Arts
Don’t sneer at I’m a Celebrity. The show is teaching us to become model citizens
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
Was this Christian pioneer of radio evangelism a fraud?
She was the sequinned star of the airwaves back in the 1920s, the first preacher to realise the potential of…
Culture Buff
John Hearder was a society photographer whose studio and display window were on Castlereagh Street between Rowe Street and the…
Second coming
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
Second coming
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
David Hockney interview: ‘The avant-garde have lost their authority’
David Hockney talks to Martin Gayford about 60 years of ignoring art fashion
Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Why are students of curation being taught to ignore the public and be suspicious of enterprise?
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
The story of the first painting to sell for over a million pounds
Nothing could have prepared the art world for the astounding moment in 1970 when, at a Christie’s sale on 27…
No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene
A bogus history book and a new oratorio turn Mary Magdalene into the wife of Jesus and a human rights activist. Damian Thompson feels sorry for the poor woman
Norman Mailer’s wife comes out of the shadows
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading…
Just because The Homesman has a few women in it doesn’t make it a ‘feminist western’
The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s,…
Why radio is a surprisingly good medium for talking about art
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
Jaw-dropping confessions of a very un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
Culture Buff
Andy Warhol is the star but Roy Lichtenstein is the master. That’s the quick take out of POP TO POPISM…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Sylvie Guillem interview: ‘A lot of people hate me. Bon. You can’t please everybody’
On the eve of her retirement, Sylvie Guillem talks to Ismene Brown about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives
Without a model, Moroni could be stunningly dull. With one, he was peerless...
Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued,…
The genius of Cecil Beaton’s interiors
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…
Yanks buy stacks of tickets in the West End. Why is Made in Dagenham so rude to them?
Go slow at Dagenham. The musical based on the film about a pay dispute in the 1960s starts as a…
Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
