Arts
So bad I wanted to escape: An Octoroon reviewed
Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black.…
Fury and excitement – how the journalists at the New York Times have coped with Trump
Back when his country was controlled by the USSR, the Czech writer Milan Kundera pointed out that ‘Union of Soviet…
Leave No Trace is inaction-packed – yet it pulls you in and keeps you pulled in
Debra Granik, the writer-director who made quite a splash with Winter’s Bone (which launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence in…
Antony Gormley’s art works better in theory than in practice
Antony Gormley has replicated again. Every year or so a new army of his other selves — cast, or these…
An extraordinary, brilliant spectacle: Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium reviewed
Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment…
The Wharf and its neighbour
After 35 years on The Wharf at Walsh Bay, the Sydney Theatre Company has moved out. But it will be…
‘I think The Kinks could have found a better frontman’: Ray Davies interviewed
‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the…
Alexander Calder was a volcano of invention
In the Moderna Museet in Stockholm there is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which references Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with…
More gripping than any scripted thriller: November 13 – Attack on Paris reviewed
There were 1,500 punters in the audience when Eagles of Death Metal played their fatal gig at the Bataclan theatre…
The best album of the year so far, by some margin
Grade: A+ While the young bands plunder the 1980s for every last gobbet of tinny synth and hi-hat, the singer-songwriters…
The excitement of emigrating on your own as a child
There was one of those moments late on Sunday night when a voice is so arresting (either through tone, timbre,…
Sorrow and pity are no guarantee of artistic success: Aftermath at Tate Britain reviewed
Some disasters could not occur in this age of instant communication. The first world war is a case in point:…
A fun evening that finished early enough for dinner – neither a given in Handel
On a sward of AstroTurf somewhere off Silicon Roundabout, Mountain Media is hosting its summer party and, well, it’s the…
This adaptation of Miss Julie is a textbook lesson in how to kill a classic
Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls…
No fear
Hereditary is the horror film that has been described as a ‘ride of pure terror’ and likened to The Exorcist…
You vote for my pupil, I’ll vote for yours – the truth about music competitions
A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and…
Meet ‘the queen of shitty robots’
Older readers will perhaps recall the once popular Sunday evening TV programme Scrapheap Challenge, in which oily, boilersuited blokes competed…
Giorgio de Chirico Gare Montparnasse
The other morning, the Director of MoMA from New York, Glenn D Lowry was on ABC Breakfast. He was knowledgable…
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
Why has the National given over its largest stage to one of the nation’s smallest talents?
The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been…
A full-on Freudian Oklahoma! at Grange Park Opera
Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side…
Longborough continues to be a refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing idiotic productions
Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off…
Exhilaratingly original, C4’s Flowers is much more than just a ‘dark comedy’
On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines,…
Women can now make dull formulaic franchise films too! Hurrah! Ocean’s 8 reviewed
Ocean’s 8 is the all-female spin-off of the all-male Ocean’s trilogy and it’s a sop, with a third act that…
Rod Liddle is wrong: if anything we still hear too much from male presenters on Radio 4
I don’t know which day Rod Liddle travelled down from the northeast and found nothing but women’s voices cluttering up…
