Arts feature
‘I’m not interested in moral purity’
Michael Hann talks to St Vincent about Sheena Easton, Stalin and performing in five-inch heels
‘Where are the Rambos?’
James Delingpole talks to comic-book writer Mark Millar about the joy of Catholicism, our sorry lack of male action figures and his childhood superpower
Napoleon dynamite
Theo Zenou on Kubrick’s fascination with the fallen Emperor
The great unveiling
The way an object is stored can magnify its beauty and enhance expectation. Joanna Rossiter wonders whether the opening up of galleries will have the same effect on an art-starved public
Theatre’s final taboo – fun
The stage has become a pleasure-free zone in which snarling dramatists fight over their pet political causes, says Lloyd Evans
The Mozarts of ad music
Richard Bratby meets the hidden men and women composing melodies to make you buy
Woman of the cloth
Laura Freeman considers how artists have depicted one of the strangest and most touching of the Stations of the Cross
Bop till you drop
Stuart Jeffries on the dark history of dance marathons
Culture shock
Richard Bratby on the post-Covid exodus of talent from the performing arts
‘His paintings are perfectly meant for our times’
Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux Klan
Bedroom pop
A short history of lo-fi, by Robert Barry
Divine revelation
Rosie Millard gets her gloved hands on one of the world’s most lavish – and expensive – art books
Looking for a new England
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Lost and found
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne
Sea fever
From ancient Greece to TikTok: Alexandra Coghlan on the pulling power of shanties
The bimbofication of art
Galleries are awash with gimmicky paintings that look like they’ve been designed by algorithm. Dean Kissick on the rise of zombie figuration
Britain’s got talent
Brexit and Covid have pushed us out of the common musical market and thrown us back on homegrown sprouts. Good, says Norman Lebrecht
The trying game
Rosie Millard dispels the myth that persistence is always rewarded
People’s galleries
Ignore the activists, says Tristram Hunt, Alexander von Humboldt’s Enlightenment project, embodied in a flash new Berlin museum, deserves celebrating
Whodunnit?
The Master of Flémalle was one of the first painters to depict in detail the reality of ordinary things. But who was he? Martin Gayford finds a prime suspect
The Venus de Marlene
Tanjil Rashid on the legend of Dietrich
Going for a song
Alexandra Coghlan on how we became a nation of choirs and carollers
‘It was like a survivors’ circle’
Michael Hann talks to Corey Taylor, front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’, about PTSD, Donald Trump and life after alcoholism
Vital signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
The outsiders
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
