Drama: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

DRAMA: Well, He Would Wouldn't He?

Last chance to listen to BBC Radio 4 Saturday Drama on BBC I:player http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qspvq

DRAMA: The Judas Kiss by David Hare

Do what you can to see this excellent play at London's Duke of York's Theatre - if only not to miss Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde - it is an extraordinary performance.
And more West End nudity!

BOOKS/DRAMA: Ford Madox Ford

I recently watched a DVD of the BBC’s Parade’s End, the script by Tom Stoppard [the casting questionable] – the end of an era – based on the novel ‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford – a fabulist, an unattractive man.  Jungian’s belief in synchronicity.... I get Julian Barnes’ ‘Through the Window’, seventeen essays (and one short story) – and there are two essays, one of The Good Soldier, Ford and Provence intelligent and revealing – one can but like this heroic and hopeless man a little more.

  

MORE EGYPTOMANIA

Hollywood's version - Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra [1963]- a film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz - unforgettable for its grandeur and a Cleopatra WINK!

The Sphinx guarding Cleopatra's Needle, London by George J. Vuillamy [1880]

The Suicide of Cleopatra by Reginald Arthur [1892]

Cleopatra by  François-Auguste Fannière [1902]

Cleopatra by Demetre H. Chiparus [1925]

Moïse sauvé des eaux by Frederick Goodall [1885]

Cleopatra's eulogy was sung by the Roman poet Horace:

Indeed she preferred a finer style of dying;
She did not, like a woman, fear the dagger
Or seek by speed at sea
To leave her Egypt for distant shores.

But gazing on her desolate palace
With a soft smile, unflinchingly accepted
The angry asp until
Her veins had drunk the deadly poison deep;

And thus more determined, fiercer than ever,
Perished.  Was she to grace a haughty triumph,
Dethroned, paraded by 
The rude Liburnians? Not Cleopatra!    

DRAMA: The Killing

I AM NOT A FAN OF DETECTIVE STORIES and so a disc set of The Killing - a present sent by an American friend - has sat unwatched until recently.  The Danish TV series - now famous - deserves its reputation. IT IS THRILLING and so well acted and filmed 'real time', day by day.