Arts feature

‘Sausage Shop’, 1951, by Stanley Spencer

Holy visions and dustbins

30 June 2016 1:00 pm

Woolworth’s spectacles. Pudding-basin haircut, rather sparse. Norfolk jacket. Pyjama cuffs below trouser legs and sleeves. Paints and brushes in an…

Show business

25 June 2016 3:00 am

Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar…

Making a stand: Archibald Leitch’s drawing for Goodison Park

Show business

23 June 2016 2:00 am

Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar…

Out of spirits: ‘Glory be to God’, c.1868, by Georgiana Houghton

Out of this world

16 June 2016 1:00 pm

It is London in the summer of 1871. Queen Victoria has just opened the Royal Albert Hall in memory of…

An early folly: Rushton Triangular Lodge, Northamptonshire, built in 1597 by Sir Thomas Tresham as a symbol of the Holy Trinity

These foolish things

9 June 2016 1:00 pm

No reliable statistics exist — it’s not the sort of thing you can audit — but England is surely the…

Three hours of vomit, fellatio and menstruation: Isabelle Huppert on Phaedra(s)

4 June 2016 9:00 am

A blushing James Woodall is riveted by Isabelle Huppert’s performance in Phaedra(s)

Spellbound

2 June 2016 1:00 pm

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask…

True or false? The Temple of Bel, Palmyra, before and after its destruction at the hands of Islamic State

Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries

True or false? The Temple of Bel, Palmyra, before and after its destruction at the hands of Islamic State

The great pretenders

26 May 2016 1:00 pm

There is fakery in the air. And maybe the French are done with deconstruction. A drone operated by a French…

Hillingdon Civic Centre: a dozen red bungalows clumsily buggering one another

Jonathan Meades on the postmodernist buildings that we must protect

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Best of postmodernism: is that an oxymoron? Jonathan Meades thinks not

Hillingdon Civic Centre: a dozen red bungalows clumsily buggering one another

Gaudy! Bright! Loud! Fun!

19 May 2016 1:00 pm

In any epoch most of what is built is mediocre, though we may not realise it at the time because…

King of heavy metal Bruce Dickinson at Madison Square Gardens in 1983

Meet the fans who risk death for heavy metal

14 May 2016 9:00 am

We in the West may snigger at heavy metal, but in some parts of the world its practitioners face the death penalty. Karen Yossman reports

King of heavy metal Bruce Dickinson at Madison Square Gardens in 1983

Death metal

12 May 2016 1:00 pm

With its loud guitar riffs and even louder fashion, heavy metal has always been ripe for ridicule. In its mid-1980s…

Florence Foster Jenkins entertains at home

When opera singers can’t sing

7 May 2016 9:00 am

Were Florence Foster Jenkins and her fellow culprits touchingly heroic, cynically fraudulent or just plain bonkers? Rupert Christiansen reports

Florence Foster Jenkins entertains at home

Deluded divas

5 May 2016 1:00 pm

When the Fat Lady Sings, everyone is primed to chortle, even if she is Montserrat Caballé and doing it wonderfully…

Everything comes down to one man’s suffering: Geza Rohrig as Saul

Should the Final Solution ever be made into entertainment?

30 April 2016 9:00 am

Amid the abundant cinema of Nazi atrocity, Son of Saul is exemplary. Ian Thomson explains why

Everything comes down to one man’s suffering: Geza Rohrig as Saul

Filming the Final Solution

28 April 2016 1:00 pm

In July 1986, nine months before he died, I met the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi at his…

Going Dutch: Eelco Smits and Janni Goslinga of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in ‘Kings of War’

This year's must-see Shakespeare? Four hours of history in Dutch

23 April 2016 9:00 am

James Woodall talks to the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, who has brought a swathe of Shakespeare’s history plays to the stage in Dutch (four hours of it)

Going Dutch: Eelco Smits and Janni Goslinga of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in ‘Kings of War’

All the world’s a stage

21 April 2016 1:00 pm

In this much-heralded Shakespeare anniversary year, one might expect a certain respect for the works to prevail. In Holland it’s…

Dark magus: Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in ‘Miles Ahead’

‘Do black movies really not sell?’: Don Cheadle on Miles Ahead

16 April 2016 9:00 am

Don Cheadle talks to Jasper Rees about the long, hard road to bringing Miles Davis’s life to the big screen

Dark magus: Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in ‘Miles Ahead’

‘Do black movies really not sell?’

14 April 2016 1:00 pm

The musical biopic is a staple of the Hollywood economy. Like an Airfix model kit it comes with the necessary…

Detail of mosaic depicting the martyrdom of Saints Castus and Cassius, 12th century, at the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily

Norman Sicily was a multicultural paradise – but it didn’t last long

9 April 2016 9:00 am

There are lessons to be learned from the disintegration of this once majestic multicultural Norman kingdom, says Martin Gayford

Detail of mosaic depicting the martyrdom of Saints Castus and Cassius, 12th century, at the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily

The rise and fall of Sicily

7 April 2016 1:00 pm

A few weeks ago, I looked out on the Cathedral of Monreale from the platform on which once stood the…

With the release of Oculus Rift, cinema will never be the same again

2 April 2016 9:00 am

With the release of Oculus Rift – virtual reality you can buy from a shop – cinema will never be the same again, says Peter Hoskin

The future is here

31 March 2016 2:00 pm

Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this…