Arts
Gospel truth
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing…
The pop artist whose transgressions went too far – for the PC art world
After years of being effectively banned from exhibiting in his own country, Allen Jones finally reaches the RA with his first major UK retrospective. Andrew Lambirth meets him
The only way is Essex University
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
The secret world of the artist's mannequin
A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft…
Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year - and the most beautiful too
Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr…
How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction
Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in…
James Delingpole falls in love with Grayson Perry - and almost comes round to Chris Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Met Opera Live's Macbeth: Netrebko's singing stirred almost as much as her décolletage
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…
Peter Phillips is mugged by a gang of Praetorius-loving six-year-old girls in China
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet battle for the heart of English dance
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Neville's Island: a play from the era of Men Behaving Badly - when women were seen as exotic excrescences
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t…
Kate Chisholm on what makes the BBC World Service so special
‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different…
Culture buff
I’m oversensitive to criticism of Australia by famous authors. Richard Flanagan, elated at winning the Man Booker Prize for The…
The only way is Essex
We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of…
Ballet’s battle royal
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Rembrandt at the National Gallery: the greatest show on earth
Martin Gayford sees Rembrandt’s late works at the National Gallery – is this the greatest show on earth?
Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed’
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
Is London's West End Jewish enough for David Baddiel’s musical The Infidel?
David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it…
Frieze Art Fair: where great refinement meets harrowing vulgarity
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
Fury: the men blow stuff up, then Brad Pitt takes his top off
Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a…
Glyndebourne’s Turn of the Screw: horrors of the most innocent and creepy kind
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
What it’s like being a scarily talented teenager
It was when she said how she loved ‘watching the computer do exactly what you wanted it to do’ that…
