Archives: Posts From April 2008
Now in Aisle Four: Body-Image Consulting
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 23 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Supermarkets in the U.K. have long sold cooking equipment, insurance, electronics, and clothing. But now, a new kind of service will be available at the checkout. For a limited time, Tesco, Britain's largest chain, will be providing complimentary ...
On the Town With Americans Abroad for Hillary
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 23 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: I had my first taste of American politics abroad last night, at a small Hillary Clinton fund-raiser held at Janet's Bar in South Kensington. Friends of mine, who'd been partying at Janet's last week, had befriended the glamorous expat Janet and, simply ...
Hoi Polloi Clog British Library; Literary Elite Get Vapors
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 22 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: It's got all the elements of the perfect British outcry. History. The intelligentsia. Public funding and academia. (The introduction of top-up fees, which require students to pay for university, was among the most hotly debated issues of the last five ...
RSC Brings On the History Plays, en Masse
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 20 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Can you have too much of a good thing? When it comes to Shakespeare, perhaps not. Thus we have the arrival of the Royal Shakespeare Company's epic production of all eight of the Bard's history plays. Under the guidance of Michael Boyd, the RSC is ...
Tightfisted Arts Council Sitting on Pile of Cash
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 17 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: For the third time in as many months, the Arts Council is in deep water. It emerged today that the funding body is sitting on £150 million ($298 million) in lottery money, after slicing funds for approximately 200 arts organizations just last month. The ...
Live at the London Book Fair
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 16 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: The London Book Fair has had its share of headlines and high-profile speakers. Gordon Brown was here Monday talking books with Sebastian Faulks. (Few knew of the prime minister's appearance before it happened, and the talk was in a private room off the ...
London Book Fair Puts Focus on Arab World
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 15 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: This is the biggest London Book Fair to date, and has proved as intense a literary whitewash as ever. Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Faulks, and the superb Egyptian author of "The Yacoubian Building," Alaa Al Aswany, are all speakers. There is also a ...
Only the Queen's Poetry, Please
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 13 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Uh-oh. Postmodernists — or just moderns — have been caught out. The Queen's English Society, whose heroes include Chaucer, John Donne, and Shakespeare, has launched a campaign against the kind of poetry that is, well, more like a chaotic assembly of ...
Puglia Is Lovely (and the Tourists Don’t Know Yet)
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 13 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Just back from Puglia, the bit of Italy nobody seems to know about. It's on the southeast, on the Adriatic, facing Albania. It has lovely clear water, (middling) beaches, a gorgeous culinary tradition, and almost equally gorgeous men and women.
I am ...
From Gordon Ramsay, A Promising Maze Grill
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 9 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Lately, Gordon Ramsay's empire has been showing some cracks. As it expands ever wider, the sense is that it's nothing but a business — not the elite selection of restaurants lovingly serving up the very finest French food, keenly overseen by the chef or ...
Orange Prize Names Three to Short List for New Writers
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 8 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: The short list for the women-only Orange Broadband Award for New Writers was announced today, and the contenders are the American writer Lauren Groff, with "The Monsters of Templeton" (William Heinemann); the British author Joanna Kavenna with ...
Delia Smith, Castigated by the Foodie Faithful
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 8 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Poor Delia Smith. The iconic chef, whom many have seen as the shining, classic embodiment of the happy British kitchen for a generation, has caused such a catastrophic backlash with her latest TV series, "How To Cheat at Cooking," that she might never ...
Livingstone and Johnson: Not So Scandalous
By Zoe Strimpel | Fri, 4 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: As the London mayoral race begins to climax, skeletons in the closet are being studiously unearthed. It emerged today that Ken Livingstone, the incumbent, has two "secret" families and five, not two, children, including a "happy and successful" ...
Naomi Campbell Lets Us Know What's Wrong With Heathrow
By Zoe Strimpel | Fri, 4 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Terminal 5 at Heathrow has not, to put it lightly, been a success. The royal mess it has been instead has commanded swathes of column inches, TV coverage, debate, and the rest since its catastrophic opening last week. Nothing works. Nobody knows what ...
The Wrong Box
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 3 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: Uh oh, the Arts Council is in hot water again. The rage this funding body elicits among the artsy elite is truly something to behold. It's not strictly about funding this time. Now, this seemingly befuddled institution has included a "sexual orientation" ...
Separated by a Common Language
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 3 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: It's a curious thing, the challenge posed by English-American accent switching. Time and again have I sat in theaters both here and in the States, all ready to enjoy myself, only to be confronted with mock accents so bad that all hope of enjoying the ...
Terracotta Army Puts Block in Blockbuster
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 3 Apr 2008 | Permalink
Excerpt: At last, admission to the sold-out Terracotta Army show at the British Museum. This exhibit put the "block" in blockbuster, and getting in normally requires lining up for hours to claim one of the 500 tickets set aside each day.
Was it worth the hype? ...
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