Arts
![Andrew Tink. [Photo: Elizabeth Tink]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CB_26.10.19.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Andrew Tink
A serious bout of ill-health forced him to abandon a successful career in politics but, in the intervening 10 years,…
The enduring allure of ‘er indoors
‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see. You may think she’s happy and free…
The beauties of the universe are revealed in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch
In the early 1660s, Pieter de Hooch was living in an area of what we would now call urban overspill…
Manon can be magnificent, this one was merely meh
Manon: minx or martyr? There are two ways to play Kenneth MacMillan’s courtesan. Is Manon an ingénue, a guileless country…
Malcolm Arnold was a traumatised wreck of a man at his death but his music was joyous!
Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat…
The beauty of Soviet anti-religious propaganda
Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead…
At their best the Psychedelic Furs are fantastic
It’s amazing what the movies can do. In 1986, the John Hughes teen flick Pretty in Pink — the one…
Should we be playing the surveillance state for laughs? Celebrity Hunted reviewed
One of the many great things about The Capture was that we could never be sure whether the British authorities’…
Without Joe Grundy The Archers feels lost
There was something really creepy about listening to the ten-minute countryside podcast released last weekend by Radio 4 supposedly transporting…
A hoot from start to finish: The Man in the White Suit reviewed
The Man in the White Suit, famously, is a yarn about yarn. A brilliant young boffin stumbles across an everlasting…
The Disney sequel that no one wanted is finally here – what a relief! Maleficent: Mistress of Evil reviewed
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is the sequel to the 2014 film Maleficent, and it will certainly come as a relief…
Shirley Hazzard
A woman working on a thesis about Shirley Hazzard is a character in A Life to Come, the award-winning novel…
Pilferer, paedophile and true great: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery reviewed
On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile…
Circus routine rather than theatre: Noises Off reviewed
Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy, Noises Off, is the theatre’s answer to Trooping the Colour. Everyone agrees that it’s an amazing…
More misogynistic than the original: ENO’s Orpheus in the Underworld reviewed
It’s Act Three of Emma Rice’s new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Eurydice (Mary Bevan) is trapped…
Pure, undiluted genius: Succession reviewed
I have never ever watched a TV series I have enjoyed more than Succession (Now TV). There’s stuff I’d put…
Imagine ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan: Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury reviewed
Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent…
Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed
The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it…
You’ll be blubbing over a wooden boulder at David Nash’s show at Towner Art Gallery
Call me soppy, but when the credits rolled on ‘Wooden Boulder’, a film made by earth artist David Nash over…
Anna Karenina
Tolstoy’s most fascinating character, Anna Karenina clearly fascinates David McAllister who has recently announced his 20th and final season as…
Sebastiao Salgado – master of monochrome, chronicler of the depths of human barbarity
Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only…
Joyce DiDonato seduces you within the first 10 minutes: Royal Opera’s Agrippina reviewed
‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina,…
Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?
This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set —…
A solid costume drama but Dame Helen has been miscast: Catherine the Great reviewed
It’s possibly not a great sign of a Britain at ease with itself that the historical character most likely to…
If you ever want to sleep again, step away from Joker
Judy is in cinemas this week and so is Joker and if you have to choose between the two, then…
