Liz Anderson

Thursday

17 Jul 2014
Liz Anderson

Farewell, Speccie

So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It may be ‘cost-effective’ to treat the obese before they go on to develop diabetes and other medical problems, but I’m not sure how much sympathy they will get when we already hear about cancer patients having operations delayed and drugs withheld because of stretched NHS budgets. According to the OECD, Hungarians are the most obese people in the EU, followed by Brits. Rather surprisingly, Romanians are the least fat. Surprising, because on a recent holiday to the island of Lefkada, there were a huge number of Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians. And, yes, most of them were huge. I am not particularly fattist, but there is something rather off-putting about large, wobbly men and women (in bikinis, for heaven’s sake) plonking themselves on the beach between oneself and the sea when there are long stretches of empty sand.

Farewell, Speccie

Wednesday

16 Jul 2014
Liz Anderson

How to beat Alzheimer’s

British scientists have identified a set of proteins in the blood which can predict, with 87 per cent accuracy, the start of dementia. Symptoms, apparently, take about ten years to appear after the actual start of Alzheimer’s. Having lived with someone with this horrendous condition, I am certain that I wouldn’t want to take a blood test that would show that in a decade I would develop dementia unless, obviously, I could have it reversed. Ignorance is bliss… But research can’t move forward without volunteers. Between 2002 and 2012, 99.6 per cent of trials aimed at preventing or reversing the disease flopped because, doctors believe, patients were treated too late, when the disease was well under way. So perhaps we should all volunteer if we want to beat Alzheimer’s: 44 million people around the world have dementia today and it is set to soar to 76 million by 2030.

How to beat Alzheimer’s

Thursday

3 Jul 2014
Liz Anderson

Shot at Dawn: an emotionally charged WWI musical

A court-martial — followed by an execution: not exactly promising ingredients for a musical. But Ross Clark’s new music drama Shot at Dawn turns out to be unexpectedly moving. On the outbreak of the first world war, Adam, a farm labourer, enlists in the army, despite being underage, and is later shot for cowardice; his sister Georgina fights to clear his name.  That’s the plot in short. With a minimum of props and a piano, nine actors manage to captivate and draw in the audience. How? Through the emotional charge generated by the words and music. It’s an evening that leaves you surreptitiously reaching for a handkerchief. Highly recommended.... Shot at Dawn is on at the Gatehouse on 1-3 July and the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge, on the 4 and 5th July.

Shot at Dawn: an emotionally charged WWI musical

Thursday

10 Apr 2014
Liz Anderson

From egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly

South Kensington is teeming with butterflies at the moment, or at least the specially constructed tropical enclosure at the Natural History Museum is. Sensational Butterflies (until 14 September) takes you on a journey through the life cycle of, you guessed it, the butterfly: from egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly. Butterflies had a good time of it last year, because of the warm sunny weather — the best for seven years — but the year before had been one of the worst ever for these insects (and for us), with their numbers crashing. The outlook is good for this summer. Fingers crossed. While the exhibition is aimed mainly at children, anyone would be fascinated to see, for example, rows of pupae lined up in the hatchery and, if you are lucky, watch a butterfly or moth emerge.

From egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly

Friday

14 Mar 2014
Liz Anderson

The Picasso muse who became an artist

With her long blonde hair tied in a ponytail, Sylvette David is familiar from many of Picasso’s paintings. She met the artist in the South of France as a teenager and became one of his models – his muse but never his mistress — during the spring of 1954 (Picasso’s relationship with Françoise Gilot had ended and he hadn’t yet met Jacqueline Roque). A collection of drawings, paintings, metal sculptures and ceramics documenting their relationship can now be seen in the Kunsthalle Bremen’s exhibition Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette: Picasso and the Model (until 22 June). And in London, the Francis Kyle Gallery, 9 Maddox Street, W1, is showing some of Sylvette’s own work (she changed her name to Lydia Corbett): World in a Flower (until 3 April), watercolours done over the past two years.

The Picasso muse who became an artist

Thursday

30 Jan 2014

Friday

3 Jan 2014
Liz Anderson

The man who transformed houses

Alec Cobbe is a designer, painter, musician, picture restorer and collector, and has recently donated drawings, photographs and other archives to the V&A, where some of this collection is now on display. Cobbe was born in Dublin and aged four moved to the family house Newbridge, an 18th-century, 50-room country villa designed by James Gibbs, which, he says, was the ‘single greatest influence on my life’. He had an ‘idyllic lamp-lit childhood’ — there was no electricity — where the ‘running water was rainwater, which had to be pumped daily to a tank at the top of the house’. And to keep young Alec amused there were pictures, historic interiors and a ‘museum’ of curiosities (fossils, snakeskins, small animal skulls), which had been started by his ancestors in the 1740s.

The man who transformed houses

Thursday

14 Nov 2013
Liz Anderson

The Discerning Eye show is full of great art pieces. I know because I chose them

If you want to buy a picture or a piece of sculpture and have lots of money or not very much, or if you just want to look at more than 450 contemporary works, then the Mall Galleries is the place to go. For some 20 years the Discerning Eye charity has held an annual exhibition of work by invited artists, plus contributions from an open submission, selected by a panel of six — two artists, two collectors and two critics. The charity’s aim is to encourage a wider understanding of the visual arts — an aim that surely no one can disagree with — and the commission it charges on sales helps to fund study bursaries. The exhibition, sponsored by ING, which also awards a couple of prizes, is unusual not just because only small works can be submitted but also because they are not chosen by committee: each selector is given his/her wall on which to hang their choices, so the six have their personal tastes on show for all to see — there’s no hiding place.

The Discerning Eye show is full of great art pieces. I know because I chose them

Thursday

3 Oct 2013
Liz Anderson

Pearls: if you’ve got ’em, wear ’em

‘Women spend more money on their ears in pearl earrings than on any other part of their person.’ So said Pliny the Elder, who disapproved of the increasing fashion for pearls in the 1st century. It’s lucky he’s not around now to see the V&A’s new exhibition Pearls (until 19 January), where there are natural, cultured and freshwater ones in abundance (including, at the end of the show, eight buckets stuffed with cheap freshwater ones from China, which produces  — overproduces — more than 2,000 tons of pearls a year). Pearls do not, as I thought, form around grains of sand in an oyster shell but are made by a parasite — mostly larvae of tapeworms — entering and disrupting the cells of a mollusc, which then secretes ‘nacre’ round the foreign object that over time becomes a pearl.

Pearls: if you’ve got ’em, wear ’em

Thursday

11 Apr 2013
Liz Anderson

Nicholas Hytner quits as head of National Theatre...in the wake of a Spectator profile

So, Nicholas Hytner is to step down as director of the National Theatre at the end of March 2015. How canny of Lloyd Evans to review his ten-year reign on the South Bank in The Spectator arts pages on 6 April, the week before his official announcement. Lloyd wrote: ‘Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship….No one guessed how bold Hytner would be. He took the presiding spirit of the theatre, as embodied in its ponderous title, and chucked it in the Thames. Instead of running a museum of official art he created a showcase for his personal inclinations. The National Theatre of Hytner. An astonishing risk. 'And no one noticed how hazardous it was simply because he pulled it off with such aplomb….

Nicholas Hytner quits as head of National Theatre...in the wake of a Spectator profile

Thursday

21 Mar 2013
Liz Anderson

Sculpture trail

William Turnbull died last year. And if his name is not as familiar as those of his friends Giacometti and Paolozzi, it should be: an exhibition at Chatsworth in Derbyshire may help put this right. Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922; he left school at 15, and went to work as an illustrator for the comic-book publishers D.C. Thomson, before enlisting in the RAF in 1941. It was his experience when serving in the Far East that gave him a lifelong interest not only in Asian artefacts but also in space and spatial perspective: a pilot’s view of the landscape beneath. Turnbull was both a painter and a sculptor, but it is for his sculptures that he is best known. Indoors at Chatsworth there is a selection of ‘head’ paintings dating from the 1950s, and a few sculptures, but it is outside that his work really comes into its own.

Sculpture trail

Thursday

27 Sep 2012
Liz Anderson

Millionaires’ playground

‘If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.’ Well, Mark Twain, I waited a couple of days and I liked the weather a lot: bright blue skies, warm sun and a cooling breeze off the Atlantic during a September weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. Two days is not long to explore the delights of the town, so here’s my advice for a -whistle-stop tour. Walk up and down the streets, past the variously coloured clapboard houses (some old — dating from the 17th century — some new) that would make Farrow & Ball devotees swoon in admiration. Pause for a while at Trinity Church, built in 1726 by Richard Munday, who based his design on Christopher Wren’s London churches. Look inside where, in the centre aisle, there’s the only freestanding wineglass triple pulpit left in America.

Millionaires’ playground

Thursday

13 Sep 2012

Saturday

10 Mar 2012
Liz Anderson

Road to Mecca

The British Museum’s latest exhibition Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam (until 15 April) sets out to explain the mysteries of this annual pilgrimage. Last year, a total of 2,927,719 pilgrims went to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, something that all Muslims should try to do at least once in their lifetime.Such huge numbers are hard to visualise, so a film, projected on to a wall, is a great help: one sees, I suppose, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims arriving in the city, and walking round Islam’s most sacred site, the Ka’ba, confined as they are to the courtyard of the Grand Mosque and surrounding areas. And because of its rather claustrophobic atmosphere, the BM’s old reading room is — for once — just the right place to hold an exhibition.

Road to Mecca

Saturday

15 Oct 2011
Liz Anderson

The art of collecting

Passion was in the air in the rooms of the Wallace Collection last week — or at least the word was at the inaugural Apollo seminar sponsored by specialist art broker Stackhouse Poland with AXA Art Insurance. ‘How do you collect art and antiques in today’s market?’ was the question and the panel, chaired by Apollo’s editor Oscar Humphries, was unanimous that passion played an essential part when starting a collection.James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s, believed that to start a collection one had to be energetic, assiduous, knowledgeable and to be at the right place at the right time because supply was always short. And he advised always to buy the best one can afford. Ah, money. Yes, Robert Devereux, founder of the African Arts Trust, agreed, money certainly helps but the two most important things were time and, of course, passion.

Saturday

23 Apr 2011

Saturday

19 Mar 2011

Saturday

6 Nov 2010
Liz Anderson

All in the mind | 6 November 2010

‘All of us have had the experience of confusion or bafflement when we repetitively forget something, do something that (consciously) we absolutely did not want to do or lose something important to us.’ Indeed. ‘Freud took these episodes seriously and showed how these apparently innocent events provide windows into our unconscious minds.’ Ah.‘All of us have had the experience of confusion or bafflement when we repetitively forget something, do something that (consciously) we absolutely did not want to do or lose something important to us.’ Indeed. ‘Freud took these episodes seriously and showed how these apparently innocent events provide windows into our unconscious minds.’ Ah.Those are the words the visitor sees first in the Science Museum’s new exhibition Psychoanalysis: the unconscious in everyday life (until April 2011).

All in the mind | 6 November 2010

Wednesday

25 Nov 2009

Saturday

13 Jun 2009
Liz Anderson

Liz Suggests

A few years ago I was given the Rough Guide to Shakespeare by Andrew Dickson. If you, like me, need to be reminded of the plot of some of Shakespeare’s plays it is an invaluable guide, giving a synopsis, a history of adaptations, further reading material and a list of filmed versions. And this summer the book has proved indispensable as there seems to be more than the usual number of Shakespeare plays being performed in London, the hot ticket being the Donmar West End’s Hamlet with Jude Law. All’s Well That Ends Well is at the National and has had great reviews (the Sunday Times called Marianne Elliott’s production ‘an irresistible blend of magic, psychological insight and moral judgment’). Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project brings The Winter’s Tale (in rep with The Cherry Orchard) to the Old Vic, with Simon Russell Beale, Rebecca Hall, Josh Hamilton and Ethan Hawke, and at Shakespeare’s Globe Dominic Dromgoole’s Romeo and Juliet is paired with Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It.

Saturday

21 Feb 2009
Liz Anderson

Liz suggests | 21 February 2009

Film There’s been a rush of good movies recently — Rachel Getting Married (with Anne Hathaway) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to name just two — and coming up is The Class, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which opens on 27 February. It’s based on an autobiographical novel by a French schoolteacher and centres on a class of 17/18-year-olds, I would guess, from racially diverse backgrounds in a poor suburb of Paris. It focuses on teacher-pupil relationships, with all the problems and misunderstandings that different cultures and languages can create in everyday classroom life. This documentary-style film is made with humour and compassion, and, though I thought it half an hour too long, is well worth seeing. Exhibition At the British Museum a stack of treasures can be found in Shah ‘Abbas, the Remaking of Iran (until 14 June).

Liz suggests | 21 February 2009

Saturday

10 Jan 2009
Liz Anderson

Liz suggests | 10 January 2009

Circus Cirque du Soleil has taken a surreal turn with its latest show, Quidam, at the Albert Hall: a headless man with an open umbrella, a crowd of people wearing white protective overalls doing, well, nothing much ... but it’s the acts what count. Most are thrilling: a couple lift, stretch and contort themselves in slow motion into anatomically-unbelievable positions; four Chinese girls looking about 12 years old spin their diabolos; and other members of the company skip, somersault, tumble and chuck one another high into the air. Lots more good stuff and, thank heavens, no tedious clowns — there’s only one, and he’s actually quite funny. Film Critics have been rather dismissive about Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s new film.

Friday

14 Nov 2008

Monday

13 Oct 2008

Wednesday

13 Aug 2008

Wednesday

30 Jul 2008

Saturday

7 Jun 2008
Liz Anderson

Liz suggests

MUSIC Proms: Get booking now for this two-month season (18 July to 13 September). Highlights include the Berliner Philharmoniker with Sir Simon Rattle (Brahms and Shostakovich) on 3 September; Handel’s Belshazzar conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras (16 August); Daniel Barbenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra playing Haydn, Schoenberg and Brahms (14 August); plus endless other goodies. For tickets tel: 0845 401 5040 or book online www.bbc.co.uk/promsOPERA Opera Holland Park is always a challenge at this time of year — will it rain or not? On opening night (Il trovatore) it poured — but nobody seemed to mind much. Other operas include Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment and Mozart’s Magic Flute. For tickets tel: 0845 230 9769 or online www.

Liz suggests

Thursday

1 May 2008
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