It is the very model of a major modern racism row: a US production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic comic opera The Mikado has been criticised for being insensitive to Japanese people by using ‘yellowface’ make-up.
The Muslim News held a conference last week to mark its 25th anniversary. One topic under discussion was the portrayal of Islam and Muslims by the mainstream media.
A couple of years ago I was invited to the University of East London (UEL) to give a talk to the students about the new wave of activist movements – UK Uncut and student protests – that had burst out around the country.
And it was going so smoothly. Jeremy Corbyn was just hours away from surviving his first full week unscathed when an ex-wife disrupted the honeymoon period. The Mail on Sunday wheeled out the first Mrs Corbyn, Jane Chapman, to have a go at Diane Abbott – the lover with whom the Don Juan of Islington North shared al fresco ecstasy in the Cotswolds and East Germany.
After the recent general election, I hoped you would stop featuring opinion polls on the front page and treating the results as if they had validity.
Europe’s refugee epic reached as far as the frozen heights of the Rockies yesterday, in a gentle, very Canadian way. At an international economics conference in the grand old town of Banff – snow already dusting the slopes of Mount Rundle far above us – Dr Tom Thompson of Olds College, the largest agricultural school in Alberta, came up to ask me how he might bring Syrian refugees to his university.
I first moved to Amsterdam late on a rainy Friday night in January. I knew that I had to take a train to Amsterdam Central Station but had no idea if I could carry my bags as far as the station, where the train station was or if there even were trains this late at night.
I met Christopher last week in a café in central Texas, a smart young man with unfulfilled ambitions. “I’m basically a traveller who wanted to see the world but got stuck here,” he said. The Republican presidential debate was due to follow that night. Since he followed the news, I asked who he would support. “Oh no, I’m not voting for anybody,” he replied. “They’re all the same – just a bunch of liars.”
When Tim Farron won the Liberal Democrat leadership contest back in July, it was mercifully without much of the media circus that accompanied Labour’s painfully elongated equivalent. As Liberal Democrats, we lost a disastrous amount of votes in last May’s election, and it’s important to reconnect with those who abandoned us. It seemed that that’s what Farron was concentrating on – until now.
I first came across Jackie Collins by a complete accident, when a stranger (to whom I am very much indebted) left “The World is Full of Married Men” on the table outside my hotel room in Mexico.
As bright as a showgirl’s sequin and as patriotic as a jam sandwich, Terry Johnson’s new stage musical is based on the original screenplay of the 2005 film starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins.
The ingredients for Covent Garden’s new Orphée et Eurydice make the mind boggle. Direction is shared between a choreographer (Hofesh Shechter) and a house director (John Fulljames), with 115 people almost constantly on stage: Shechter’s dance company, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under John Eliot Gardiner’s direction, plus Amour (Amanda Forsythe), Orphée (Juan Diego Florez), and Eurydice (Lucy Crowe).
The notion that opera is a glamorous and frivolous entertainment for the social and cultural elite may be a convenient stereotype, but for those who have experienced it nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of operas address subjects that are both real and relevant. Love and death, religion and sex, power, friendship and betrayal are fundamental concerns of the human condition and to hear them expressed through the elemental voices of music and drama is to make a connection... Читать дальше...
Without fail between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a nauseating knot forms in my stomach - and this year, I’ve finally figured out why.
I used to have a driver called Omar in Baghdad at the height of the Sunni-Shia slaughter between 2004 and 2010. He was a Sunni Arab and, at the peak of the sectarian bloodshed, he fled with his family to Damascus where they stayed for a year.
Jeremy Corbyn famously does not do personal abuse, but John Rentoul (“Led to the wilderness by a characterless man”, 13 September) is old school, and in so many ways old hat.
A real-life disaster movie
You may not remember the reality television series Cider Kidz, which ran for a solitary season late at night on E4 towards the back end of 2013. Set in rural Somersetshire, and featuring the recreations of half-a-dozen teenage students at a chaotically administered further education college on the outskirts of Taunton, it was described by one TV critic as "making The Only Way Is Essex look like Middlemarch" and by another as "a compelling indictment of more aspects of the modern adolescent lifestyle than I have space here to enumerate". Читать дальше...
I have a face that I reserve for clipboard-wielding strangers on the street who bound towards me like puppies. By staring expressionlessly into the middle distance and shaking my head, maintaining my stride, I hope to convey the message that I know they have a job to do but, should they attempt to talk to me, a plague of locusts will rain down on their heads and their houses will be reduced to a heap of ashes. It usually does the trick.
Little has been done to end the four-year civil war that is destroying Iraq and Syria and which has caused the biggest mass flight of people ever seen in the Middle East. More than half of the 23 million Syrian population have fled their homes, of which four million are refugees outside Syria. There is a growing exodus from Iraq, with three million people displaced, many of whom today see that the war is not ending and that they can never again hope to live safely in their own country.
'Yol, are you sitting down?" I wasn't, though I was in a bad way and probably should have been. It was a Sunday, I'd had two hours' sleep after a heavy night of tequila slammers, poppers and dancing, and I'd arrived late at the ICA to find a queue of mildly disgruntled art fans waiting for me to open the doors. I hadn't made it home and now, here was my flatmate calling me with some disturbing news. I propped myself on the end of the box-office counter and asked, "What's up?" "I burnt the flat down last night," replied Yvonne. Читать дальше...