Arts
Mystery portrait
Shortly after moving to Manhattan in the noughties I was strolling through the West Village when I came across a…
David Hockney A closer winter tunnel, February-March 2006
The National Gallery of Victoria has closed again ‘until further notice’. The rest of the country is more fortunate, at…
Net effect
Let’s face it. Theatre via the internet is barely theatre. It takes a huge amount of creativity and inventiveness to…
Corona-gardening
The American diet was probably at its healthiest in the second world war. Fearing interruption to supply chains, Washington launched…
Licensed to kill
Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden on death row whose job is beginning to take its toll, and…
Selves examined
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…
The keys to Beethoven
If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man…
Reels on wheels
Tanya Gold on the rise and fall of drive-in cinema
Containing multitudes
It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently…
Relief
Recently I touched on the subject of evaluating works of art prompted by what seemed to me rather an empty…
Jessie Traill: A biography
She could have been one of our great-aunts. She was from that remarkable generation of educated, unmarried women who chose…
Scouse style
Richard Bratby on Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, which has taken on everyone from gang leaders to Derek Hatton
Neil Young: Homegrown
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
No laughing matter
The RSC’s 2014 version of Much Ado is breathtaking to look at. Sets, lighting and costumes are exquisitely done, even…
Half baked
Some cinemas have reopened, with the rest to follow by the end of the month, thankfully. But the big, hotly…
Rooms with a view
Not long after the pubs, big galleries have all started to reopen, like flowers unfolding, one by one. The timing…
Floor show
Sophie Haigney on the weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets
The day the music died
Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion. Yet they’re also terrified of returning. One story explains why. Picture this innocent choral-society scene…
Wendy Bowman, 2019 by David Darcy Darling Portrait Prize 2020
She is not a theoretical or idealogical environmentalist. Wendy Bowman became an activist when her crops were ruined by polluted…
A drive on the wild side
When a 90-minute documentary is introduced with the words ‘This is the M25’, you’d be within your rights not to…
Going underground
Leaf Arbuthnot and Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the new cultural rebels
Dysfunctional music by dysfunctional people
A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and…
The Bard in the bedroom
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens in a world of puritanical austerity. The cast wear sombre black costumes and…
Audio onanism
In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and…
The great pretender
In the past Werner Herzog has given us a man pushing a ship up a mountain, a 16th-century conquistador going…
