Vanessa Curtis

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Vanessa Curtis

A detail from a photograph of Virginia Woolf (including rear of David Cecil’s head) by Lady Ottoline Morrell, Garsington, June 1923. From the book under review© By permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Diana Darke |Vanessa Curtis |James Hall

Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylized designs that are often botanically impossible, yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art.

Dec 4, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Adam Mars-Jones |Mary Beard |Vanessa Curtis |J. E. Smyth

Dear Pedro Almodóvar, I resisted your early films when they came out, put off by the naughty-boy transgressions and failing to recognize their vitality and underlying good humour. Then, in 1988, the first sequence of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made a convert of me, with the camera on a level with Carmen Maura’s feet as she paced in desperation back and forth across a polished floor like a cornered tigress in high heels.

Nov 20, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Vanessa Curtis |Adam Mars-Jones |J. E. Smyth |Philippa Snow

In a market crowded with full-length biographies of Vivien Leigh, Lyndsy Spence wisely refrains from adding another one. Instead she focuses on the years 1953–67, covering the period when Leigh was beginning to lose her grip on reality due to an escalation of bipolar illness. She had already won Oscars for the roles of Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois, and her high-profile marriage to Laurence Olivier was failing, damaged by his repeated infidelities and her fragile mental health.