Arts
Jan de Bray “The governors of the Guild of St Luke, Haarlem” 1675
The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was surprisingly exciting and is now known as the Dutch Golden Age. Newly…
The forgotten history of the Tube’s ‘poster girls’
Every weekday, I travel by Tube to The Spectator’s office, staring at the posters plastered all over the walls. I…
Excellent but there’s too much larking about: ENO’s Rodelinda reviewed
ENO has revived Richard Jones’s production of Handel’s Rodelinda. It was warmly greeted on its first outing in 2014, though…
Don’t believe the sales figures – DVDs are thriving
According to the accountants’ ledgers, DVDs are dying. Sales of those shiny discs, along with their shinier sibling the Blu-ray,…
The advantages of turning down the colour knob: Monochrome reviewed
Leonardo da Vinci thought sculpting a messy business. The sculptor, he pointed out, has to bang away with a hammer,…
Why has the Bridge Theatre opened with this lightweight new play? Young Marx reviewed
Bang! A brand new theatre has opened on the South Bank managed by the two Nicks, Hytner and Starr, who…
It’s hard to preserve the primacy of head over heart while watching this doc about refugees
Anybody who wants to maintain a strong and untroubled stance against mass migration to Europe should probably avoid BBC2’s Exodus:…
Partying like it’s 1899: two lieder recitals reviewed
If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that…
Hideously watchable: Killing of a Sacred Deer reviewed
You know where you aren’t with director Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek allegorist creates parallel worlds which superficially resemble our own.…
Oh dear Jesus… Liam Gallagher’s As You Were reviewed
Grade: C+ There was a certain thrill to be had from that first Oasis album, Definitely Maybe. Liam’s yob howl…
Why talking about death is a essential part of living
Mandy was 38 when she was told she was ‘in the end stage’, suffering from COPD and finding it more…
The death of cosy Christie
This is not Midsomer Murders. The new film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is thick with…
Michelle de Kretser
A multi-award winner, Michelle de Kretser has just published her fifth novel, The Life to Come. Born in Sri Lanka,…
The art of persuasion
It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this…
Wayne’s world
Ballet would have been an obvious revenue stream for Sadler’s Wells when it reopened back in 1998 but straight-up classics…
The old ways
I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look…
Amazing Grace
In the first scene of this distinctly odd documentary, Grace Jones meets a group of fans, who squeal with delight…
Rattle’s hall
Even in a Trump world where reality is what you say it is, the London Symphony Orchestra’s announcement of a…
Irish ayes
Luigi Cherubini is the pantomime villain of French romantic music. As head of the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s he…
London calling
Madame Monet was bored. Wouldn’t you have been? Exiled to London in the bad, cold winter of 1870–71. In rented…
Family planning
Beginning starts at the end. A Crouch End party has just finished and the sitting room is a waste tip…
The ties that bound us
Only Neil MacGregor could do it — take us in a single thread from a blackened copper coin, about the…
Pass the sick bag
The opening of Gunpowder (BBC1, Saturdays) was just about the most knuckle-gnawingly tense ten minutes I’ve ever seen on TV.…
Rachel Podger
The Enlightenment saw orthodoxies challenged and the emergence of radical ideas throughout the latter half of the 18th century. That…
Emotional rescue
In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove…
