Steve_Bamlett_blog

Early in Anita Desai’s Rosarita, a daughter remembers a family jointly (or so it seems) pondering, during a specific dinner where her mother broke the codes that hold together middle-class families with servants, and other revelatory incidents, that mother’s ‘unsuitability for a wife’. In a generalised point of view within Desai’s elegant prose, told largely … More This blog looks for what is truly revolutionary in Anita Desai’s (2024) ‘Rosarita’.

Seeing in person Tate Modern’s retrospective Modern’s Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider on July 21st at  15.30, with our dear friend Catherine. Geoff, Me and Catherine in the sun outside the BFI Café, photograph by Catherine. I have already written a preparatory blog (on June 19th, 2024) relating to my expectations of this … More Seeing in person Tate Modern’s retrospective ‘Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider’ on July 21st at 15.30.

Seeing in person the British Museum’s reconstruction of the elder Michelangelo in Michelangelo: The last decades on July 21st at 12.30 with our dear friend Catherine. Geoff, Me and Catherine in the sun outside the BFI Café, photograph by Catherine. Geoff and I met our dear friend Catherine at the café pf the British Film … More Seeing in person the British Museum’s reconstruction of the elder Michelangelo in ‘Michelangelo: The last decades’ on July 21st at 12.30 with our dear friend Catherine.

‘This is not quite what I remembered’, says Susannah Clapp, the theatre critic of The Observer of mnemonic at the National Theatre who had also seen the original production.[1] Clearly she could not have said this had she read with understanding Simon Burney’s fragment discussing the genesis of this ‘revival’ in Complicité: Mnemonic [A Site],  … More This blog is about eventually seeing ‘Mnemonic’ for myself in the Olivier Theatre at 7.30 p.m. 10th July 2024.

Leonard Woolf in the last volume of his autobiography wittily acknowledges that newspaper critics of earlier volumes had a point when they ‘complained of [his] digressions‘ and attributed it  to ‘old age, garrulous senility’. However, he insists that they also missed the main reason for not aiming to ‘force his life and his memories of … More ‘If one is to try to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable’. Why? The case of Leonard Woolf!