Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Books, History, Literature

(Biography) Book Review – Thomas Cromwell: A Life

REVIEW

IT is generally through Hilary Mantel’s inspiring and prize-winning novels, such as Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, that most people today have come to know the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell. TV adaptations of the books, through the glowering performances of Mark Rylance, have also added to our understanding of Cromwell’s character.

But, what kind of man was the real, historical Cromwell? Six years in the making, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental biography attempts to answer that question in painstaking, and even in excruciating and fine detail.

It comes as no great surprise that some of the most memorable scenes in Wolf Hall have no basis in fact. Novelists do that as they are prone to make things up.

The book’s opening sequence has a young Cromwell taking a terrible beating from his father. Not true, according to MacCulloch. There is no real evidence that the father was a brutal bully. There is little record of Cromwell’s early life at all. He was a little-known and obscure brewer’s son from Putney.

What is striking is how often and how closely Mantel did follow the historical record.

Cromwell’s most notable trait was his ruthlessness in pursuit of power. Both novelist and biographer make that abundantly clear. He achieved it because he found a solution to what was known as “The King’s Great Matter”.

Henry VIII had decided that he had breached a biblical prohibition in marrying Katherine of Aragon, who had been his deceased brother’s wife. The lack of a male heir was proof of God’s wrath.

Henry’s eagerness to annul his marriage was increased by his passion for Anne Boleyn. Unexpectedly, Anne insisted that she would not share Henry’s bed unless she was his wife. (Her sister Mary, an earlier lover of the king, had displayed no such scruples.)

It was Cromwell who found a way to fulfill the King’s wishes. He smoothed the path to Anne’s royal marriage.

Yet, when she also failed to produce a male heir, he turned on her. Anne already resented her husband’s chief minister. She was heard to say that she would see “his head off his shoulders”.

But it was Cromwell who saw her to the scaffold. Henry already had his eye on a young noblewoman named Jane Seymour.

He complained that “he had been seduced and forced” into marriage with Anne “through spells and charms”. The speed with which Anne was toppled is remarkable. Cromwell was behind charges, almost certainly untrue, of adultery. She was even accused of incest with her brother.

She was executed in the Tower in front of a thousand spectators. Prominent amongst them was her nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. Eleven days after her death, Henry married Jane Seymour.

Throughout this biography, MacCulloch suggests an element of sadism in Cromwell’s character that is absent in Mantel’s depiction. He recommended the torture of a prisoner with the words, “pinch him with pains”.

When he heard that some monks from the London Charterhouse had died in Newgate prison, he was furious. He swore that he’d had something far more unpleasant in mind for them.

Cromwell’s own tragedy was that he served a master even more ruthless than he was.

Mantel will tell of her hero’s downfall in the third, as yet unpublished, volume of her trilogy.

MacCulloch’s final chapters show Henry’s willingness to cast off his chief minister as soon as his usefulness came to an end.

Anne of Cleves was the unwitting catalyst of his downfall. After the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth, Cromwell was determined that the King should next marry a German Protestant. Anne fitted the bill.

Unfortunately, when she arrived in England, Henry was appalled by her.

To his embarrassment, he couldn’t make love to her either on his wedding night or on any succeeding night. Cromwell had to face the fact that “his own protracted diplomacy had resulted in the King’s humiliation”.

Even worse, Henry came to believe that his chief minister was gossiping about his problems between the sheets. Cromwell was doomed.

 

HE was arrested on June 10, 1540. From prison, he wrote to the King, ending his letter with the words, “I cry for mercy! mercy! mercy!”

The only mercy he was given was the privilege of being beheaded rather than facing burning at the stake (for heresy) or hanging, drawing and quartering (for treason).

Even then, one account suggests that the executioner botched the job and took several swipes of the axe to kill him.

On the very same day that Cromwell died on the scaffold, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard.

There is a paradox at the heart of this epic work of scholarship. Despite the relentless accumulation of detail, Thomas Cromwell himself remains a mystery. He is as unknowable at the end of the book as he is at the beginning.

It might even need a novelist of Mantel’s exceptional gifts to bring such an enigmatic character fully to life.

– ‘Thomas Cromwell: A Life’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch is published by Allen Lane for £30

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Architecture, Arts, Culture, Scotland

The V&A Museum of Design

SCOTLAND

DUNDEE’S equivalent of the Pompidou in Paris or Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now on full view. The V&A, designed by Kengo Kuma, is simply staggering.

With its instantly recognisable outline – part sea cliff, part galleon – the £80.4million V&A Museum of Design may soon find itself revered as a global design icon.

Certainly, few who have seen Scotland’s first dedicated design museum are likely to be left unmoved by its dizzyingly ambitious zigzag slabs of rough concrete, described variously as a crash-landed Egyptian pyramid, the ribbed carcass of a beached whale and the ragged remains of a mighty shipwreck. Art in its full splendour and glory.

On display: The £80million museum’s collection is expected to attract 500,000 visitors in its first year.

Following its official opening, the “V&Tay”, as it is ostensibly and affectionately known to its London colleagues, is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors from around the world in its first year alone, generating tens of millions of pounds for the local economy.

Critics may welcome a time when this controversial project starts to pay its way, having been blown off course by years of construction delays and escalating costs before finally anchoring itself at the heart of the city’s £1billion waterfront regeneration.

Since its conception, the original £45million budget has almost doubled and its Japanese architect and designer had been forced to tow his initial plan for a water-bound structure back to dry land.

On the V&A’s opening, however, a preview which was attended by dozens of the world’s media, Mr Kuma pronounced himself satisfied that his vision to create a “living room for the city” had been realised.

The attraction’s galleries showcase 300 objects, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room and the painstakingly reconstructed interior of Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearoom which has not been seen for 50 years.

Mr Kuma said: “It is fitting that the restored Oak Room by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is at the heart of this building as I have greatly admired his designs since I was a student.

“In the Oak Room, people will feel his sensibility and respect for nature, and hopefully connect it with our design for V&A Dundee. I hope the museum can change the city and become its centre of gravity.”

He said the magisterial light-filled atrium with its sweeping staircase and waves of oak panel boards was a nod to Mackintosh, who was deeply influenced by oriental art and design.

Mr Kuma said: “When I saw [Mackintosh’s] buildings as a student I was very surprised at how Japanese they were. Japanese quality, [and] Japanese sensitivity exist in his designs.”

Everywhere in the museum, glimpses of the Tay can be caught through small windows, while the hall and stairs glint with fossilised coral set into limestone flooring.

Complementing his daring design are the – often quirky – exhibits of the Scottish Design Galleries, from the so-called Valkyrie tiara, created by Cartier using more than 2,500 diamonds for Mary Crewe-Milnes, Duchess of Roxburghe, in 1935, to cutting-edge environmental material crafted from the fibres of stinging nettles by Dundee-based firm Halley Stevensons for Glasgow backpack-maker Trakke.

There is also some hand-coloured Beano artwork for a Dennis the Menace cartoon strip from 1960.

Also in the collection is the largest remaining fragment of the Titanic – part of a door from the first-class lounge of the liner – and a costume worn by Natalie Portman’s character, Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which was created by Trisha Biggar, the Glasgow designer.

A full-sized clay model Jaguar car sits between the entrants to the permanent collection and the opening touring show, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which tells the story of Scotland’s role in the golden age of cruise liners.

V&A Dundee’s director, Philip Long, said “it was with some emotion” that he was finally able to unveil the museum and that the challenges that beset the huge project had been overcome, more than a decade after it was originally proposed.

Another V&A director, Dr Tristram Hunt, said Ocean Liners: Speed and Style could “not be a more appropriate inaugural exhibition for Mr Kuma’s amphibious, semi-nautical, wonderful museum that is so successfully reconnecting the city with its historic waterfront”.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander told invited guests to the first viewing of the museum that he felt a “tremendous sense of pride” in the building.

He said: “There’s a fire in the bellies of Dundonians that wasn’t there ten years ago. Dundee is leading the charge in cultural-led regeneration.”

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Puzzle (15)

REVIEW

Modest champion: Actress Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle

A FILM can sometimes be so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and applaud if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.

Instead you simply sit there, smile or maybe even dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the brilliant Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.

Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.

But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principle pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, whom is both cherished by her blue-collar New England family and taken completely for granted.

At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.

Her principle purpose in life, other than to attend Bible classes, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.

At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the 1950s.

We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a modern smartphone. She does not welcome it – “like carrying a little alien robot in your purse”, she says – but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks it up and does it again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.

The short journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one she has just completed.

She also finds an advert, “Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner”, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.

 

THIS leads her to a wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.

If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.

But what this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.

Certainly, a lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.

Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons’ life seemed to have mapped out for her.

Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life – Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.

Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory – in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.

Marc Turtletaub, a first-time director, has made a terrific job of shaping the screenplay (by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann) into a sensitive and very moving film. Hats off to the whole production team for a very lovely film.

Verdict: Charming and captivating

★★★★★

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