Simon McBurney and the incomprehensibility of archaeology

The Guardian’s Review section yesterday featured an interview with Complicite director Simon McBurney, whose operatic debut A Dog’s Heart reaches London at the ENO in November. I met McBurney last year in his flat, part of a converted piano factory with wide views across London from its roof garden. Over breakfast toast and coffee (cappuccinos …

A visit to Stonehenge in 1853 (maybe)

Most people who visit Stonehenge seem to write about the experience in platitudes repeated from guidebooks (“It is hard to imagine the intense industry of the people who set the stones upright here some thirty-four hundred years ago”) – or about things that have little to do with the stones (“Ask Mummy to tell you …