Arts
The pleasures and perils of podcast listening
No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special…
Culture Buff
Adelaide is the perfect festival city and its once biennial, now annual, Festival has been the pace setter for others…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
Eurocrash and Eurotrash
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Will the real Swan Lake please stand up
Ismene Brown unpicks the great enigma of ballet theatre
Sargent, National Portrait Gallery, review: he was so good he should have been better
The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as…
La Donna del Lago, Metropolitan Opera, review: Colm Toibin on a night of masterful singing
La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas…
Fifty Shades of Grey, review: ‘Use a condom!’ my sister shouted
And so, in the end, I went with my sister, Toni, to see Fifty Shades of Grey and we saw…
How to Hold Your Breath, Royal Court, review: yet more state-funded misanthropy
‘We hate the system and we want the system to pay us to say we hate the system.’ The oratorio…
Why Putin is even less of a human than Stalin was
LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll…
UKIP: The First 100 Days, Channel 4, review: a sad, predictable, desperate hatchet job
Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to…
The Heckler: how funny really was Spitting Image?
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
Spitting Image
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
Spitting Image
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
Where Van Gogh learned to paint
William Cook reports from the sooty netherworld that made an artist of Vincent Van Gogh
The future of the album lies in the gallery
The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of…
The Associates at Sadler's Wells reviewed: another acutely inventive work from Crystal Pite
The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious…
Classical music's greatest political butt-kissers: Dudamel, Gergiev and Rattle
On 8 March 2013, Gustavo Dudamel stood by the coffin of the Marxist autocrat Hugo Chavez and conducted the Simon…
Mastersingers of Nuremberg, ENO, review: ‘a triumph’
ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations…
A tatty new theatre offers up a comic gem that’s sure to be snapped up by the BBC
New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The…
Love Is Strange review: subtle and nuanced in ways which, I’m assuming, Fifty Shades is not
You will be wondering why I haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey as this is very much Fifty Shades of…
The amazing story of the blind photographer
Perhaps the news that Radio 5 live will be the only BBC station (under the new broadcasting rights agreements) to…
Better Call Saul review: the box set equivalent of a (very) well-made play
I lost count long ago of the number of dinner parties and pub conversations where I’ve had to utter the…
Culture buff
He gave himself the name ‘Tennessee’; a creative and public relations masterstroke for a still unknown 28 year-old writer. Born…
