Richard D North.

There's a lot to like in Interstellar, and much of it has been caught by professional reviewers. I think there are several dimensions (oops) one needs to reckon with. One: is the story a convincing human - personal - drama? Two: is it a good morality tale? Three: is it a good cinematic theme park ride? Four: is its science robust? If you've the patience here's my unpick of some of those, below the fold. Read more...

I had an outing on this Sunday morning show as a paper reviewer (and squibbist on Strictly Come Dancing) and said one thing which may have seemed distasteful. Can I try to put things right here, below the fold? Read more...

Before he married his second wife HelenKennedy, and adopted her name, my grandfather Stanley married Vera Rawnsley, and they produced my father, Paul. She later married, first, Filson Young, and, second, Clifford Bax.

Here is Staney’s stained glass portrait of a young woman, by family tradition, his wife Vera.

Read more...

This is the third of three posts on Stanley Kennedy North’s work for the Colman family of Norwich mustard fame. (See #1 here and #2  here.)

SKN did three pieces of stained glass for the great Norfolk mustard makers, and this, the third, is a large (I guess… Read more...

In around 2013 I was given a unique, beautiful book, The Story of 79th Armoured Division: October 1942 - June 1945, published  by the unit's officers and men in July 1945 in the ruins of Hamburg, which they had just helped liberate. Since then, I have researched a fair bit and here is what I think I know, or can reasonably guess at.... Update: December 2017 brought a new hypothesis that Broschek of Hamburg may have produced the book (see below). Read more...

This is the second of three posts on Stanley Kennedy North's stained glass commissioned by the Colman family of Norfolk. Here, further to the first SKN glass post, on his Wheel of Life, is another, on his Tree of Life. The third post is a heraldic panel devoted to the Colman's. Here's a gallery on The Tree of Life: And some discussion of the work... Read more...

Stanley Kennedy North did three beautiful large stained glass works for the  Colman mustard family of Norfolk to commemorate their donations to Norwich’s pre-NHS hospitals. The works are now in the care of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital’s Arts Project, managed by Emma Jarvis.

This is #1, The Wheel of Life,… Read more...

At long last I have visited the Britten-Pears residence, shrine and museum which is the Red House, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. It was indeed up there with the Bloomsberries' Charleston, near Eastbourne,;or with Karen Blixen's Rungstedland, near Copenhagen (or her house by the Ngong Hills, near Nairobi). All are places where creative people surrounded themselves with good taste. Above all, the Red House could be compared with the wonder of Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Both these East Anglian gems are, after all, pilgrimages for the "Soft-Modernism" which the middle classes adopted from their post-war Bohemian leaders in style. In the event, the Red House excelled, and was almost a disappointment too. Read more...

Al Pacino's Salomé efforts are really wonderful and  I want to rattle on about all three: the film of the play; the documentary about the filming of the play; and the Stephen Fry Q&A on Sunday 21 September at the BFI. My main point is that Jessica Chastain was the star of all of them. Read more...

Helen McRory's Medea was unmatchable, I'd guess. She is superb as the woman close to a complete breakdown but never more magnificent and even sometimes in an eerie sort of control, and not without wit and guile. Not at all without those latter, though at her wits' end. But let's get down to business - the bits she's not accountable for.   Read more...