Arts and culture
Jeffrey Smart exhibition Constructed World
There are just a few weeks left to catch the Jeffrey Smart exhibition Constructed World at the Art Gallery of…
Culture Buff
A new book reminds us, perhaps unintentionally, that not everything that has mattered in the performing arts started with the…
Maxine Peake
We live in a time of paradoxes. The NSW Parliament has just legislated for terminations to be performed from 22…
Sylvia in Houston
Houston is a prosperous Texan city, the hub of the US oil and gas industries. And home to the city’s…
Dominic Smith
He’s an Australian-born international best-selling author. Dominic Smith was born in Brisbane in 1971 to an Australian mother and an…
King’s College choristers at ease
It was a beautiful autumn morning when we went up to Cambridge for a meeting at King’s College. Christopher Hogwood…
Paul Dyer conducting the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
Only a person who is more or less my age can have a direct recollection of the 1953 coronation of…
Shakespeare in Love
For centuries plays have been derived from novels, myths and legends but only recently have we become used to plays…
Margaret Olley Pomegranates in a basket 1967
It’s a barely forgivable cliche to call them ‘the odd couple’; but Margaret Olley (1923-2011) and Ben Quilty (b. 1973)…
Brett Whiteley (1939-1992) Self portrait in the studio 1976
Painters and opera go together. Connected by passion and big gestures, it is not surprising that composers are drawn to…
Detail from the cover of WINX
It is possibly lying on a Royal bedside table. Certainly we know that a week or so ago, a copy…
On the Beach at Trouville 1870. Bequest of Michel Monet 1966
A magnificent Empire-style townhouse near the Bois de Boulogne contains a remarkable collection of paintings. On rue Louis Boilly, the…
Alyona Kovalyova and Jacopo Tissi in Diamonds Act 3 of Jewels
The name is a byword for exacting standards and grand tradition. The Bolshoi Ballet, at the peak of the ballet…
Anna Bolena
Where would we be without the Tudors? Certainly our shelves, stages and screens would seem empty without their era which…
Captain James Cook. Wedgwood and Bentley, c.1779
Three speakers: one is Director of The Royal Collection comprising over a million objects in 13 royal residences across the…
John Beard Edmund (+Bill)
I don’t imagine the newest member of the Royal Family was named after the Archibald Prize but it was a…
Broadway production of Come From Away
We all remember where we were when first hearing of 9/11. Some people were on trans-Atlantic flights. When the US…
Royal portraits at Bendigo
One of our favourite places in London is in St Martin’s Place, just around the corner from Trafalgar Square and…
![[Photo: Marco Borggreve]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Stanislav_Kochanovsky.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Stanislav Kochanovsky
The Melbourne Symphony was really on to something in 2017 when it engaged a young Russian conductor for a Rachmaninov…
Melbourne cast of Cosi
It was one of the most delightful Australian films of the 1990s. Directed by Mark Joffe, Cosi was also one…
Jonathan Biggins as Paul Keating
This is a show for the nostalgic and the masochistic. The Gospel According to Paul is a one man show…
Self portrait 1934 Nora Heysen
In his new biography of Winston Churchill, Andrew Roberts notes that ‘it was said of Emperor Napoleon III that he…
Fernando Guimarães
The closing chapters of Homer’s Odyssey were the source for the opera regarded as the crowning achievement of composer Claudio…
Jacqueline McKenzie and Mandy McElhinney
Mosquitoes is not a particularly alluring title for Australians but it is the title of the latest play by Lucy…
Aurum by Alice Topp
Such a wonderful word: ‘verve’. Not used much now, it’s one of the words we owe to the French. We…
