Gray Matter: Coronavirus crisis prompts precious acts of kindness in community
The bells of St Mary’s Church chimed 4pm last Friday across an all but deserted Radcliffe Square.
The bells of St Mary’s Church chimed 4pm last Friday across an all but deserted Radcliffe Square.
Long before Corona became the name of a deadly virus. it was familiar in the branding of one of the world’s best-selling beers, and before that – especially to people of my generation – of a hugely popular make of soft drinks. These were always called ‘pop’ – a name that has gone, along with the product.
Large and enthusiastic audiences at the Playhouse last weekend enjoyed three performances of an excellent production of one of the great staples of the repertoire, Puccini’s La bohème, from the new(ish) Oxford Opera Company.
The Beefeater restaurant chain has been purveying its particular branch of mass-market dining since 1974, a fact now celebrated in one of its most prominent promotional logos.
Alan Ayckbourn's first hit Relatively Speaking is closer to farce than to the insightful dramas of middle-class (often middle-aged) angst that followed in his long and still continuing writing career.
The mighty musical machine that was (and is) Queen has ever delighted the public as it seems, in recent years, to have dismayed critics immune to the band’s kind of magic when practised away from the concert platform.
Gustav Mahler called Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio “the opera of operas”, and those of us less qualified than he to assess its many merits must ever regard it as a massively impressive work.
The disgraceful state of Oxford’s roads, crumbling and potholed, almost certainly caused the broken coil spring which, having been detected during an MOT test, has kept my car off the road for the past week as a replacement part is awaited from Sweden.
The unutterable vulgarity of Soho Farmhouse at Great Tew is nowhere better illustrated than in its ban on an adornment almost invariably sported by some of its patrons in other areas of their lives. I mean the tie.
Daniel Radcliffe continues to build his career post-Potter and is back at The Old Vic – following his 2017 success as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz – in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
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