“[Barry] Humphries has in fact announced he is retiring not just Edna but his full retinue of characters – Sir Les Patterson and Sandy Stone among them. Edna, and perhaps some of the others, may yet crop up on TV occasionally.”
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Looted Medieval Frescoes Head Home To Cyprus From Texas
“A set of 13th-century Byzantine frescoes – plundered after Turkey invaded Cyprus and on display in Houston for the last 15 years – is headed home at last. It’s the closing chapter in what turns out to be a remarkable odyssey.”
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita? Redesign The Cover
“Designing the cover for Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, a book about child abuse, has always been a difficult proposition, and too many past efforts have cast the eponymous character as a pre-teen sex bomb. Which is why John Bertram, an architect and blogger, sponsored a competition calling for better ideas.”
‘The Artist In Me Was Dying’ – Sergei Polunin Talks About Why He Left The Royal Ballet
“In a way I did feel that the artist in me was dying a little bit … I do not want to sit and make a nest and be comfortable, and I did feel so comfortable that I stopped being involved as a person and an artist … It is almost like a delete button and you just want to start fresh.”
Holding An Orchestra Together In Chaotic Kinshasa
“An amazing new documentary film …, takes us into the everyday lives of the members of a most unlikely ensemble: the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, located in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place ravaged by war, endemic poverty and corruption.”
The London Olympics’ Exciting New Buildings That You Don’t Know About Yet
“While Anish Kapoor’s tower and Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre have received all the coverage in the run up to the Olympics, there are plenty of other stunning structures ready to break from the pack.”
The Medium Is The Message, And This Artist’s Medium Is Old Chewing Gum
“Artist Ben Wilson takes your splattered chewing gum on the streets to a whole new level. The unconventional artist’s passion lies in transforming blobs of gum littering the pavements into miniature masterpieces.”
Pygmalion In Rhodesia
“In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins takes a poor flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and teaches her to speak the king’s English. In [Zimbabwean-American writer Danai Gurira’s] The Convert, Jekesai, a young woman from the Shona people, runs away from an arranged marriage and is taken under the wing of a black Catholic missionary named Chilford.
You Know What The Trouble Is With Confidence?
It’s “a completely unreliable guide to decision making. … [We’re] often confident in our intuitive judgments even when we have no idea what we’re doing. And to make matters worse, we tend to evaluate the reliability of other people’s decision making on the same basis – if they’re confident, they must know what they’re talking about.”
Stripped-Down, High-Def Ballet Video Becomes Internet Hit
Says National Ballet of Canada principal Guillaume Côté, who, with videographer Ben Shirinian, created In the Zone, “I wanted to get the tights off and I wanted to get the costumes off, and just show the sheer physicality of classical dance.”