Marlon Brando – “On the Waterfront”

The iconic scene from Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” here.

An internet archive for book inscriptions

A friend was browsing recently in a New York secondhand book stall, and came across a familiar volume of poetry. It was written by a well-known poet friend. She knew his work, and finding the volume was less startling than seeing the inscription inside the book – from the poet himself, declaring his love to [...]

Beethoven – Waldstein Sonata

Interpreted by Claudio Arrau, here.

Shakespeare’s witchcraft, Ionesco’s doubles

There are more witches round Windsor and its park than on the heath in Scotland. At least, someone is called a “witch” far more often in The Merry Wives of Windsor (and in The Comedy of Errors) than in Macbeth. Maybe the word’s greater frequency as a comic insult shows Shakespeare did not take magic [...]

Guy de Maupassant

by Pol. Neveux
“I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.” These words of Maupassant to Jos頍aria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, [...]

Neither and Both

The ideal anthology is now, one would think, impossible. Not aiming for the compleat condition as established by the encyclopedia (18th century), biographical dictionary (19th century) or, today, by the googolplex Internet, an anthology’s purpose was, historically speaking, to establish a canon, to assert a primary or mainstream historical narrative that would encompass diffuse and [...]

Jane Austen and Slavery

by Ibn Warraq (July 2007) in New English Review
Edward Said’s most egregious misreading of a literary work concerns Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park [1814]. Even before mangling Austen, Edward Said was responsible for having created an atmosphere of hostility and prejudice against the West and Western culture—from painting to literature. In such an atmosphere, Jane Austen [...]

Mozart and the magic iron bar

Last year, the celebrated maverick theatre and opera director Peter Sellars approached Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traore with a challenge: would she write and perform a new work for the New Crowned Hope festival, which he was presenting in Vienna as the finale of the city’s Mozart Year, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth? [...]

Centennial of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s birth reshaping her image

Tormented Mexican painter Frida Kahlo meticulously painted blood, gore and her emotional suffering. Yet curators recently discovered she lived playfully, spending hours with puppets acting out scenes in a childlike theatre. As she challenged conventional ideas of beauty – she boldly flaunted her unibrow and moustache – yet kept photos of bikini-clad women and beefy, [...]

First chance to see Picasso exhibition

The first of two major exhibitions to be held in Edinburgh this summer dedicated to Pablo Picasso opens to the public today.
Picasso: Fired with Passion, at the National Museum of Scotland, will be followed on July 14 by Picasso on Paper, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland of the artist’s prints, drawings and [...]