Arts
Haydn seek
As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his…
The fascinating Ms Swift
There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the…
Rules of engagement
With theatres shut, radio must lighten the darkness. The Guilty Feminist is a wildly popular podcast performed by Deborah Frances-White…
Race relations
Some years ago I was invited to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone courtesy of a watch manufacturer. As freebies…
Captive audience
This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most…
Museums of the mind
Six months ago I published a book about travelling to look at works of art. One such journey involved a…
A world apart
Holed up in her sixth-floor London flat, Laura Freeman finds solace in the art of the hermit
Christos Tsiolkas
This was not the ideal beach book for the Christmas holidays but now we are in different times, it has…
Red or dead
There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…
Georgia on my mind
The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is…
Closing time
War and plague have menaced theatres before, but rarely on this scale, says Lloyd Evans
Raiding the sonic store cupboard
There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis,…
Notes on a scandal
Kevin Katke was quite a man. He had no military training, no political background and no espionage experience. Nonetheless, his…
A soldier’s life
First shown on BBC Scotland, Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War (BBC4, Wednesday) was the documentary equivalent of…
Mozart’s Clarinet
A couple of friends have nominated it as music they would like played at their funerals. I’m not into programming…
Untruthful
To tell you the truth about The Truth, even though it stars Catherine Deneuve at her most Catherine Deneuve-ish (i.e.…
Gross receipts
Film-makers are increasingly turning to the violent, provocatively slow or viscerally repulsive.What is driving this rise in extreme cinema? asks Francesca Steele
The inside story
On Blueberry Hill sounds like a musical but it’s a sombre prison drama set in Ireland. Two bunkbeds. Above, an…
A perfect antidote
Anyone familiar with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s work will brace instinctively when the curtain goes up on his new Figaro. He’s the…
Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers
The world of 19th-century British music was raucous, but are there any masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered? wonders Richard Bratby
Difficult women
The director of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, talks to Sarah Ditum about her new biopic of Marie Curie, exile from Iran and her fears for the future of democracy
The abbey habit
The world may be going to hell in a handcart but some things remain reassuringly unchanged: Julian Fellowes period dramas…
The great pretenders
The accepted line about Bryan Ferry is that his is one of the greatest reinventions in English pop culture: Peter…
The rise and fall of Peter Bogdanovich
David Thomson talks to the director about Buster Keaton, falling out of favour with Hollywood, and his mentor Orson Welles
Strokes of genius
Martin Gayford
