At the core of Labour’s leadership election is a choice. Not about personalities but about two paths for Labour and Britain. Does Labour stand up to the Tories' miserable and divisive austerity policies, reinvigorating our party as a social movement to oppose them - or do we accept them or some variant of them?
When Jean-Claude Juncker put out a tersely worded statement after the Greek people ignored his plea to vote in favour of further austerity measures, he stressed that he would now consult “the democratically elected leaders” of the other 18 eurozone members.
There are moments in life we all remember, and I will never forget where I was on 7 July 2005 when the awful news came through that a series of bombs had gone off on the London Underground and on a London bus.
The overwhelming No vote in the Greek referendum marks the beginning of the end of the euro. There will be short-term twists and turns, a deal here and a deal there, but the single currency as originally conceived is challenged beyond recovery.
It’s official, they did a survey. We are having sex with twice as many people as our parents did. Could we be the sexiest generation of all time? I think so.
Here we are in July, probably the best butterfly month of the year, not least because it means we are past the June Gap. Not many people know what the June Gap is; in fact, there are two separate such hiatuses, one referring to butterflies and the other to bees.
A decade has passed since four men travelled to London and blew themselves up killing 52 people. I was 16, and I remember it well, I remember the confusion, the anger and the shock.
If, as first reported in The Independent last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is about to transfer the cost of funding free TV licences for the over 75s to the BBC licence fee payer, he will effectively pre-empt a proper debate about the size of the BBC and its funding in the run-up to Charter Renewal in 2016. It appears that he is planning to do this by the worst kind of dodgy Whitehall accounting, worthy of an Enron finance director at the height of the dot-com bubble.
It begins in darkness. Not a cold negative darkness. But a warm velvety one. A sound like clapping is heard. But the rhythm is complex, stuttering, syncopated, pulsing like a message – a message of genesis, of the genetic, of both.
My country’s Prime Minister asked a stupid question, so there is going to be no smart answer.
There was a blinding lightning flash and Maxine Peake slammed onto the stage her face ten inches from mine, consumed with an unspeakable intensity and ferocity. In this re-envisioning of Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker the audience sit amid the action in a theatre transformed into an underground bunker bedlam. Peake is an ancient malevolent faerie, a sterile shape-shifter, who is out to seduce two teenage mothers, one carrying a child, the other who is in the mental hospital because she has killed hers. Читать дальше...
Pete Townshend's second rock opera after Tommy, the archetypal tale of Jimmy, the hero of Quadrophenia, has become a cornerstone of British popular culture since The Who struggled to perform it live in 1973. The Franc Roddam film adaptation shaped the mod revival of the late '70s, while Townshend's oeuvre planted the seed for Britpop and resonated through subsequent stage versions by his band and assorted guests.
With Simon Rattle at the helm, Jonathan Dove's new community opera The Monster in the Maze has German, British, and French co-commissioners, and is getting its premiere in three countries, and in three languages.
One of the many joys of growing up in Manchester during the late Eighties and early Nineties was the city’s extraordinarily fertile music scene. “Madchester”, as it was known, churned out a succession of brilliant bands, from The Stone Roses, to The Charlatans, to the Happy Mondays. One of my favourite groups from that era was James, whose 1991 hit “Sit Down” contained the majestic lyric: “If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor.”
Scientists in the Netherlands have reported that we share about 80m bacteria during a passionate ten-second kiss; a finding that makes puckering up seem cringe-worthy – and downright unsanitary during a cold and flu season.
Rigoletto has certainly been updated before, most notably in Jonathan Miller’s ENO production set among the New York mafia. Here, award-winning director Caroline Clegg does a smart riff on that idea, setting Verdi’s opera in the machismo environment of 1920s America, experiencing the birth pangs of the American dream.
1. It may not even be the 18th most important thing about the Greek referendum result, but it is interesting that the opinion polls got it wrong.
Societal crises breed extremism. As political theorist Hannah Arendt has claimed, extreme groups gain momentum by offering solutions when other alternatives appear unable to “alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man”.
If anything, it has taken Unesco rather too long to recognise the merits of the Forth Bridge and enter it into the inventory of World Heritage sites. It has been around since 1890, and has always done much more than simply link North and South Queensferry by rail.
Sitting in the comparative comfort of HM Treasury, 11 Downing Street or the Andrew Marr Show studio, the notion of cutting the housing benefit paid to poorer families may seem an easy, almost theoretical exercise; another entry on the Excel spreadsheet that will help the Chancellor deliver some £12bn in cuts to social security spending.
Between Opera North’s splendid semi-stagings of the four parts of Wagner’s Ring cycle over the past four years, and next year’s complete cycles, there was a Wagnerian gap. That has now been filled by a similar semi-staging of The Flying Dutchman, involving several of the same singers, and, of course, ON’s chorus and orchestra under the music director Richard Farnes.
