Arts
Home improvement
Squatting, gutting and retrofitting – and a lesson from India: Stuart Jeffries looks at the future of British architecture
Two by two
Mothballed since March when it danced a farewell Swan Lake, the Royal Ballet made a triumphant and joyous return to…
Haunted by Hitchcock
Rebecca is a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic, twisted, never-out-of-print tale of sexual jealousy. It’s directed by Ben…
Panto at Glyndebourne
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
A conspiracy against art
Southwark Playhouse has revived an American show, The Last Five Years, whose run was cancelled in March. In advance, I…
Lockdown
What a strange phase the world of theatre – the world of artistic activity – is going through at the…
Richard Tognetti
They led the way back into the spotlight. Richard Tognetti and members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra were the first…
Rare and precious
Martin Gayford explains why the Royal Academy would be wrong to sell Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’
Sins of the fathers, music of the sons
When Kwame Kwei-Armah took over the Young Vic he strapped a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign over the front of the…
Whistling past the graveyard
Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died…
Porn again
A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie…
Partridge on the menu
In the week Jenni Murray left Woman’s Hour, I was listening to Alan Partridge on his new podcast, From the…
Saints and sinners
Saint Maud is a first feature from writer-director Rose Glass and it’s being billed as a horror film. But it’s…
Are you reading this, Rishi?
Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was…
Fish and fire
Anyone who invited the Russian composer Mily Balakirev to dinner had to be jolly careful about the fish they served.…
Agnes Wales
Something is going on with Agnes Wales. Is it possible that the current board of trustees of the Art Gallery…
V. Namatjira Stand strong for who you are
It is a name deeply imbedded in Australia’s cultural memory. Albert Namatjira’s (1902-1957) was a prolific and immensely popular watercolour…
Life and fate
The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a…
A.G. Cook: Apple
Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a…
A world apart
Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of…
The boys are back in town
There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr)…
Sex and corpses
A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…
Zinger ping pong
Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a…
All together now
It’s the breath I miss most. The moment when a shuffling group of men and women in scruffy concert blacks…
In two minds
Can people of one race really understand the experience of another? asks Colin Grant
