Arts
Conflicting colours and tones of tragedy
Any fan of Gerald Murnane would love to see him win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And if it’s never…
Rent has not aged well
Rent is a show about mortality haunted by the untimely death of its author, Jonathan Larson. On the eve of…
The Hallé is on a roll
Say what you like about Manchester – and who doesn’t, right now? – but when it comes to imaginative programming,…
BBC1’s Time isn’t subtle – but it’s still riveting
Jimmy McGovern is a writer whose sleeve is rarely heart-free. Since cutting his teeth on Brookside in the early 1980s,…
Status Quo are a much better band than people think
Some years ago a concert promoter called Alan Day explained to me how he had revived the touring fortunes of…
The yacht rock revival
Returning to Britain this year, I have been struck by the re-emergence of some of the 1970s’ smoothest sounds. This…
Our obsession with the 1990s
Why are we drawn ceaselessly back into the ever-more-recent past? The 1990s trend has been building for years now, with…
That sinister sense of comic patter
Harold Pinter is one of the great dramatists of the last hundred years, perhaps the only one who can hold…
Marvel’s Wolverine just doesn’t work
Grade: B If you’re the sort of person for whom ‘SNIKT’ – the sound-effect that, by ancient tradition, accompanies the…
Celebrity Traitors is evil
At the time of writing I’m still in the dark as to whether Richard E. Grant’s Celebrity Traitors gambit –…
The Standard of Living didn’t make me feel anything
James Graham’s new play is a biography of John Maynard Keynes, known as ‘Mennid’ to his friends, which feels like…
Royal Opera’s maddeningly erratic Parsifal
If the Royal Opera’s new Parsifal had ended after Act One, you’d be reading right now that it was one…
A rough and exhilarating ride with Bill Callahan
It’s as difficult to pin down exactly what Bill Callahan does as it is to explain what makes it so…
The genius of Pam Tanowitz
Too much ballet these days is top-heavy with narrative that would be better served by the spoken word than it…
In praise of Obama’s podcast
Barack Obama has launched a books podcast. Three years ago, this would have been an automatic cause for celebration in…
The Social Reckoning is deeply boring
Has anyone in human history inspired more visceral disgust than Mark Zuckerberg? Hard to imagine. I know I used to…
The Turner Prize is only 50 per cent dreadful
Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that my relatives founded Middlesbrough but it’s entirely true. Having raised the…
The woman who showed us the real Russia
It’s hard to know where to start – or finish – when explaining the formidable Lilian Hochhauser, due her centenary…
From another world
It’s striking what we can experience if we look back at the images of the recent past, aided by YouTube.…
Do we really need a Dudamel Schumann cycle?
Grade: B These are strange days in the recording industry. Heaven alone knows why Platoon – an Apple sub-conglomerate with…
War is as good as Succession
In his ruefully funny 2012 novel The Man Who Forgot His Wife, John O’Farrell compares the increasingly uncivilised process of…
The problem with Sting’s musical
The Last Ship, a musical written by and featuring Sting, is touring Europe, Australia and America. The show is a…
Ian McCulloch’s still got it
No one ever joined a rock band because they didn’t want to be recognised. Being adored matters to stars, sometimes…
Meet the man behind Royal Opera’s new Parsifal
Evgeny Titov has landed at the Royal Opera, and he has good news for Britain’s beleaguered opera scene. ‘It’s the…
The singular vision of Quentin Bell
Every visitor to Charleston Farmhouse will know the work of Quentin Bell even if they don’t realise it. He made…
