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July 31, 2015

MAGNIFICAT: The week ahead

July 31, 2015

How to get more from MAGNIFICAT, the daily spiritual life companion

Tomorrow I am starting the First Five Saturdays devotion – here is how I am preparing for it

July 31, 2015

The devotion was explained by Our Lady to Sister Lucia 90 years ago this December

Omnium Gatherum

July 31, 2015

This week we celebrate the Transfiguration, when our Lord allowed something of His true splendor to shine through His (our) humanity for Peter, John and James. That’s an amazing grace! Have you ever wondered why some people receive amazing graces and others don’t? St Maximus Confessor (d 682) gives an interesting insight while he comments

The Eighteenth Sunday of the Year

July 31, 2015

EX 16:2-4; EPH 4:17 & 20-24; JN 6:24-35 (YEAR B) Grumbles and murmurings punctuated Israel’s progress to the promised land. At Meribah they had first complained of thirst. Later they would bemoan their hunger in the wilderness, complaining that Moses was leading them to their deaths. Too easily we accept grumbling as a part of

Briefly noted

July 31, 2015

50 Poems for My 50th by Sarah de Nordwall (Bard Press, £9.99). Spirited, provocative, tender and personal, these poems by the founder of the Bard School are a delight, reminding those with jaded appetites that the world is full of wonder and the task of poetry is to open our eyes to the mysterious beauty

The wunderkind who survived middle age

July 31, 2015

The Seed Collectors by Scarlett Thomas, Canongate, £14.99 ‘If you want a really good time, go into a church,” a character suggests two thirds through Scarlett Thomas’s new novel, The Seed Collectors. It’s not just the quality of the sermons that’s exciting this character, however, but also the transformative effects of a liquid produced by

The birth of the ‘patched up’ Bible

July 31, 2015

How the Bible Became Holy by michael l satlow, yale, £12.99 We now know a great deal about how, when and why specific biblical texts were composed. There is still much to learn about the mechanisms by which these texts acquired authority among the faithful, both Jewish and Christian. We sometimes assume that the various

This is what it’s like to be a despot’s daughter

July 31, 2015

Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan, Fourth ESTATE, £25 Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, not only had the courage to defect from Russia but also the ability to describe the experience of growing up in her father’s monstrous shadow. Her book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, published soon after her defection in 1967, became

Sheep show the way to a Bartók treat

July 31, 2015

It isn’t often that a critic gets the chance to walk to a concert through fields of bleating sheep; and as someone more used to elbowing his way into London’s Festival Hall through semi-drunken office workers, people doing rap routines and skateboards firing like torpedoes through the trashy precincts of the Southbank Centre, I can’t

Bourne turns Carmen into a lurid film noir

July 31, 2015

Matthew Bourne’s hugely enjoyable dance-drama, The Car Man, at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, is now subtitled Bizet’s Carmen Re-Imagined. The choreography has been much improved since I last saw Bourne’s thriller in 2002. The only Carmen aspect about the production is the reorchestration of Bizet’s music by Rodion Shchedrin. Bourne has got rid of Mérimée’s story

I’d love to see these child geniuses run wild

July 31, 2015

If I was producing Child Genius (Channel 4, Tuesdays, 9pm), I’d do it differently. The format is clever kids answering questions that would fox Einstein. “What’s the square root of Piccadilly Circus?” Etc. Now, what I’d do is enter one less academically gifted – and ask them absurdly easy questions. “How many fingers am I

Seeing contemporary art in the cold morning light

July 31, 2015

FINE ART REVIEW   Contemporary Art Round-Up Contemporary art: what’s it all about? Money seems to be the deciding factor. Accordingly, I put all the artists I saw around London this weekend into Artprice’s “Contemporary Art Sales League 2014” spreadsheet. Within the six galleries visited, only four names came inside the top 500. Richard Prince