If you sit in the window of the Caffe Nero on Cranbourn Street, near Leicester Square Tube station, and look across the heads of the passing tourists, you will see rising out of the ox-blood tiles above the Wok to Walk Chinese takeaway opposite a relief carving of a set of [...]
Rules are there to be broken, as the saying goes. Break them I did when I went to Spain for a few days without a book written by a Spaniard or set in Spain. Choosing a book to match the destination is my one holiday reading rule, which has led [...]
I feel curiously, overwhelmingly attracted by the colour yellow – like a bee feels for pollen, or a moth for a flame. So perhaps you can imagine the power held over me by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: a combination of books and yellowness, my two favourite things. The [...]
This is the first is a new series of monthly columns by Emily Rhodes. CultureKicks will also soon have ‘What I’ve been watching…’ and ‘What I’ve been listening to…’ columns to go alongside it. I saw in the New Year up in Scotland, where some friends were getting married on [...]
Today sees the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride & Prejudice, one of the most enduring of all English novels, and seemingly so resilient a romance that it can survive everything from erotic parody to an invasion of zombies. One of the hashtags doing the rounds on Twitter last [...]
Last week’s Archive on 4 on Radio 4 was a retrospective of the BBC2 series Ways of Seeing, presented by John Berger, which was first broadcast 40 years ago. I remember reading the book when I was at university, and listening to the programme now I was reminded of one of [...]
In opposition, David Cameron memorably chided Gordon Brown as ‘…an analogue politician in a digital age,’ adding: ‘You are the past’. All true in a political sense, but perhaps Cameron was wrong (or not quite right) about the direction of the digital age. Many in the arts are now arguing [...]
2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an [...]
Talk about timing! There I was in New York last weekend for the final Broadway performance of the hugely successful Billy Elliot: The Musical, and just as Phyllida Lloyd’s Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady was about to open in the city. From a musical that takes a dim view of [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a newly published, 1,000-page book devoted to a religious – or perhaps psychotic – episode in February and March of 1974, when a pink beam of light sentby God explained the nature of reality to a pulp science fiction writer. It was the [...]