Arts
The Boy Next Door reviewed: a terrible new J-Lo movie that's disturbingly enjoyable
Stateside critics, who panned Jennifer Lopez’s new film The Boy Next Door on its US release last month, may be…
Muswell Hill reviewed: a guide on how to sock it to London trendies
Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of…
A legendary piece of iconoclastic dance returns. Does the piece still stand up?
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Opera North's Gianni Schicchi and La vida breve reviewed: a flawless double helping of verismo
Is there a more beautiful aria than ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi? There are more overwhelming moments…
There’s nothing wrong with getting into Thomas Tallis on the back of Fifty Shades of Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
Critical on Sky1 reviewed: a new medical drama where everyone radiates an unusual degree of competence and concern
Sky1’s new hospital drama Critical (Tuesday) can’t be accused of making a timid start. Within seconds, an urgent request had…
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…