Arts
The recruitment company to go to if you've got no arms or legs
When to launch? For impresarios, this is the eternal dilemma. Autumn is so crowded with press nights that producers are…
St. Vincent: too much lovability and not enough roguishness from Bill Murray
Is Bill Murray fit for sainthood? Certainly his fans have him figure as some sort of lesser divinity, maybe one…
BBC1’s Remember Me: the curious case of the killer Yorkshire taps
BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town.…
Why you have to listen to this year's Reith Lectures
Each year the Reith Lectures come round as Radio 4’s annual assertion of intellectual authority, fulfilling the BBC’s original aspiration…
Culture buff
We’ve established that capital city festivals are for other people. Their principal purpose is to bring people into the city,…
Dance One last dance
I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger…
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
