Arts
I listened to a solid week of Woman’s Hour…
I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and…
A flop: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button carries a strap-line, ‘an unordinary musical’. Perhaps the word ‘extraordinary’ is simply too banal…
Fails to ignite: Royal Opera’s Tales of Hoffmann reviewed
I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t love Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Everything – everything – is stacked against this…
Top tosh: The Diplomat reviewed
The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of…
Is it meant to be a comedy? Gladiator II reviewed
It’s nearly 25 years since Ridley Scott’s Gladiator came out and you’ve probably been wondering what happened to the little…
Perfectly imperfect: Evan Dando, at Islington Assembly Hall, reviewed
‘Can I have a photo with you, please?’ It’s the most embarrassing question you can ask of someone you’re interviewing.…
Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows
Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…
William Morris’s debt to Islam
When William Morris was born in Walthamstow, in 1834, it was little more than a clump of marshland at the…
Narrative robbery
So the silly season, the festive season when we celebrate the incarnation of the Good is looming, yet again, and…
Spy-drama porn: Sky’s The Day of the Jackal reviewed
All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three…
One beauty – one turkey: Wexford Festival Opera reviewed
‘Theatre within Theatre’ was the theme of the 2024 Wexford Festival and with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Critic, that’s…
Radio 4’s Lord Lucan series is rescued by a brilliant narrator
It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become…
A riveting show crammed with the kind of risky gags rarely heard on stage these days
How To Survive Your Mother is a play based on a memoir by political dramatist Jonathan Maitland. He portrays himself…
Sad but beautiful exhibition of Afghanistan’s war rugs
Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah…
Too cautious and wildly over the top at the same time: Paddington in Peru reviewed
Toy Story or The Godfather? Which way would Paddington in Peru go? Would the third instalment of a much-cherished series…
Terrifically good value: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviewed
A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not…
Much more than just a game: World of Warcraft at 20
On 23 November, the video game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary. That’s no small thing. By most metrics,…
The all-powerful hand of the director
When that writer of spare French prose André Gide was asked who the greatest French poet was he replied, ‘Hugo,…
Why is Elon Musk obsessed with Diablo IV?
Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo…
A bit of a mess: Channel 4’s Generation Z reviewed
In the second of this week’s two episodes of Generation Z (Sunday and Monday), a teenage girl called Finn wondered…
Nick Cave’s right-hand man Warren Ellis on AI, Gorecki and staying young
In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still…
Hugh Grant is an amazingly convincing villain – who’d have thought it?
Heretic is the latest horror film from writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quite Place) and stars Hugh Grant,…
The joy of Chris Stapleton
Chris Stapleton is a barrel-chested man of 46, who hides his face beneath a beard that must have taken years…
Is Coogan’s Dr Strangelove as good as Sellars’s? Of course not
Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in…
