Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

May 02, 2022

Britten’s “Peter Grimes” is a tale for our times

May 02, 2022

Covent Garden’s powerful production of “Peter Grimes” pulls no punches, writes Michael White The seaside town of Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, has a little Catholic church with a delightful garden that gets overlooked by visitors. Though many of them come as pilgrims, they are not there for religion. Aldeburgh’s pilgrims come in search of the composer

Warhol’s Catholic tastes

May 02, 2022

Nick Ripatrazone finds the latest series about the artist perfectly depicts the startling paradoxes that guided his life and work The final episode of The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new six-part documentary series on Netflix about the pop artist’s life and work, examines how the HIV/Aids epidemic roiled New York City in the Eighties. Bronx

Raphael: A Renaissance genius

May 02, 2022

Raphael was, as Kenneth Clark put it, “one of the civilising forces of the western imagination”. For many of us, he is best known as the painter of exquisite Madonnas, which feature on artistic Christmas cards, their very familiarity preventing us from seeing them properly. Indeed, the two bored cherubs at the base of the

A new biography of “Old” Jerusalem reviewed

May 02, 2022

Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City by Matthew Teller Profile Books, £13.35, 389 pages If this book were a painting, it would have been done in bold strokes and vibrant colours. It evokes the sights, smells and flavours of “Old” Jerusalem effectively, as Matthew Teller integrates the geography of the

Family trauma across the decades

May 02, 2022

Bad Relations by Cressida Connolly Viking, £14.99, 288 pages Families don’t always bring out the best in people,” says one of the characters towards the end of Cressida Connolly’s novel Bad Relations. Despite its title, this gem is about much more than familial discord through the generations; its themes are memory, loss, grief and redemption.

A glimpse of heaven at Sir John Soane’s Museum

May 02, 2022

Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces from Sir John Soane’s Museum by Dr Frances Sands Batsford Press, £35, 159 pages “We’ll make heaven a place on earth,” crooned the songstress Belinda Carlisle. I wonder whether she’s ever visited the Sir John Soane Museum, in the heart of London, where, for people like me, that process has already

Picasso was inspired by his lovers – and by religion

May 02, 2022

A Life of Picasso, Volume IV: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943 by John Richardson Jonathan Cape, £35, 368 pages John Richardson died in 2019 with his monumental biography of Picasso half-finished, leaving its subject with 30 years of life still to come. This uncompleted project will surely be the Ozymandias of all biographies, since Richardson’s talents were

A requiem for a Church

May 02, 2022

A People’s Church: A History of the Church of England by Jeremy Morris Profile Books, £30, 480 pages The defining and unhappy image of the response of the Church of England to the Covid-19 pandemic was that of the Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating Holy Communion on his kitchen table at Lambeth Palace. It was Easter