Arts
Chorus of approval
One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had…
Chorus of approval
One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had…
How Hollywood is killing the art of screenwriting
Cinema is tough right now for writers. Thomas W. Hodgkinson reports from the front line at the Austin Film Festival
Does Allen Jones deserve a retrospective at the Royal Academy?
It has been a vintage season for mannequins. At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an exhibition called Silent Partners looks…
Paddington review: put your mind at rest - no one gets marmalade up the bum
‘Please look after this bear,’ reads the famous label hanging round Paddington’s neck, and this film does that, admirably, handsomely,…
The National’s latest attempt to cheer us up: three hours of poverty porn
Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has…
ENO’s Gospel According to the Other Mary: great music weighed down by a worthy staging
Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the…
Is this 65-year-old British pianist the next big thing in classical music?
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
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,…
