The Politics of Dancing

‘Painting with Light’ Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the modern age Tate Britain: Exhibition 11 May – 25 September 2016 I. Looking at paintings, sculpture, drawings, in short absorbing ‘art’ exhausts me. After about thirty minutes I need to sit down. And so I now sit on a bench in the Tate Britain and close my eyes. An image, a woman’s face, is planted there, a delicate pre-Raphaelite face, pursed lips, and intense unforgiving eyes.  I knew those eyes well, they were Z’s eyes cold as ice in the face of some real, or imagined, -much more frequently imagined, -infidelity on my part. In the gallery, strangers mingle and talk in lowered voices as if at a garden party thrown by the Queen. But in this filtered atmosphere ghosts flit silently amongst the crowd or stare down from canvases as they engage endless critics and admirers. I do not really fear these ghosts; indeed, it is these very ephemeral phantoms with whom I have come to talk; but I always...

Even when the Conservative Party was trying to get rid of Iain Duncan Smith, it gained seats in opposition. When the Labour party was on the cusp of splitting into two parties in 1981, it gained seats in opposition. Now Labour in Scotland has finished third behind a resurgent Conservative party, the party's worst result in Scotland since 1910. If Labour has lost Scotland it is unlikely we shall see another majority Labour government for a great many years, if ever. In the face of all this Jeremy Corbyn and the massed choir of deluded Corbynites sing of a Lourdes style Miracle of May , snatching mythical victory from the reality of defeat.* Whilst those in the exit camp of the EU referendum sing only of a new golden age if we just leave the EU. No pain, no consequences, only gain, the ex-Mayor of London Boris Johnson leading this charge against reason. We are now living in a world scripted by Private Eye, in which outlandish scenarios are constantly played out before our eyes....

THE IPHIGENIA QUARTET GATE THEATRE NOTTING HILL  11 Pembridge Road Notting Hill Gate London W11 3HQ Box office: 020 7229 0706* Four plays over two nights presenting a multi-dimensional tragedy, seen from a variety of angles exploring fundamental issues of violence, sacrifice, and civic duty, vanity, motherhood and the predicament of women in the face of male violence. All this concerning events that occurred more than 2000 years ago. Nobody could ever accuse the Gate of lacking ambition. That it all works so powerfully is a credit to the cast who manage to fully convey the immediacy and terrible implications of the crisis faced by the primary protagonists, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Iphigenia. Andrew French  “I am a good man in a dreadful situation….” The drunken Agamemnon declares in the first of the four plays, Agamemnon . “Is that ‘the line’ you’ll use?” Clytemnestra, his wife shoots back as she dissects his self-image with home truths about...

The Four Brexiters All for Oneself and Oneself Alone The EU referendum campaign has become a disaster for the Conservative party. To watch former cabinet colleagues attack and deride one another provides, for this viewer, a source of entertainment that risks distracting me from the importance of the matter in hand. For Britain to leave the EU would be an unmitigated disaster, a far greater folly than Suez in the long list of missteps the country has made in re-adjusting to a new world role, and with much more catastrophic consequences. Fortunately, in the Leave campaign we are presented with a collection of misfits, wannabe’s, never where’s or will be, and outright loony tunes leading a campaign so inept it could have been lifted from an episode of Monty Python.   Still I am finding it difficult to be completely sanguine, referenda are odd affairs invariably with a subtext, fought over issues wholly irrelevant to the issue on the ballot. Moreover, they can easily be p...

This is a re-posting of a blog originally posted after the findings of a panel looking into the Hillsborough disaster was published in 2012. It has been slightly edited since then.  You were supposed to know who was telling the truth from the outset. It was a question of accent and tone. What were you going to believe, the precise language and well-rounded vowels of the official spokesmen, the coroner, the civil servants, the police or the ‘over emotional’ scouse accents of the Liverpool supporters. Their accents were supposed to tell you everything you needed to know; it was, as they say, supposed to be a ‘no brainer.’ The Hillsborough manslaughter has told us everything we needed to know about class in  Britain  and the contempt with which the established order views the lives of ordinary working people; the added dimension here being that the dead hailed from the city of  Liverpool,  and were that especially lowly tribal caste, football fans. I...

  CORBYN, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND THE REGRESSIVE LEFT I Famously, a week is a long time in politics and the power of this cliché must now have been brought fully home to David Cameron. Though things started to go seriously wrong for the Osborne Cameron Project considerably before the revelations about his father and significant tax evasion surfaced. As a consequence, the Labour Party has enjoyed a minor recovery in the opinion polls, not as I have seen depicted in some headlines, ‘a surge,’ but a modest recovery from a disastrous low base. Given the recent disastrous budget and the open warfare within the Tory party, not to mention the revelations about Cameron and his father, this was the least that could be hoped. Of course, a competent Labour leader would have wiped the floor with Cameron following the shambolic budget and the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith. Instead of which we witnessed two of the most incompetent performances by a Labour leader in my lifetime.  ‘...

 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' ( LP Hartley : The Go-Between) A man, clad in an apron hands stands in the doorway of a shop that sells, amongst other things, Hungarian wines. The proprietor or merely an assistant? A boy dressed as a man, in a time before ‘teenagers,’ stands looking amused, hands on hips. A milkman adopts the same stance, though along with a passer-by he looks curiously toward us, as we look at him, for we are the future and they are the past, and it is only natural that we should be curious. Only the old woman crossing the road is oblivious to the ceremony of having one’s photograph taken. That ceremony is now gone, or perhaps has become so ubiquitous that it has dissolved into other ceremonies, the artificial tourist pose, the gurning face made to indicate crazy fun or the trophy child held up to the camera. The passport photo now the last refuge of the formal ceremony of posing for one’s photograph. But ...