doesn’t stoop to sensationalism or bald self-promotion. You can find this in George Orwell’s domestic diaries, but you can also find it in Adam Riley’s Birds of South Africa. This current publication offers an […]
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