Arts & Humanities

Questions about the evolution of music criticism

In February 2012, Grove Music’s Editor in Chief Deane Root talked to contemporary music scholar Paul Griffiths about his multi-faceted career and his involvement with Grove in print and online. Grove Music Online has been the leading online resource for music research since its inception in 2001, a compendium of music scholarship offering full texts with numerous subsequent updates and emendations, more than 50,000 signed articles, and 30,000 biographies contributed by over 6,000 scholars from around the world.

“Davy” Jones, actor and musician

By Gordon Thompson
As the Beatles made their historic debut on American television in February 1964, the cast of Oliver!, the actor playing the role of the Artful Dodger, and other acts on the show watched from the wings as the hysteria unfolded. Davy Jones had started his acting career on British television, making his debut appearance in the venerable Coronation Street followed by the gritty Liverpool police drama, Z-Cars.

A history of the book

By Michael Suarez and Henry Woudhuysen
‘And yet the books’ by Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz’s great poem (1986) brilliantly captures the relationship ‎between the book as a universal, world-wide object, a thing that exists by the millions and yet is so ‎individual, and the single, solitary writer or reader. How can such a ubiquitous, material phenomenon ‎be at the same time so personal and so transcendent?

David Gascoyne and the missing portrait

By Robert Fraser
I am often asked to name my favourite poem by the British writer David Gascoyne (1916-2001), my biography of whom appears with OUP this month. Bearing in mind Gascoyne was in his time an interpreter of Surrealism, an existentialist of a religious variety and a proponent of ecology, you might expect me to go for a poem along these lines. Instead, I usually choose a poem of the early 1940s entitled “Odeur de Pensée.”

What is a leap year?

Today, 29 February 2012, is a ‘leap day’. To understand more about the leap phenomenon, and the significance of 29 February in history, we turn to The Oxford Companion to the Year: an exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning.

Final episode of TV series M*A*S*H airs

This Day in World History
On February 28, 1983, at the end of its eleventh season, M*A*S*H said goodbye to television. More than 105 million Americans in about 51 million homes watched the series finale, a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie directed by star Alan Alda that featured the show’s characteristic blend of comedy and drama.

Robert Moses and the Second Avenue Subway

By Joan Marans Dim
The world was allegedly created in seven days, so why is it taking New York City so long — some 90 years, or possibly longer — to create the Second Avenue Subway? According to the MTA, proposals to build a north-south subway line along Second Avenue date back to 1929. But it wasn’t until March 2007 — 78 years later — that the first construction contract for Phase One of the Second Avenue Subway was awarded.

Why Memoir Matters

By G. Thomas Couser
Memoir gained sudden prominence in the mid 1990s, when a few memoirs by unheralded authors–Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club, and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted–had spectacular sales and favorable reviews. The memoir boom was underway.

Once upon a life story…

By Denis Sampson
‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road.’ It is one of the most celebrated of all fictional beginnings, evoking the essence and tradition of narrative itself, telling a first story to a child, and at the same time the beginning of a very sophisticated kind of biographical fiction, the childhood and youth of an artist.

OUP NYC Poetry Reading Series with Paty, Schoonebeek, Dimitrov, & Landau

On February 23rd, Oxford University Press in New York will host four poets reading together on one night. Their poems span a broad range of forms and aesthetics, from collaborative short poems and plainspoken lyrics to a sequence of post-apocalyptic epistles. A wine reception will begin the evening at 6 p.m., with readings from the poets afterward. Oxford University Press associate editor Kristin Maffei will host the event and read a selection from her own poems. If you are a poetry fan/lover please join us. To wet your appetite for the event, we have a few selections of poetry below.

Martin Scorsese, 3D, and Hugo

By Robert Kolker
“That’s that,” quoting Ace Rothstein at the end of Casino. I didn’t end the Martin Scorsese chapter on an optimistic note in the fourth edition of A Cinema of Loneliness. There is more than a hint that the Scorsese’s creative energies might be flagging. With this in mind, I went to see Hugo with a lot of skepticism.

Questions about Santa Muerte and Mexicans’ relationship with death

By R. Andrew Chesnut

It’s Mardi Gras today and revellers may recognize skull and skeleton decorations also used on the Day of the Dead. Santa Muerte is the skeleton saint whose cult has attracted millions of devotees over the past decade. We wanted to ask R. Andrew Chestnut about this folk saint’s impact today.

The Oxford Companion to Downton Abbey

Now that Series One and Two, plus the Christmas Special, of Downton Abbey have aired in the US and Canada, we’ve decided to compile a reading list for those serious-minded viewers who’d like to learn more about Edwardian England, World War I, life in an aristocratic household, and what lies ahead for the Crawleys and their servants. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Antiquity and newfangleness

By Andrew Zurcher
The “Februarie” eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s pastoral collection, The Shepheardes Calender, was first published in 1579. It presents a conversation between two shepherds, a brash “Heardmans boye” called Cuddie and an old stick-in-the-mud named Thenot.

London Fashion Week is fast approaching

By Emily Ardizzone and Anna Wright
2012 will be a momentous year for the UK capital, and the new collections presented in London in this week will no doubt add to the growing feeling of excitement in the run up to the Olympic Games. London’s Fashion Royalty will all be present, from established design houses such as Aquascutum and Paul Smith, to new and emerging talent in the form of the Central St Martins’ Graduate show.

Brian Epstein and the quest for a contract

By Gordon Thompson
On a cold winter’s day in early 1962, Brian Epstein and the Beatles huddled together contemplating their failed bid for a Decca recording contract and the bitter aftertaste of rejection that left emptiness in their stomachs. But hunger can feed ambition. Disappointments would ensue, but almost immediately Epstein would be the proverbial right man in the right place at the right time and meet a string of people who were looking for something not quite exactly unlike the Beatles.