Arts and culture
What a strange thing
It sounds irresistible, doesn’t it? A National Theatre Live version of a play by Jack Thorne (the magician who conjured…
Steve Harley was no one-hit wonder
Celebrity deaths range from the ‘tragically young’ (Amy Winehouse) to the ‘I thought they’d gone years ago’ (Peregrine Worsthorne) and the monumental (Michael Jackson). But there’s another…
Another popular feast
Miriam Margolyes was not wrong – however intrepid she may have been – to remark to Her late Majesty the…
Moody shifts of tone
It’s interesting to see a new production of The Sound of Music is on at the National Theatre (a somewhat…
Power beyond eloquence
It was fascinating to catch up with the Grammys the other night. There was the cheering sight of Miley Cyrus…
An all-but-lost treasure
Tennessee Williams is still looking like one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century and the plays he wrote…
A fey screeching parody
Is it a necessary declension, the descent from histrionic splendour to self-parody and worse? For years now Ryan Murphy has…
Ophelia in her madness
Why does Taylor Swift feel like such a force of nature? She transfigures the economy of wherever she lands and…
The writer with an incurable wound
‘They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the…
Artists behaving badly
What a weird situation it is that the painter Donald Friend once treasured by Robert Hughes for the lyricism of…
A deeply elegiac work
That superb poet Peter Porter who was also in love with music used to say there was no denying the…
Barbie’s Oscars snub isn’t sexist
Not for the first time, Hillary Clinton is outraged. Reacting to the news that Barbie star, Margot Robbie, and the…
Greek tragedies
It’s the time of year when there’s a lot of talk about films and catching up with films. Along with…
Barbie’s bombshell
Who would have thought the beery blokey jukebox musical The Choir of Man at Melbourne’s Playhouse would be such an…
Maestro Bernstein
What do we know about Leonard Bernstein, who did everything to popularise classical music and wrote the Broadway classic West…
Why are theatres so cowardly?
Looking back at the year’s West End theatre, a few shows stand out. First, the best. Vanya, starring Andrew Scott…
The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles
Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well…
Remembering John Gardner
“Art begins in a wound, an imperfection,” said the late novelist John Gardner, one of the last American writers to…
A very distinguished monster monarch
So the Matthew Warchus/Jack Thorne A Christmas Carol opened again to just as rapturous a response as it did a…
The Crown is going out in a blaze of camp glory
Say what you like about Netflix and Peter Morgan, the producers and creator of The Crown respectively, but they’ve certainly…
The Turner prize doesn’t make sense anymore
In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing…
Every kind of spectacular effect
It’s starting to turn into the season to be jolly (or whatever variant you can manage) with the Melbourne Symphony…
What fiction can teach us about terrorism
The first decade of this century, following Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001,…
Why Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is one of the strangest books of all time
The 2024 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about…
The point of perdition
What will history make of the superior crime stories we seem to be churning out? The late Peter Corris’ Cliff…
