Arts
Gustav Mahler
When I began listening to music seriously, in about 1950, I had read about Mahler but wasn’t able to hear…
Dressed to thrill
Mitridate, re di Ponto was Mozart’s fifth opera, written and first produced when he was 14 years old. Absolutely amazing.…
Match made in heaven
Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need…
Animal crackers
The Vaults at Waterloo are gallantly trying to pose as the party spot for hipsters in the world’s coolest city.…
Repo women
Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering…
There will be blood
Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental…
Car trouble
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is an action, heist, car-chase film that is said to reinvent the action, heist, car-chase film.…
American quartet
Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether…
Back to the future
As Kraftwerk took their 3D show around Britain last week, a document from 2013 surfaced online, purporting to be their…
Mad about the girls
It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are…
Roll over Beethoven
If you want to see an opera director kicking a genius when they’re down — and I mean really sticking…
Hyped to death
Hand it to the Americans. They know how to hype a young talent to death. The latest to be asphyxiated…
Here comes the Sun
It was most odd. Four decades after I’d walked into the Sun to start my first shift as a news…
Tom Roberts The sculptor’s studio 1884-85
We may have seen them before, but the prospect of the Australian Impressionism show is very alluring; it has now…
Andrew Nicholl A distant view of Derry through a bank of wild flowers
Last week came the welcome announcement of the State Government’s funding of the major extension, indeed doubling, of the exhibition…
Brief encounter
How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work…
Non-magnetic north
Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue…
His Master’s Feet
Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer…
Tall story
‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He…
Trouble in paradise
‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…
Peter Perrett: How The West Was Won
Much though I loved it at the time, not a great deal of lasting worth came out of that fervid…
Twin peaks
In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable…
Hymn to self-slaughter
Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on…
Listen with mother
This week’s column is dedicated to my mother who loved her radio and encouraged us to be listeners. Without her,…
Tom Conroy as Winston Smith
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ That is the arresting opening line…
