Arts
Met Opera Live's Macbeth: Netrebko's singing stirred almost as much as her décolletage
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…
Peter Phillips is mugged by a gang of Praetorius-loving six-year-old girls in China
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet battle for the heart of English dance
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Neville's Island: a play from the era of Men Behaving Badly - when women were seen as exotic excrescences
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t…
Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special
‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different…
Culture buff
I’m oversensitive to criticism of Australia by famous authors. Richard Flanagan, elated at winning the Man Booker Prize for The…
The only way is Essex
We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of…
Ballet’s battle royal
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Rembrandt at the National Gallery: the greatest show on earth
Martin Gayford sees Rembrandt’s late works at the National Gallery – is this the greatest show on earth?
Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed'
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
Is London's West End Jewish enough for David Baddiel’s musical The Infidel?
David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it…
Frieze Art Fair: where great refinement meets harrowing vulgarity
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
Fury: the men blow stuff up, then Brad Pitt takes his top off
Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a…
Glyndebourne’s Turn of the Screw: horrors of the most innocent and creepy kind
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
What it's like being a scarily talented teenager
It was when she said how she loved ‘watching the computer do exactly what you wanted it to do’ that…
Hooray for Homeland - Carrie’s back blasting America’s enemies to pieces with drones
One of the more welcome and surprising things about television at the moment is that Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) is…
Culture buff
A highly successful tour of European festivals is a great boost to an orchestra. Not just to morale but to…
Mike Leigh interview: 'A guy in the Guardian wants to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!'
Hermione Eyre talks to filmmaker Mike Leigh about Mr Turner, Hollywood, and making films his own way
Tate Modern’s latest show feels like it’s from another planet
‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966…
The drunk conductor who ruined Rachmaninov’s career
Would musical history have turned out differently if Alexander Glazunov hadn’t been smashed out of his wits when he conducted…
Opera North’s Coronation of Poppea: a premium-rate sex-line of an opera
Virtue, hide thyself! The Coronation of Poppea opens with a warning and closes with a love duet for a concubine…
Matthew Bourne’s Lord of the Flies: when boys turn feral
GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of…
Donmar’s Henry IV: Phyllida Lloyd has nothing but contempt for her audience
The age of ‘ladies first’ is back. Phyllida Lloyd reserves all the roles for the weaker sex, as I imagine…
