Arts
Striped caps and striking shoes
June 11 saw the death of the Yorkshire-born English painter David Hockney who was arguably the most celebrated painter of…
A ballet masterpiece revived – but where’s the pony?
The choreographic partnership of Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot has long been celebrated in mainland Europe: a new double bill…
Is there anything sadder than a Scots Gaelic lament?
Sad songs hit harder, I find, when their meaning hangs just out of reach. Aside perhaps from the exquisite ache…
Toy Story 5 contains delicious touches
Toy Story 5 – do we need it? One worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is…
Clarkson’s Farm remains the best drama on TV
Aliens are very fashionable right now. Steven Spielberg recently announced that they are real and have been visiting us since…
Head to Deptford for one of the exhibitions of the year
Grim news from gallery-land, where even Manhattan’s mega-blue chips are shedding jobs by the truckload. ‘The market’s fucked,’ one soundbite-handy…
A play that shows Iranian society is like our own
Under the Shadow is a timely drama set in Tehran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam’s missiles are raining…
The problem with ‘queer art’
In 1911 Duncan Grant’s ‘Bathing’ went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the…
A man of music
The other day saw the opening of the Peter Corrigan Collection at RMIT which comprises his personal collection of architectural…
Spielberg fumbles his final sci-fi
Steven Spielberg has said his latest film, Disclosure Day, is ‘the summation of my life in science fiction’, which began…
Michelle Terry is ferocious in Brecht’s simplistic tutorial
Bertolt Brecht’s classic, Mother Courage, is about a female war profiteer who drags a wagon of supplies through no man’s…
The liberating delights of Aldous Harding
The first thing I did after getting home from the Barbican the other week was google ‘Aldous Harding neurodivergent’. It…
Another thriller, another teenage incel
At just over two hours, Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear was 20 minutes longer than the 1962 original.…
Delightful Rossini at Glyndebourne
It’s impossible to say what Rossini would have made of Glyndebourne’s production of Il turco in Italia, but you can…
This Lucian Freud belongs on the compost
From 1940, at Benton End, near Hadleigh in Suffolk, the artist Cedric Morris brought his eye to breeding irises. Eliminating…
Three cheers for the new illustration museum
In the artistic pecking order, illustration long languished behind what were seen as the fine arts, even though it was…
Such stuff as dreams are made on
When Ken Branagh took the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford for the first time in thirty years…
What a rabbit hole this film takes you down
Madfabulous is a biopic of Henry Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, who was probably mad and definitely fabulous. His…
None of McCartney’s new songs will trouble his setlist for long
On 30 May 1966, the Beatles released ‘Paperback Writer’ – a fortnight after ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones…
Why I’m increasingly drawn to optimistic sci-fi
You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol…
Are we ready for the truth about Judy Garland?
End of the Rainbow feels like a prison drama set in London in 1969. Judy Garland is about to give…
A first-class production of Puccini’s Western
Nature smiled on the opening week of Opera Holland Park’s new season. There’s no better advertisement for semi-outdoor opera than…
The art of resurrecting forgotten artists
A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to…
