Arts
The play’s the thing
Donald Winnicott once told a colleague that Tolstoy had been perversely wrong to write that happy families were all alike…
No laughing matter
We love Amy Schumer. Fact. And we love Goldie Hawn. Fact. But can we love Snatched? Not so much, if…
League of nations
‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini…
Roving eye
Photography has many genres, even more than painting, and most photographers achieve fame by focusing on one of them. There…
Moment of truth
Two extremes of the listening experience were available on Monday on Radio 4. The day began conventionally enough with Start…
An artist of the quickening world
What is it about Yorkshire, particularly Leeds, that it has bred or trained such a succession of famous modern sculptors?…
Police force
I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…
False start
When a composer begins an opera, they create a world. You don’t need a full-scale overture: the tear-stained violins that…
Killing time
Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed…
A method to his madness
His cartoons were semi-serious responses to societal problems, as this extract from Adam Hart-Davis’s new book shows
Bingeing on Bach
Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession —…
Teenage kicks
Imagine living in a country where the average age is under 16 (in the UK it’s currently 40 and increasing)…
Serial offenders
Since completing season two of the brilliant Narcos, I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a replacement serial drama that is more…
Blondie: Pollinator
Ah, Blondie. Those happy days of glorious power pop, chilly disco and rich, fruity vocals — Debbie Harry yearning away…
Secrets and spies
Spare a thought for Emil Gilels, still revered today by Russians as the foremost pianist of the Soviet era. The…
Mild things
English Touring Opera is playing safe this spring, with Tosca and Patience, and was rewarded, in Cambridge at least, with…
Sins of the flesh
Obsession at the Barbican has a complicated provenance. The experimental Belgian director Ivo van Hove adapted the show from a…
Elioth Gruner 1882-1939
Last week I lunched at the Coogee Pavilion on the most perfect day. The scene before me was almost identical…
Remembrance of things past
If you want to appreciate why the return of Twin Peaks is so significant, then you need to know something…
Farming today
There are bigger entities landing at your local multiplex this week. An ancient indestructible franchise is re-re-(re-)booted in Alien: Covenant.…
Animal magnetism
Picasso had a thing for bulls. Martin Gayford talks to the artist’s friend and biographer. Sir John Richardson about a lifelong obsession
Animal magnetism
‘I frequently went to bullfights with Picasso,’ Sir John Richardson remarked, quite casually, as he showed me around the exhibition…
Stand and deliver
Some opera-lovers prefer concert performances to full stagings. I don’t. It’s that whole Gesamtkunstwerk thing: opera needs to be seen…
Masonic bodge
Left-wing groupie Paul Mason has written a costume drama about the suppression of the Paris commune in 1871. We meet…
Alexander Campbell
Inheriting abilities from one’s parents is one of the happy accidents of birth. A remarkable example of inheritance of exceptional…
