TV’s second-best show

23rd April 2013

Best show on TV? Easy. The Good Wife. But now that Broadchurch has finished, the second-best show (at least on a non-subscription channel) is most definitely Nashville, a series from ABC in the States that More4 more

A lost masterpiece

22nd April 2013

On Thursday night BFI Southbank screened Roland Joffé's 1980 BBC television adaptation of John Ford's play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. This was shown as part of 'Classics on TV: Jacobean tragedy on the small screen', a season of television more

Live blogging live streaming #aiww

19th April 2013

I had a ticket to the National Theatre's Othello tonight, but circumstances now mean that I'm at home. Which offers the perfect opportunity to watch the online live stream of The Arrest of Ai WeiWei from Hampstead Theatre. The stream is  more

Memories of the ‘Dream’

17th April 2013

I was 16 years old in the summer of 1971. At school I had just taken my O' levels, including English Language and English Literature, for both of which I had been taught by the poet Brian Jones. He told more

Links for the weekend

14th April 2013

There's one straight-up, stand-out recommendation this week, Eric Naiman's lengthy essay for The Times Literary Supplement, When Dickens met Dostoevsky. It's the tale of a notable literary hoax about an alleged meeting encounter between the two authors in more

Television today: illogical, crazy, dumb

11th April 2013

Let's suppose that Arts Council England employed the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and a team of researchers and production staff to put together a substantial 3-volume history of the art of the Netherlands. ACE committed, let's say, £300K of public funds more