Previous Day
A golden flower in full bloom
Gong Li's latest role mirrors China's increased confidence and
status in the world, and reunites her with director Zhang Yimou,
writes
Jonathan Watts. p
Lasting Impressions
The artists who followed Claude Monet were not innovators, but they created a distinctive colony around the Impressionist master, writes Lara Marlowe in Giverny
Universities are becoming places of restricted learning
CultureShock: The current short-sighted trend of treating our third-level institutions as if they were businesses is causing a narrowing of intellectual diversity p
Arts
The sweet steps of a master
On The Town: The Butler family were out in force for the opening of the first solo dance programme, Does She Take Sugar?, from Jean Butler at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin this week. Two slim, red-haired women turned out to be the dancer's younger sister, Cara Butler, and her mother, Josephine Butler, who grew up in Ballyhaunis in Co Mayo. They were joined at the first night by other family members. pOrchestral manoeuvres in the dark?
ArtScape: The board of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland (NYOI) has stirred up a hornets' nest by announcing a decision "to amalgamate its two existing orchestras, the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland (ages 12-18) and National Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ireland (ages 18-24)", writes Michael Dervan. p
Viewing the Rising from the other side
New letters reveal how the insurgents' failure to cut phone lines to the Curragh meant the Rising ended as soon as it began, writes Eanna MacCuinneagáin of Cathach Books pFormer rejects seen as very good catches
Another Life: As plant plankton doubles and redoubles across a sunlit sea, setting in train a hectic replenishment of ocean life, it is good - if quite incredibly overdue - to find Europe preparing to ban the dumping at sea of billions of inconveniently dead and mangled fish. The admission by the EU Fisheries Commissioner, Joe Borg, that discarding unwanted catches is "morally wrong" comes after decades of expert confirmation and outrage at the waste of marine life. pHorizons
Eco-friendly Fingal: Fingal County Council is one of the most environmentally aware county councils in Ireland, with well-developed recycling schemes and ecological building guidelines. p
In short, masters of the genre
Short Stories: 'Protection in art is only justified by a fairly strong claim for the home product. Such a claim the stories here will have to substantiate". Thus Elizabeth Bowen, introducing The Faber Book of Modern Stories in 1937. pPoked, prodded and put on display for prurient eyes
Biography: On August 9th 2002, a few thousand people gathered on a hilltop in South Africa to listen to their president, Thabo Mbeki, pay homage to an extraordinary woman who had died 187 years previously and whose bones were only then being buried. pA break for the borders
Irish Studies: This collection is concerned with shifting boundaries and borders, those around Irish studies and those around sub-disciplines within it. pA broken view from the shore
Fiction: If Booker short-listed author Trezza Azzopardi has a recognisable territory it is those lives conducted on the margins. The Hiding Place, her debut novel, which made it on to the Booker shortlist as a rank outsider in 2000, drew on her own background growing up in an immigrant community - she is half-Maltese - in 1950s Wales. Remember Me, her second novel, followed elderly bag lady Winnie as she sets out to win back her few pathetic belongings, a journey that becomes a painstaking reconstruction of a lost self. pDispossessed down under
Australia: It is difficult today to imagine the excitement and glamour of the Australian Aborigines at the end of the 19th century. To a certain circle, of course: the anthropologist, the emerging sociologists, the psychological theorists. pFrom colour-coded messages to skilful portraits
Poetry: Last year I visited an exhibition of work by the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky, at the Tate Modern. Each canvas showed the painter's gradual shift from figurative clarity to multi-coloured abstraction as he developed his theory that colour could stimulate emotion in the same way that classical music could. I gazed at the later paintings, attempting to decipher those gorgeous swirlings; the response, when it eventually came, was visceral rather than intellectual. pA wake-up call for the left
Sociology: Kieran Allen has done the Irish public a great service by writing this righteous and angry book. In the consumerist and debt-driven fog of Celtic Tiger culture, people rarely stop and think about what kind of socio-political processes led us to where we are. pA catastrophic craft
History: French artist Théodore Géricault's powerful masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, is a potent image of shipwrecked people abandoned on a raft, but how many of us ever registered the fact that the painting records a real and terrible event? pWhen Britain stopped being fun
History: Ben Wilson is one of the rising stars of historical writing. His first book, The Laughter of Triumph (2005), received considerable critical acclaim, which was particularly impressive for a debut author's 464-page take on a "forgotten hero", 19th- century satirist William Hone. In Decency and Disorder, Wilson has produced a historical tome with wide potential appeal. pA cool, complacent, unconvincing voice
Fiction: Few writers do voice better than Graham Swift, one of Britain's most consistently original writers. Voice has always been important to his fiction, and watching its emerging dominance over the course of what is a major literary career has proved interesting. pPaperbacks
The latest paperback releases. pTóibín at Trinity
LooseLeaves: It's not at every literary conference that the writer under scrutiny is on hand to contribute to proceedings but Colm Tóibín, always a lively speaker, will participate in an international symposium exploring his work at Trinity College Dublin next Friday and Saturday, April 20th and 21st. p
Old-fashioned romance
TV Review: Never trust a man with badly dyed blond hair: this was the central insight of Anner House, RTÉ's feature-length adaptation of the Maeve Binchy novel, set in Cape Town. pOld habits die hard for reformed pirate
Radio Review: Radiohead at 11 in the morning? I must be listening to Phantom. This is the station where it seems no day is complete without the playing of an Arcade Fire song, and no night can be declared over until Radiohead have had a spin. But to hear the decidedly non-morning person Thom Yorke keening away before 11am? That's what sets this station apart from other music broadcasters. pThe British press take no hostages
Present Tense: She'd been captured by the enemy. Stripped. Separated from her comrades. Humiliated. Told to "confess" on TV. Then she was promised release, but only if she'd wear Mrs Borat's hand-me-downs and wave like she'd just won Winning Streak. p
