Arts
The greatest French museum you’ve never heard of
Imagine a French museum that’s second only to the Louvre when it comes to paintings, with an eye-watering collection of…
Grief-conjurors, space-mincers and earth-shovellers: performance roundup
They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark.…
India’s Sistine ceiling
In Tamil Nadu we found that we were exotic. Although there were some other western tourists around, in most of…
Rarely have I sat through such a chaotic and whimsical script: Describe the Night reviewed
Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next…
Sky Atlantic’s Patrick Melrose adaptation is triumphant
Warning: if you haven’t seen it yet, the first episode of the much-anticipated Patrick Melrose (Sky Atlantic, Sunday) contains scenes…
How hospices make you think differently about life
The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so…
A Bowie tribute album: Arctic Monkey’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino reviewed
Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our…
Tafelmusik – Bach and His World
One of the most admired music ensembles in the world is touring for Musica Viva Australia until 4 June (Perth,…
From buck dancing to Happy Feet: a short history of tap
Fire up YouTube on the iPad, tap in ‘tap’, then wave goodbye to the rest of your day: clip after…
Belly, the band responsible for one of my favourite 90s songs, is back
Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town…
Why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4?
Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have…
Animals, tourists and raptors: the hazards of being a plein-air artist
A conservator at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum was recently astonished to find a tiny grasshopper stuck in the paint of…
Which now unbearable TV show has been ruined for ever by political correctness?
Twenty years after it first appeared, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is back for a brief, week-long anniversary run…
Flawed but often hilarious new play: Nine Night at the Dorfman Theatre reviewed
Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following…
Dudamel’s Amériques made The Rite of Spring sound like Einaudi
Apparently it’s called ‘expectation management’. Pollux, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, takes its name from…
Convoluted, woeful mishmash with no central story: How to Talk to Girls at Parties reviewed
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is set in the 1970s and has punk as the backdrop and an…
Girls at the Piano
We need to remind ourselves that there was once a time when there were no Keynesian socialist bureaucracies determining ‘cultural…
How Riccardo Chailly brought joy – and Italian opera – back to La Scala
As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has…
Is PewDiePie the new Harold Bloom?
The most subscribed to channel on YouTube — by far — belongs to a rather strange young Swede named Felix…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
From now on you can assume that every TV-drama cast is female-led
From time to time, a TV show comes along which is so thrillingly original, so wildly imaginative, that you can’t…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Lean on Pete is a beauty
Andrew Haigh makes inaction films. Weekend (2011) tells of two young homosexuals getting to know each other in Nottingham. In…
No one can beat Mary Cassatt at painting mothers and children
A lady licking an envelope. An intimate thing. It might be only the bill from the coal-man she’s paying, but…
A dated and remote two-hour polemic basking in #MeToo topicality: The Writer reviewed
Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic…
