Arts
Bold, in its way, but Ben Whishaw is ill-suited to Shakespeare: Julius Caesar reviewed
Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two…
Devastating but also more involving than you’d ever think possible: Loveless reviewed
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is, indeed, devastatingly loveless, as well as devastatingly pitiless, which does not sound hopeful. Yet it is…
BBC Arabic’s version of Woman’s Hour is rather different to Radio 4’s
When the BBC’s Arabic-language network went out on air for the first time 80 years ago, on 3 January 1938,…
Rod Liddle finds his inner SJW listening to Justin Timberlake
Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history…
Railways and the Raj
Many of our acquaintances now rarely watch 7.30, partly out of irritation with the succession of whingers and trade union…
What’s it like being the only right-wing comic?
Geoff Norcott is lean, talkative, lightly bearded and intense. Britain’s first ‘openly Conservative’ comedian has benefited enormously from the Brexit…
The joy of buses
It’s a pity Will Self didn’t embark on his bus tour round Britain before the Brexit vote. If he had,…
Gursky’s subject is humanity: prosaic, mundane, extremely messy His colossal, panoramic pictures are brilliant and lowering at the same time
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me…
Celebrating Carter was one of the most energising musical occasions in years
Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there…
The worst thing about Piers Morgan is that he deserves his success
Perhaps you missed the fuss because there has been so little publicity about it. But last week, at Davos, the…
There are many scenes in this overlong play that consist, literally, of drivel: John reviewed
The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’…
Wonderfully fixating and wholly non-formulaic: Phantom Thread reviewed
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a lush psychosexual drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a pampered, tyrannical, pernickety 1950s couturier…
Morning Star, 2017
President Macron is lending the Bayeux Tapestry for exhibition in the British Museum; the medieval tapestry masterpiece The Lady and…
A sumptuous feast of an exhibition: Charles I at the Royal Academy reviewed
Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of…
Royal Opera’s Tosca is a sloppy affair
One of the Royal Opera’s greatest virtues is the care it takes with its revivals, even those that are virtually…
Ainsley Harriott is still unaccountably amused by almost everything: Costa Del Celebrity reviewed
These days, when it comes to people who used to be on the telly, the answer to the classic newspaper…
Is forgetting a modern disease?
If you were to ask me by the end of the week what I had written about in this column…
Downsizing throws away its brilliant premise
Downsizing is a film with the most brilliant premise. What if, to save the planet, we were all made tiny?…
The secret to one of the nerdiest – and longest-running – quizzes around
Last year was a bit of a year for Radio 4 anniversaries; maybe most notably, Desert Island Discs celebrated 70…
ENB’s La Sylphide resembles a lock-in at a Royal Mile souvenir shop
Gurn loves Effy, Effy is engaged to James but James is away with the fairies: a recipe for love tragedy.…
R&B landfill: Craig David’s The Time is Now reviewed
Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you…
Unlike most Pinter plays, this one doesn’t bore or baffle: The Birthday Party reviewed
The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t…
Portrait of William Manning c.1821
The great museums and galleries in Australia do more than acquire, maintain and display their collections; they are also centres…
The sex lives of conductors
I once knew a great conductor who claimed that he never boarded a plane to a new orchestra without a…
Ferrari – heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous and addictive
Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250…
