Arts
Battle fatigue
Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated,…
Battle fatigue
Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated,…
DVF worship
Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of…
Egypt: where gods are born and go to die
Tom Holland on Egypt, where the deities were born and history itself began
Why I find women-only exhibitions depressing
Modern Scottish Men, a new exhibition celebrating the achievements of male artists in the 20th century, opens next month in…
The couple behind the world’s most famous chair
Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine…
How the pixel became a key feature of drone warfare
I hadn’t really thought much about pixels before, despite spending a large portion of my day looking at them. After…
Never again, I told myself last time Bob Dylan was in town
We were like four hapless contestants on University Challenge. None of us knew the answer. But just like they do…
This Juliet needs a new Romeo
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff deserves to become a classic
It’s Halloween, and right on lightning-flash cue enters an operatic ghost story exhumed from the grave of long-since-buried works. You…
Turning Alzheimer’s into theatre is like building a surfboard out of sawdust
Here are three truths about play-writing. A script without an interval will be structurally flawed. A vague, whimsical title means…
I wept only with frustration: Spectre reviewed
Spectre is the 24th film in the Bond franchise, the fourth starring Daniel Craig, the second directed by Sam Mendes,…
Not all crap TV is all that crap
Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of…
Agincourt was neither necessary, nor great. We’re mad to celebrate it
Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated,…
Colm Toibin on priests, loss and the half-said thing
Jenny McCartney talks to unstoppable literary force Colm Tóibín about loss, priests and half-said things
I doubt Goethe intended Werther's sorrows to be as unremitting as this
There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given,…
Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant: The Wars of the Roses reviewed
The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI…
Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed
One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a…
Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando
Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102…
What’s it like to talk to a serial killer?
‘I’ve never met a human being who doesn’t appreciate being listened to, being taken seriously,’ said Asbjorn Rachlew, the Norwegian…
The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones
The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact,…
Culture buff
Edward Albee posed the question in 1962: ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ The answer, it seems, is no one. There’s…
Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando
Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102…
Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed
One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a…
I doubt Goethe intended Werther’s sorrows to be as unremitting as this
There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given,…
