The Rossettis were a “weird” bunch, said Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard. Born in London to Italian political exiles and raised to be “precocious artists and poets”, they were a major fixture of Victorian Britain’s cultural landscape. Dante Gabriel (1828-82), a painter, would become the co-founder and de factoContinue Reading

The Twilight saga, the teen vampire romance films that became one of the world’s major talking points in the late Noughties, coming only second, perhaps, to the US election race and Obama’s accession, is going to be remade into a TV series. The news has, predictably, caused a firestorm online,Continue Reading

The RSC has reopened its refurbished Swan Theatre with an eagerly anticipated adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel Hamnet, said Sam Marlowe in The Stage. As “snug and supple” a fit for the Stratford stage as one of the bespoke gloves made by William Shakespeare’s bullying father, it imagines theContinue Reading