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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
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I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Sue Steward's rating
Reader rating
Phone: 0870 444 1500
Trains: Tube/Rail: Euston/Kings Cross 
, Tube / Bus: 10, 30, 63, 73, 91 
Still lives: women printing Kodak negatives by sunlight, Harrow, 1891
Literary icon: Oscar Wilde’s exaggeratedly poetic publicity photo, New York, 1882
Magic has infused photography ever since images first emerged from empty light-sensitive surfaces. It's still there in our digital world, of course — watch the wide eyes as people
cluster round a mobile phone image — but now the mystery element is taken for granted.
This fabulous and long-overdue exhibition drawn from the hidden treasures (more than 300,000 images) inside the British Library reminds us of a time when that magic was fresh. It mixes the scientific with the artistic, the virtually unseen and the familiar, taking in Francis Frith's ladies on Hastings Beach, a top-hatted
archaeologist at Stonehenge and Oscar Wilde's exaggeratedly poetic publicity portrait.
The curators introduce us to the early experimenters, the techniques invented and long abandoned, the imaginative use of chemicals, optical effects, techniques and lenses that established an art-form distinct from painting.
The collection includes single prints, series, albums and, vitally, the instruments — camera obscura, panoramics, and Henry Fox Talbot's pioneering original camera. It pushes forward into the early 1900s, documenting the explosion of popularity through prints of Kodak's head office in Clerkenwell Road and their all-women production line in Harrow.
The coincidence of early photography and frenzied
scientific discoveries saw wacky, beautiful, sublime, historically significant applications of the technology, such as Fox Talbot's first negatives and positives, displayed here as a pair in An Oak Tree in Winter.
Two transparent frogs were printed during the craze for X-raying a year after its invention, and the snoozing hippo specimen at London Zoo in 1852 seems frighteningly novel.
Away from the scientific world, photography was an aesthetic and artistic medium, emulating painting. Portraiture was inevitably most popular and illustrated new anthropological interest emerging from the Grand Tour, and explorations of “exotic' cultures” — preserved here in a lyrical Japanese lakeside scene and a starkly modernist rendering of the Coliseum.
Wandering through these marvellous pieces and technological milestones, it's tempting to think it's all been done before. But then the magic creeps back: it's all illusion.
Until 7 March, 2010. Information: 0870 444 1500; www.bl.uk
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
