Arts

For any politician spoiling for a fight over Ireland’s border, Under the Tree is required viewing

11 August 2018 9:00 am

Every so often there’s a news story in which neighbours quarrel over rampaging leylandii. The police are summoned, the case…

Lang Lang in an improbable situation

11 August 2018 9:00 am

An internationally admired orchestra in a beautiful hall: that’s the Melbourne Symphony in Hamer Hall of the Victorian Arts Centre.…

Captain Scott’s 1911 expedition to Antartica, with the Terra Nova anchored in the background, from The Colour of Time

The artist who breathes Technicolour life into historic photographs

4 August 2018 9:00 am

There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering…

Currentzis’s Beethoven asked us to listen with our bodies rather than our minds

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an…

Comedy is entirely unsuited to the ‘Edinburgh hour’

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost…

Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?

4 August 2018 9:00 am

The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him…

Villa Tugendhat, Brno, Czech Republic

Modernist architecture only worked for the wealthy

4 August 2018 9:00 am

It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une…

If we offer Ian McKellan a peerage, will he promise not to inflict his King Lear on us again?

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Gandalf, also known as Ian McKellen, has awarded himself another lap of honour by bringing King Lear back to London.…

Radio 4 brings back the dead

4 August 2018 9:00 am

If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit…

It will save some marriages – or end others: The Escape reviewed

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Dominic Savage had an early start. In Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s sprawling take on Thackeray, he played a prepubescent…

Photo: Rene Vaile

Wayne Blair

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Such a lovely title, it’s hard to believe that The Long Forgotten Dream hasn’t been used before. The title belongs…

‘Lovely’ is the word that best sums up the National Garden Scheme

Why the National Garden Scheme beats the Chelsea Flower Show hands down

28 July 2018 9:00 am

What could be more British than nosying around someone else’s private property while munching on a slice of cake? The…

Molly Wright as Alex in Apostasy

Fascinating, powerful and brilliantly done: Apostasy reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

For many years I would chat genially with our local Jehovah, Stephen, who came door-to-door every few months or so,…

Why the scream of the elephant is much more chilling than the roar of a lion

28 July 2018 9:00 am

Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living…

Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t funny – especially when he’s mocking the powerless

28 July 2018 9:00 am

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers…

Landscape (North Friesland), 1920

Nolde was giddily optimistic about the Nazis – they rewarded him by confiscating his works

28 July 2018 9:00 am

The complexities of Schleswig-Holstein run deep. Here’s Emil Nolde, an artist born south of the German-Danish border and steeped in…

One of Alan Bennett’s finest efforts: Allelujah! reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious…

A proper old-fashioned stinker: ITV’s The Bletchley Circle – San Francisco reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

After just one episode, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV, Wednesday) seems certain to stand out from the crowd. In…

Thrilling energy & humour from Longborough Festival Opera: Ariadne auf Naxos reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

‘They’ve dined well, they’ve drunk their fill, their brains are dull and slow. They’ll sit snoozing in the dark until…

John Russell. The terraces at Monte Cassino c1889 Private collection, courtesy Nevill Keating Pictures, London, on loan to the National Gallery, London.

John Russell

28 July 2018 9:00 am

Once he was known as ‘Australia’s lost impressionist’ and referred to as John Peter Russell. Now at the Art Gallery…

Life is a cabaret: Barry Humphries and Meow Meow

Barry Humphries on Trump, transgender ‘rat-baggery’ and causing maximum offence

21 July 2018 9:00 am

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather…

An embarrassing and misshapen dud: Opera Holland Park’s Isabeau reviewed

21 July 2018 9:00 am

I’ve been trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it became impossible to take Mascagni’s Isabeau seriously. It wasn’t when…

Channel 4 doesn’t do ‘news’ in any meaningful sense of the word – it’s pure propaganda

21 July 2018 9:00 am

When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I…

Lee Bul’s ‘Monster: Pink’ (foreground) and ‘Crashing’ (background)

If you like monstrosities, head to the Hayward Gallery

21 July 2018 9:00 am

One area of life in which globalism certainly rules is that of contemporary art. Installation, performance, the doctrine of Marcel…

The marketisation of BBC radio is a recipe for creative disaster

21 July 2018 9:00 am

There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed…