Why you should serve a magnum on Christmas day December 21, 2016 Yes, Yes, Christmas is a time for giving. But it is also a time for a decent glass of wine or two and sharing them with friends and family. One of the greatest pleasures in collecting and appreciating wine is choosing the wines that will work just right with the occasion and the planned menu [...]
Christmas with JPMorgan: the bank picks books, sites and music for the holiday season December 16, 2016 There's still time to get a last minute gift for the banker in your life! JPMorgan's annual holiday reading list has been given an upgrade for 2016, and to mark the 10-year anniversary of the reading list, the US bank added on a few cultural and musical recommendations. The bank is actually calling the list #nextlist2017, and [...]
Star Wars: Rogue One review: A brilliantly gutsy, spectacular spinoff that could have been braver December 15, 2016 While it may not feature Jedis doing backflips or the Millennium Falcon tooling about space, Rogue One: A Star Wars story definitely feels like a Star Wars film. It has a heartbreaking family-based plot, a familiar struggle between the Empire (baddies) and the Rebellion (goodies, kind of) and all manner of weirdo aliens. There's even [...]
Government blocks sale of rare Wedgwood vase December 15, 2016 The culture minister has blocked a rare Josiah Wedgwood vase from leaving the country. The “Basaltes” vase was sold in July to an unnamed bidder for almost half a million pounds. However, it is hoped that an alternative buyer from the UK can raise an equivalent amount of £482,500 (plus £16,500 VAT) in order to [...]
Dreamgirls review: Glee star Amber Riley yells the house down in the first Dreamgirls production to come to London December 15, 2016 This is the first time Dreamgirls has been performed in the West End, and it’s a production that’s sure to echo down the years, purely for the diabolical racket it kicks up. The mics might have been turned up to 11 – not necessary in the tiny Savoy Theatre – but the primary source is [...]
Love at the National Theatre: an important play about welfare in Britain that’s appropriately unenjoyable December 14, 2016 Love, at the National Theatre, is not the poverty porn that so often clutters the London stage, but a powerful indictment of the shocking state of social housing, social care, and social welfare in Britain today. Writer-director Alexander Zeldin presents a group of disparate people forced to live side-by-side in emergency housing, and the grinding [...]
Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre review: Ruth Wilson is deliciously neurotic in this stylish retelling of Ibsen’s classic play December 14, 2016 It’s astonishing to think this painfully raw, searingly relevant play was first performed 125 years ago. There are moments in this symbolism-heavy production directed by Ivo van Hove that could have crawled from the mind of that enfant terrible of the 1990s Sarah Kane. The world gets older; Ibsen stays the same age. It’s one [...]
A Monster Calls is a moving tale of loss that doesn’t pretend to have any of the answers December 13, 2016 From Harry Potter to the Secret Garden, children’s literature is chock full of orphans. Yet theirs is a rare form of bereavement, usually the result of a tragic accident that happened without warning at an age they barely remember. In A Monster Calls, 12-year-old protagonist Conor O’Malley faces up to a more common, brutal reality; [...]
The Last Guardian review: 10 years in the making, Fumito Ueda’s new game is a flawed work of genius December 13, 2016 Playing The Last Guardian is like booting up a fondly half-remembered game from your childhood. Almost 10 years in the making, Japanese designer Fumito Ueda’s follow-up to his elegiac PS2 titles Ico and Shadow of the Colossus comes with a monumental weight of expectation; its protracted development – only snippets of which were glimpsed over the years [...]
Peter Pan at National Theatre: this off-kilter adaptation is as as bewildering as it is beguiling December 9, 2016 The National Theatre’s adaptation of Peter Pan is a hectic, colourful experience that should appeal to young and old alike. It’s also all over the place in terms of its treatment of JM Barrie’s long-serving fairytale, by turns reactionary and radical. Director Sally Cookson leaves the barrier between story and stage machinery engagingly fluid – [...]