Arts
Is Frank Skinner the new Alan Bennett? Edinburgh Fringe round-up
For recovering teetotallers, like me, Thinking Drinkers is the perfect Edinburgh show. On stage, two sprucely dressed actors perform sketches…
A Beggar’s Opera that beggars belief in Edinburgh
Robert Carsen’s new updating of The Beggar’s Opera is a coke-snorting, trash-talking, breakdancing, palm-greasing, skirt-hiking, rule-breaking affair — and every…
Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984)
Exhibitions prior to major art auctions can be a wonderful way to view works by significant artists that may not…
![Let there be light: the Atlantic footballfish dwells 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. [Paulo Oliveira / Alamy Stock Photo]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/18augartslead.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
How to live in a world without light: Life in the Dark at the Natural History Museum reviewed
Like most of our ape ancestors, we have really had only one response to the fall of night. We have…
Three of the best faces, and six of the best hands, ever painted: the pick of the Edinburgh Art Festival
The Rembrandt show at the National Galleries of Scotland (until 14 October) has a problem. A mighty haul of Rembrandt…
Holidays in Hell – Such A Pleasant Getaway from the BBC
Apparently there’s a new ‘character’ on University Challenge. I wouldn’t know. Last year, I vowed never again to raise my…
A captivating addition to the filmography of the first world war: The Guardians reviewed
There are moments in The Guardians when you can imagine you’re in the wrong art form. Time stills, the frame…
An exalted experience even without a convincing central character: Siegfried in Edinburgh reviewed
There’s one big problem with Wagner’s Siegfried, and the clue’s in the name. None of Wagner’s mature works hangs so…
Conversations with a penis, having a laugh about Brexit and why titles matter: Edinburgh Festival reviewed
David Greig has written the international festival’s flagship drama, Midsummer. This farcical romance is performed as a party piece by…
Another side of John Humphrys
‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier…
The House
The House is the economically direct title of a new book about ‘the dramatic story of the Sydney Opera House…
Music’s Brexit
It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled,…
Full of bog-standard, if annoyingly effective, emotional manipulation: The Foreign Doctors Are Coming reviewed
Surprising I know, but judging from The Foreign Doctors Are Coming (Channel 4, Tuesday), Britain mightn’t be such a bad…
Washed-up junkies, Trump the director and a cash giveaway: Edinburgh Festival round-up
Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on…
Robert Redford turns his hand to radio
Much ado is being made of the latest listening figures, which have suggested that the percentage of those aged between…
A visionary and playful heir to Duchamp: Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace
Nothing was so interesting to Yves Klein as the void. In 1960 he leapt into it for a photograph —…
Thank god for the return of the generation gap in pop
In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy…
Magnificent: Vanessa at Glyndebourne reviewed
‘Outside this house the world has changed. Life is swifter than before; there is no time for idle gestures.’ Anatol,…
For any politician spoiling for a fight over Ireland’s border, Under the Tree is required viewing
Every so often there’s a news story in which neighbours quarrel over rampaging leylandii. The police are summoned, the case…
Lang Lang in an improbable situation
An internationally admired orchestra in a beautiful hall: that’s the Melbourne Symphony in Hamer Hall of the Victorian Arts Centre.…
The artist who breathes Technicolour life into historic photographs
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering…
Currentzis’s Beethoven asked us to listen with our bodies rather than our minds
Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an…
Comedy is entirely unsuited to the ‘Edinburgh hour’
Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost…
Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?
The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him…
Modernist architecture only worked for the wealthy
It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une…
