Arts
Stuck at home with a serial killer
It’s odd when you think of the way television has usurped almost everything else in the time of the virus.…
The odd couple
Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny…
Yusuf/Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2
Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…
Five-star blarney
The Old Vic refuses to reopen. Director Matthew Warchus says the social distancing rules make it impossible for him to…
Dumb and dumber
I think I am supposed to say that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third in a franchise about…
One for the road
The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time…
Spirited away
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
Culture club
In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation…
In defence of George Bernard Shaw
What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad.…
Diana Rigg
It was sad the other day to hear of the passing of that scintillating lady of stage and screen Diana…
Sheku Kanneh-Mason
The world became aware of Sheku Kanneh-Mason when he played the cello at the wedding of Harry and Meghan Sussex…
Class acts
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Marshal law
Covid marshals have invaded theatreland. Arriving for a weekday matinee at the Bridge, I was greeted by stewards holding up…
Who dares wins
‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas —…
The Pineapple Thief: Versions of the Truth
Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has…
Peake practice
Mervyn Peake’s unsettling illustrations reveal a gentle, kindly man with the soul of a pirate, says Daisy Dunn
Look at the paint!
The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves…
Lost in translation
Listening to the tacky and incomprehensible audio-adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel seriesSandman, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 19th-century…
What cinema is for
Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf),…
Arcadian repose
A friend of mine, a bit of a watermelon really like most of the cultural milieu, asked me why I…
Cynical Theories
They are possibly the most politically incorrect authors in the world. And they have universities squarely in their sights. Helen…
Paradis regained
Selina Mills on Maria Theresia von Paradis, the gifted but forgotten 18th-century composer, whose story will finally be told in a new chamber opera
Wet wet wet
It has roughly the same proportions as Shakespeare’s Globe. The Roman Theatre in Verulamium (St Albans) is an atmospheric ruin…
Me time
‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us.…
The art of the monologue
If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so…
