Arts
Bog-standard spy mystery with a gimmicky appeal: Anna at the Dorfman Theatre reviewed
Arts Council England takes money from almost all of us and spends it on culture for almost none of us.…
Earth dying in five billion years I can deal with, but not a world-weary Brian Cox
When you see the opening caption ‘4.6 billion years ago’, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re watching a programme…
How plastic saved the elephant and tortoise
Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip…
Anna Bolena
Where would we be without the Tudors? Certainly our shelves, stages and screens would seem empty without their era which…
The new treasures of Pompeii
One afternoon in AD 79 an unusual cloud appeared above Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples. ‘It was raised high…
Sunday night on the Beeb was an orgy of virtue-signalling and third-rate sport
After its new costume drama You Go, Girl! (Sundays) about how amazing, empowered and better-than-men women are, especially if they…
Forget the The Reith Lectures. To understand the world listen to George the Poet
At last a podcast that takes the medium to its limit, created by someone who loves listening, understands how it…
A very odd two hours: Sting and Shaggy reviewed
Many is the pop star who has craved gravitas. Only Sting, however, has pursued it by covering John Dowland on…
This Boris play only gets it half-right
The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum,…
A mesmerising retrospective: Victoria Crowe at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, reviewed
This mesmerising retrospective takes up three floors of the City Art Centre, moving in distinct stages from the reedy flanks…
The forgotten masterpieces of Amy Beach
At the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the Takacs String Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson played a piano quintet that was once…
If opera survives, it’ll be thanks to artists and curators, not opera houses
It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all…
Rocketman is cheesy and clichéd – and all the better for it
There have been claims that Rocketman, the biopic of Elton John, is ‘cheesy’ and ‘clichéd’, but, in truth, you do…
Captain James Cook. Wedgwood and Bentley, c.1779
Three speakers: one is Director of The Royal Collection comprising over a million objects in 13 royal residences across the…
From haunted to haunter: the afterlife of W.G. Sebald
East Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark…
The duo that broke the mould of poster design
The best double acts — Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert & George, Rodgers and Hart — are often made up of…
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s #MeToo Medusa is a bad hair day from Hades
Medusa is the bad hair day from Hades. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s retelling of the Greek myth is frizzy, tangled and…
The mosque where it’s the men who make the tea
On returning from a brief trip to Istanbul, where inside the mosques women are still very much kept to one…
Willy Loman would have been fine if he’d worked in a laundry: Death of a Salesman reviewed
Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to…
Anderszewski went at Beethoven’s Diabellis with a nail gun
Are Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations really ‘the greatest of all piano works’, as Alfred Brendel claims? It’s hardly what you would…
A clunky exercise in box-ticking: Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years reviewed
These days, a common way of introducing radio news items is with the words ‘How worried should we be about…?’…
A Saturday-night variety show: Take That at the O2 reviewed
Being old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take…
Startlingly fresh and jaggedly strange: Birds of Passage reviewed
You don’t come across too many films from Colombia, but every few years one wriggles its way through the festival…
John Beard Edmund (+Bill)
I don’t imagine the newest member of the Royal Family was named after the Archibald Prize but it was a…
How film fell for caliphs and slave girls
Most of Hollywood’s Arabian Nights fantasies are, of course, unadulterated tosh. The Middle East, wrote the American film critic William…
