A sonnet written and recorded on New Year’s Eve. Two thousand sixteen is determined to leave us One last verse I’ll write while there’s time The year in which time left – oh so much to grieve us Scoffs at my efforts to sum up and rhyme A handful of lines? – when the thousands of years …
So long for air to brighten, Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten. Seamus Heaney, ‘Fosterling’ (from Seeing Things) A seasonal sonnet celebrating a magical epiphany one winter’s day in Sussex. You may recall that our autumn film ‘Surrealism in Sussex’ featured …
You get that right tickin’ rhythm, man, and its ON! Fats Waller A short film inspired by the Royal Academy’s current exhibition of Abstract Expressionism (or ‘AbEx’), the first major survey since 1959. On seeing these mugs in the RA shop A cuppa of Art’s desiccation Expression’s commodification In the pink as we drink Or wash …
In the early 1990s, I played Sherlock Holmes in a series commissioned in the US by National Public Radio and produced in the UK by Independent Radio Drama Productions. In one story, ‘The Greek Interpreter’, I also played Holmes’s elder brother Mycroft. The episodes were available as inflight entertainment on Concorde. So I can boast …
Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse The formalized early 20th-century depictions of the Battle of Lewes, glimpsed in the film, …
I was sad to hear on the news that the director Howard Davies has died; he was only 71. I worked with him on David Mercer’s No Limits to Love back in the days of the RSC’s Warehouse Theatre (now the Donmar), which Howard had established. But what I’m chiefly remembering this evening is his …
These rooms are small, I said to myself; you must discount the value of that old chimney piece & the niches for holy water. Monks are nothing out of the way. The kitchen is distinctly bad. There’s an oil stove, & no grate. Nor is there hot water, nor a bath, & as for the …
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Back in the spring we promised a film about Fitzrovia, which has since evolved and broadened its scope historically, geographically … …
A short film detailing my recent encounters with Surrealism in Sussex. On discovering Lewes House in 1889, Edward Perry Warren wrote: ‘It is in the centre of Lewes and yet has a quiet garden, a big kitchen garden, a paddock, greenhouse and stables ad lib. Downs accessible and green wooded country as well. You can …
This is the last day of August and like almost all of them of extraordinary beauty. Each day is fine enough and hot enough for sitting out; but also full of wandering clouds; and that fading and rising of the light which so enraptures me in the downs; which I am always comparing to the …