Reviews on The Review

Had Purcell and his anonymous librettist been working in the twenty first century, they would have been had up by the Advertising Standards Authority.  There is little or no resemblance between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream  and this semi-staged opera.  In the late sixties the Purcell Society published a comparison between the Shakespeare and the [...]

Donald Davie described Larkin’s poetry as a ‘poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations.’ By setting his version of Graham Greene’s novel in the summer of 1964, Rowan Joffe sets the film at a moment when society was moving between that lowered vision, and the newer world of the ‘swinging sixties’. Thus, Joffe [...]