Arts
The art of persuasion
It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this…
Wayne’s world
Ballet would have been an obvious revenue stream for Sadler’s Wells when it reopened back in 1998 but straight-up classics…
The old ways
I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look…
Amazing Grace
In the first scene of this distinctly odd documentary, Grace Jones meets a group of fans, who squeal with delight…
Rattle’s hall
Even in a Trump world where reality is what you say it is, the London Symphony Orchestra’s announcement of a…
Irish ayes
Luigi Cherubini is the pantomime villain of French romantic music. As head of the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s he…
London calling
Madame Monet was bored. Wouldn’t you have been? Exiled to London in the bad, cold winter of 1870–71. In rented…
Family planning
Beginning starts at the end. A Crouch End party has just finished and the sitting room is a waste tip…
The ties that bound us
Only Neil MacGregor could do it — take us in a single thread from a blackened copper coin, about the…
Pass the sick bag
The opening of Gunpowder (BBC1, Saturdays) was just about the most knuckle-gnawingly tense ten minutes I’ve ever seen on TV.…
Rachel Podger
The Enlightenment saw orthodoxies challenged and the emergence of radical ideas throughout the latter half of the 18th century. That…
Emotional rescue
In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove…
Football focus
Part canvas, part sandwich board, club kits don’t always work – but their designs can be addictive
It’s the thought that counts
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…
St Vincent: Masseduction
Grade: A The old Tulsa sound was a rather agreeable low-key, shuffling, blues-inflected rockabilly — primarily J.J. Cale and Leon…
The Bilbao effect
Twenty years ago I wrote of the otherwise slaveringly praised Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: I’m in a minority of, apparently,…
Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
Mad Men – The Opera
Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti begins not with a prelude, but a jingle. In Matthew Eberhardt’s production a trio of…
Cressida Campbell Still life with dragonfly 2016-17
Emerging from a gifted family, Cressida Campbell is now one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. She chose an unusual medium…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Comedy of terrors
Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is nearly two hours of men in bad suits bickering, but if you have…
Saints and sinners
Any rival reality-TV makers watching Channel 5 on Thursday will, I suspect, have been both mystified and slightly embarrassed at…
Seeing the light
Dance is an ephemeral art. It keeps few proper records of its products. Reputations are written in rumours and reviews.…
The bad sex award
Simon Stephens gives his plays misleading titles. Nuclear War, Pornography and Punk Rock contained little trace of their advertised ingredients.…
Xavier de Maistre
Gracie Fields used to sing: ‘I took my harp to a party but nobody asked me to play’. I can’t…
