Arts
No Pay? No Way!
As a sort of protest, I am not going to the opening of No Pay? No Way! at the Sydney…
The Happy Prince
Many people have had a go at it. Ever since Oscar Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales in…
Warts and all
Jan van Eyck changed the art of picture-making more fundamentally than anyone who has ever lived, says Martin Gayford
On the bias
The Gift is three plays in one. It opens in a blindingly white Victorian parlour where a posh lady, Sarah,…
Apex carnivore
Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that…
And did those feet
Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a…
Women of the cloth
My step-grandmother Connie was an inspired needlewoman. For ten years, as a volunteer for the charity Fine Cell Work, she…
Mettle detector
SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear…
Material world
You might have thought Madonna was not a singer but a professional footballer judging by the talk before she took…
Space invaders
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an…
Things that go bump
Pregnancy has always been a public spectacle – and as the Foundling Museum’s new exhibition shows, a dangerous one
Curdled foreskin
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the…
From hell to heaven
One of the many astonishing things about the BBC2 drama The Windermere Children (Monday) was that the real-life story it…
Doing Chekhov by halves
Uncle Vanya opens with a puzzle. Is the action set in the early 20th century or right now? The furnishings…
Purified scarification
Every development in heavy music is derided by mainstream critics. When Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin emerged in the late…
Top bantz
So, you’ve fallen in love with a piece of classical music and you want to buy a recording. The problems…
Winging it
‘Plunderers of the air’, Naum Gabo called the Luftwaffe planes. In Cornwall, during the second world war, Gabo kept cuttings…
Luca Micheletti and Anna Dowsley
A taciturn Glaswegian and an unlikely knight of the realm, David McVicar has directed several of Opera Australia’s most admired…
New faces
Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking……
Marta Dusseldorp
Known throughout his life as Dick, Gerardus Dusseldorp had just come to Australia and created Civil and Civic (later Lend…
Putting us in the picture
on the history, power and beauty of infographics
Paper, paper everywhere
Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them —……
Follow the lieder
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show……
Let there be light
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and……
Stranger things
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the……
