Arts
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Sylvie Guillem interview: ‘A lot of people hate me. Bon. You can’t please everybody’
On the eve of her retirement, Sylvie Guillem talks to Ismene Brown about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives
Without a model, Moroni could be stunningly dull. With one, he was peerless...
Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued,…
The genius of Cecil Beaton’s interiors
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…
Yanks buy stacks of tickets in the West End. Why is Made in Dagenham so rude to them?
Go slow at Dagenham. The musical based on the film about a pay dispute in the 1960s starts as a…
Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
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…
