Arts
The Imitation Game: a film that's as much in the closet as Alan Turing was
The Imitation Game is a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who broke the German’s Enigma…
Royal Opera’s Idomeneo: get seats but make sure they’re facing away from the stage
Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as…
The voices of Indian PoWs captured in the first world war
At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British…
We know that war is hell. But it doesn’t ever make us stop doing it
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
Culture buff
Jane Turner is to play a mother with a difficult daughter. No, it’s not a stage version of Kath &…
Un-Beaton
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…
Autumn round-up
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
Un-Beaton
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…
How Londoners can reclaim the River Thames
The current redevelopment of the city’s riverside is a lost opportunity to reclaim the Thames for Londoners, says Ellis Woodman
Interstellar: like Star Trek – but dumber and more tiring
Christopher Nolan’s futuristic epic Interstellar isn’t a clever film, or even a dumb film with a clever film trying to…
Egon Schiele at the Courtauld: a one-note samba of spindly limbs, nipples and pudenda
One day, as a student — or so the story goes — Egon Schiele called on Gustav Klimt, a celebrated…
Mariinsky’s Boris Godunov - a revelation
Anyone who thinks opera singers and orchestral players are overworked should spare a thought for the Mariinsky Opera on its…
An inept dud penetrates the Park Theatre’s dross-filters - and I blame Beckett
Jonah and Otto is a lost-soul melodrama that keeps its audience guessing. Where are we? The Channel coast somewhere. Indoors…
Is there anything a gospel choir can't cheer up?
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing…
Many more Germans were displaced in 1945 than Indians during partition
What Radio 3 needs is a musical version of Neil MacGregor. The director of the British Museum and now a…
James Walton uncovers the sound of Nashville - money
Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer…
Gospel truth
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing…
Gospel truth
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing…
The pop artist whose transgressions went too far – for the PC art world
After years of being effectively banned from exhibiting in his own country, Allen Jones finally reaches the RA with his first major UK retrospective. Andrew Lambirth meets him
The only way is Essex University
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
The secret world of the artist's mannequin
A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft…
Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year - and the most beautiful too
Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr…
How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction
Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in…
James Delingpole falls in love with Grayson Perry - and almost comes round to Chris Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
