Arts
I, Spy
Is the new year a time to reflect on the misjudgments of a life spent opining? Thirty years ago, when…
I beg Sam Mendes to stop writing his own scripts: Empire of Light reviewed
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’…
Eccentric triviality aimed at 1970s feminists: Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed…
Not everything Bowie did was genius – he was more interesting than that
I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of…
A Turkish dystopia that eludes western censors: Netflix’s Hot Skull reviewed
A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in…
Did this Lithuanian invent abstraction? M.K. Ciurlionis, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, reviewed
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal…
Do conductors have to be cruel to be good?
Richard Bratby on monstrous maestros
The intensity of Christmas
What a box of contradictions Christmas is. There’s the quest for presents – which can get urgent and exhilarated in…
Irresistible: Sky Max’s Christmas Carole reviewed
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
Mesmerisingly sad: Corsage reviewed
Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may…
A short history of applause – and booing
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing…
The puppetry renaissance
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…
Like bingeing on cheap chocolate: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s…
Cruel but shamefully enjoyable: Vardy v Rooney – the Wagatha Christie Trial reviewed
The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram…
Christmas songs that will reduce your gas bills
It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My…
What makes a Christmas song Christmassy?
Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have…
The art of the panto dame
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog…
An Uffizi Adoration that upstages even the Botticellis
Laura Gascoigne on the shadowy Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, whose painting in the Uffizi upstages the masterpieces of Botticelli
Howdy, pardner
Someone told me the new TV streamer The English had a weird resemblance to Cormac McCarthy who has just published…
If Ravel’s Boléro makes you yawn, you’re not really listening
Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share…
Brueghel’s peasant paintings were the D.C. Thomson comics of the 17th century
‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of…
An all too brisk and too narrow history of eugenics: Radio 4’s Bad Blood reviewed
Like so many of history’s great catastrophes, the story begins with an eccentric Victorian Englishman. Francis Galton was a maker…
Why bother calling it White Noise when it’s just another Noah Baumbach film? White Noise reviewed
These days, everyone who was knocking around a few decades ago predicted the internet. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the internet…
