ACTOR Anton Lesser could hardly have been a more appropriate choice to read the words of Thomas Hardy, a man with whom he shares qualifications as an architect, and a subsequent and far more successful and famous career. And on an unforecastly beautiful evening, just west of the world famous Stonehenge, Mr Lesser joined actress…
ALFRED Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, the story of mistaken identity in the frozen depths of the cold war, is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all times. But it WAS 66 years ago, and many of today’s audiences will be entirely unfamiliar with the plot or its background. So…
PURBECK-based writer Georgie Codd will host her first live night out in Dorset on Friday 13th June. In aid of Dorset Mind, it is based around her second book, Never Had a Dad: Adventures in Fatherlessness, which was published in 2024. The book attracted millions of listeners when it was previewed on the hit US…
BATH’S annual music festival, still struggling to retain its former glories, ended the 2025 event at the beautiful St Swithin’s Church on Sunday afternoon with a concert by Ensemble Moliere, celebrating the life and work of the remarkable dancer Marie Salle. Born to fairground tumblers in 1707, Marie transformed the then rigidly formal world of…
THE celebrations held to mark the anniversary of VE day must not only have stirred memories for those now comparatively few people who remember the occasion, but intrigued those who are too young to know about the lives and times of their parents and grandparents. If you, like me, were born after the war, but…
THE walled garden at Hatch House near Tisbury is a beautiful place at any time of the year, but it is at its most magical in July when the Covent Garden Dance Company brings its mini-festival, Ballet Under the Stars, nicknamed the “Glyndebourne of dance”, this year from 25th to 27th July. Founder-director Matt Brady…
YOU don’t often hear the phrase “protest singer” these days, but the tradition – which stretches back for many years in unions and traditional working communities, and was reinvented by the folk singers of the 1960s – lives on in Reg Meuross, the Crewkerne-based singer-songwriter whose work has always championed the issues of the day,…
FLORA Wilson Brown’s play The Beautiful Future is Coming was first seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre in 2024, and now comes to Bristol Old Vic in a new production by Nancy Medina, the theatre’s artistic director. In the programme Nancy says “ We’re thrilled to share this beautiful human story in our city, which…
IT keeps raining, the fields are under water, the country has a policy of forced quotas for farmers, townsfolk are rationed to one egg a week, any misdemeanour or farm failure means removal from your farm to work in factories where life expectancy is a maximum of three years … and brutally trained young men…
PRONOUNS have become weirdly political in the last few years – it is all-too-easy to cause offence by using the wrong one when addressing or referring to a person who has adopted “they” and “their” as their preferred form. Author, environmental campaigner, poet and philosopher Robert Macfarlane encounters the same problem in his new book,…