2,374 stories by "TERRY TEACHOUT"
An undated CBC interview with Eugène Ionesco, conducted in French and subtitled in English: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wed…
"Nobody loves them, and rightly, for they are creatures of the night. Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? I doubt it. They come out after dark, and we know how we feel ab…
"Delusions of grandeur are stupid and delusions of past grandeur fatal." William Haggard, The Arena
Bobbie Gentry sings her "Ode to Billie Joe" on the BBC in 1968. The string arrangement, also heard on the original recording, is by Jimmie Haskell: (This is the latest in a series of arts-re…
"'You're asking for advice?' "'I am.' "'It's a dangerous commodity: people sometimes take it.'" William Haggard, Venetian Blind
From 2006: Few things in life are more disagreeable than coming down with a bad cold when you have three deadlines staring you in the face. The human brain is a miraculous organism, but it d…
"They were children, political adolescents. Take a clever boy at sixteen, he reflected, and put him into a laboratory for the next seven or eight years. What emerged inevitably was a materia…
You haven't seen much of me in this space in recent weeks because I've been traveling, both with and without Mrs. T, for personal and professional reasons alike. The two of us, for instance,…
Blossom Dearie sings Stephen Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch" (from Company) at Danny's Skylight Room in New York in 1999. Ray Kilday is the bassist, Luis Peralta the drummer: (This is the …
"Hatred was the word which had presented itself, and it had shaken him, for he knew that hatred was a horrible emotion, a compound of envy and fear." William Haggard, Slow Burner
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review a revival of Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West in Washington, D.C. Here's an excerpt. * * * Now that Brian Friel has left us, who is Ir…
Seamus Heaney reads an excerpt from The Cure at Troy, his 1990 English-language adaptation of Sophocles' Philoctetes, on The Andrew Marr Show, originally telecast by the BBC on March 16, 200…
"So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong." Walter …
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, I discuss the published version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the problem of reading a play you haven't seen. Here's an excerpt.…
"All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action, all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that…
Leontyne Price sings Verdi's "Pace, pace, mio Dio" (from La Forza del Destino) in a 1980 telecast, accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic: (This is the latest in a series o…
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
From 2006: I sometimes do too much fieldwork before seeing a movie, building up a whole structure of preconceptions that I then have to trundle into the theater with me and crane my neck to …
"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea." Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics
The Jimi Hendrix Experience plays "Purple Haze" in 1970 at the Atlanta Pop Festival: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, …
"It is the fact, that by the constitution of society the bold, the vigorous, and the buoyant, rise and rule; and that the weak, the shrinking, and the timid, fall and serve." Walter Bagehot,…
In today's Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of Cats. Here's an excerpt. * * * Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" opened in New York in 1982 and closed 18 years later, the four…
"Sears, Roebuck and Co. Introduces the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art," a 1962 training film made by Vincent Price to explain to Sears employees how to sell fine art to their customers…
"I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil." Edward Teller (quoted in István Hargittai,…
"We live and negotiate with the people; if their conversation be troublesome to us, if we disdain to apply ourselves to mean and vulgar souls (and the mean and vulgar are often as regular as…
