Posted by RDN under At the movies / Mind and body on 16 September 2009. No comments.
Previously, I listed Karen Blixen’s house outside Copenhagenand Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge as my favourite interiors. Casting around for third, I wondered about including Charleston, the rustic Bloomsbury hangout. Now I have a better candidate: Matisse’s chapel at Saint Paul de Vence. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 11 August 2009. No comments.
Betty Miller and Henry James both wrote beautifully about the merits of failure. Here are a couple of quotes from a mid-summer mini-orgy of reading. More »
Posted by RDN under Economic crisis / Mind and body on 1 August 2009. No comments.
Hot from ENRON, the dazzling show at Chichester Festival Theatre’s Minerva Theatre, one realises that it was a romp with next to nothing useful to say. I imagine it will go down a storm when it transfers to the Royal Court. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / RDN's media cribsheets on 25 July 2009. No comments.
The BBC’s The Big Questions has asked me on to discuss consumerism. Presumably they want me to defend it and I’m pretty happy to do that. Of course, I intend to be a little mealy-mouthed. I am very happy to defend affluence and inequality. I think people do little harm and much good as consumers, but I suppose consumerism is one degree too materialist to be wholly satisfactory. More »
Posted by RDN under At the movies / Mind and body on 1 June 2009. No comments.
This is perhaps the most beautiful interior I have ever seen. It is at once bohemian and aristocratic. Karen Blixen being who she was, it is determinedly unbourgeois. It is of course also a wonderful pilgrimage site. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 23 March 2009. No comments.
I never met Sergeant Lee “Jonno” Johnson, Natasha Richardson or Jade Goody but I am proud of them. I suppose other countries can produce such “types”, and that if I were American or French I could point to similarly moving or touching personal stories. But still: Blimey! More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body on 12 March 2009. No comments.
The Myerson family saga is a perfect media event. I can think of no-one who is losing. Jake, especially, stands a good chance of benefiting. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / Politics and campaigns on 4 February 2009. No comments.
As I write, I have what used to be called a “Golly Wog” on my desk. I like it. Golly! Carol Thatcher has of course been a complete clot, but you can’t help feeling sorry for her. More »
Posted by RDN under Mind and body / Politics and campaigns / RDN's media cribsheets on 30 January 2009. No comments.
Patrick Hosking in The Times and John Gapper in the Financial Times both say interesting things about Davos Man. But they leave the impression that Mr Schwab’s elite festival was about boosting the egos of corporate giants. The real Davos Mistake was quite other. More »
Posted by RDN under Handling protest / Mind and body / Politics and campaigns / TV and Radio on 31 December 2008. No comments.
Jarvis Cocker of Pulp seems like a good egg, if a little coddled. He was guest editor of the Today programme on New Year’s Eve and agonised about climate and financial meltdown. Strikingly not-novel, his account was partly based on a trip to the Arctic made by a group of artists. How deliciously lacking in irony it all was. More »
