Richard Morrison is chief music critic of The Times. He is a regular columnist, writing mainly on music, arts and culture en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:10:12 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif Richard Morrison Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:33 GMT 2009-11-03T02:53:35Z The invitation was irresistible. “Come and inspect the new Olympic Stadium — by boat!” said Tony Hales, chairman of British Waterways. So last Friday, precisely 1,001 days before the opening of the 2012 Games, I took up his offer. Richard Morrison Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:34 GMT 2009-10-20T05:00:29Z If I were Margate’s tourism officer I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The good news is that one of the resort’s old seaside shelters has been Grade II listed — an acknowledgement of its unlikely role in the creation of one of the 20th century’s greatest poems. The bad news is that the poem partly written in that wind-lashed shelter was The Waste Land, possibly the bleakest expression of life’s futility ever penned in the English language. Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-10-16T11:12:25Z Last year I reviewed 12 opera companies across the UK. Between them they offered more than 1,000 performances of 40-odd works. Ticket prices, on the whole, ranged from the steep to the stratospheric, yet it was rare not to enter a reasonably full theatre. To describe early 21st-century Britain as opera-crazy is perhaps still an exaggeration. But there are certainly eager audiences out there for engaging performers and lively directors. Richard Morrison Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:28 GMT 2009-10-14T10:36:10Z Tucked away in Deborah Cohen’s fine book Household Goods, about how the Victorians and Edwardians furnished their homes, is a gripping sub-chapter — a digression, really — entitled The Secret Life of Things. In it she touches on one of the most ancient of superstitions: the belief that some old household items — tables, chairs, clocks, even soft furnishings — have a “life of their own” and can exude an aura that seems unrelated to their surface appearance or ostensible function.