Arts
I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not
The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt…
You can’t forget what Will Self says - even if you wish you could
It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign…
Culture buff
In 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution, one of the most popular operas in Paris was Richard Coeur-de-Lion.…
I wanted to beat it with a stick and cry, ‘Get on with it!’: Carol reviewed
Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard…
The bicycle may have triumphed but it’s far from perfect
It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We…
Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous
‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial…
Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…
Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…
Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?
Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like…
Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?
Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like…
You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could
It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign…
You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could
It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign…
I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not
The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt…
Julia Margaret Cameron: the Leonardo of photography
Ruskin dismissed Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs as untrue. But, argues Martin Gayford, the same could be said of any picture
The work of Elisabeth Frink is ripe for a renaissance
In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures,…
The strange death of Louis XIV
At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene…
Britain's abstract painters deserve more attention than America's abstract expressionists
Fifteen million pounds and a hefty slice of architectural vision have transformed the Whitworth from a fusty Victorian art temple…
The Heckler: why we must stop Thomas Heatherwick's Garden Bridge
Thomas Heatherwick is the most famous designer in the United Kingdom today and has an unquestionable flair for attention-grabbing creations.…
Late Brahms is wonderfully crafted - which is why it's so dull
Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal…
Rambert Dance: one piercing masterpiece - and one dud
Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…
What’s it like to have a Nazi for a father?
This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there…
Kenneth Branagh’s The Winter’s Tale is better than any I can recall
Kenneth Branagh opens his West End tenancy with Shakespeare’s inexplicably popular The Winter’s Tale. We start in Sicily where Leontes…
Morgen und Abend: the kind of opera that gives opera a bad name
The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf…
Is television at its best when it mimics radio?
Not that long ago the BBC trumpeted a new Stakhanovite project to big up the arts in its many and…
A gripping Start the Week from a Paris on the edge
It was as if Andrew Marr and his guests on Start the Week on Monday morning were standing on the…
