Last week my wife and I ignored the flooding to travel to Cardiff for the opening night of WNO’s La Traviata – a revival of David McVicar’s 2008/2009 staging as part of the 2014 Fallen Women season. It’s a powerful production: late 19th century realism playing out across Violetta’s fallen tombstone (enlarged to a scale that’s not so much memento mori as a reduction of everything else on stage to fleeting memento vivere). Continue reading →

In my day job (scholarly journals publishing) I spend a lot of time wrestling with the possibilities and challenges of digital technology. I don’t mean the basic migration of readers from print copies to online versions of the same material, but the ways in which digital technology is transforming how people read and what they publish. Continue reading →