When someone says: what are you writing? It sounds in my ears like they’re saying: I’m going to set fire to your house. Or I’m going to kill your dog. And I don’t even have a dog. It’s like asking a man: are you still beating your wife? He is condemned by the question. Asking […]
Monthly Archives: September 2021
Salvador Dali Brings Simon Baker to Cadaqués
An album – a feast, a spectrum, a kaleidoscope – of some of the world’s best photography opens in the streets, bars and galleries of Cadaqués on 1 October 2021 at the start of the InCadaqués International Festival of Photography – now in its fifth year – the second year of Covid. The best? Absolutely. After […]
Poetic License and La Bohème
Pucccini’s opera La Bohème isn’t a love story. It is a warning to women never to fall for a poet. Poets – like politicians – tell you the grey sky is blue and you believe them. It’s what they call poetic license. Politicians we can get rid of. Poets live on with their rhymes and rhythms wriggling […]
There must be some kind of way out of here
Two riders stop on a hilltop. They gaze across the valley at a castle surrounded by farmland where people labour in the fields. In the castle, princes and their beautiful women drink wine while barefoot servants come and go unnoticed. ‘There must be some kind of way out of here?’ says one rider to the […]
Mata Hari – Nude Dancer, Spy, Existentialist
Mata Hari is famous for three things: nude dancing, spying and being shot by firing squad. Born in 1876 in Holland, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle came from a wealthy family and was removed from her élite school when the headmaster was caught flirting with her – her fault, naturally. At 18, she married Rudolf MacLeod, a […]