Arts

Stagey and mannered: Cate Blanchett as Carol

I wanted to beat it with a stick and cry, ‘Get on with it!’: Carol reviewed

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard…

Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like…

I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not

28 November 2015 9:00 am

The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt…

The Jodrell Bank Observatory (Photo: Getty)

You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could

28 November 2015 9:00 am

It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign…

Culture buff

28 November 2015 9:00 am

In 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution, one of the most popular operas in Paris was Richard Coeur-de-Lion.…

Stagey and mannered: Cate Blanchett as Carol

I wanted to beat it with a stick and cry, ‘Get on with it!’: Carol reviewed

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard…

Two wheels good: Belgian racing cyclist Eddy Merckx on the track, 1970

The bicycle may have triumphed but it’s far from perfect

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We…

‘Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman’ or ‘The Music Lesson’, 1662–5, by Vermeer

Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial…

Anna Devin as Alcina and Nick Pritchard as Ruggiero in ‘La Liberazione di Ruggiero’ at Brighton Early Music Festival

Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…

Anna Devin as Alcina and Nick Pritchard as Ruggiero in ‘La Liberazione di Ruggiero’ at Brighton Early Music Festival

Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…

Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like…

Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like…

The Jodrell Bank Observatory (Photo: Getty)

You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign…

The Jodrell Bank Observatory (Photo: Getty)

You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign…

I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not

26 November 2015 3:00 pm

The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt…

‘May Day’, 1866, by Julia Margaret Cameron

Artificial life

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Ruskin dismissed Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs as untrue. But, argues Martin Gayford, the same could be said of any picture

Power tool: Elisabeth Frink carving ‘Dorset Martyrs’, c.1985

Lost in space

21 November 2015 9:00 am

In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures,…

‘La Mort de Louis XIII’, 1731, by Jean-François de Troy

Death watch

21 November 2015 9:00 am

At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene…

‘Untitled’, 1963, by Gillian Ayres

Approachable abstraction

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Fifteen million pounds and a hefty slice of architectural vision have transformed the Whitworth from a fusty Victorian art temple…

Thomas Heatherwick

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Thomas Heatherwick is the most famous designer in the United Kingdom today and has an unquestionable flair for attention-grabbing creations.…

Bored by Brahms

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal…

Ménage à trois

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…

Sins of the fathers

21 November 2015 9:00 am

This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there…

Judi Dench (Paulina) and Kenneth Branagh (Leontes) in ‘The Winter’s Tale’

Winter wonderland

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Kenneth Branagh opens his West End tenancy with Shakespeare’s inexplicably popular The Winter’s Tale. We start in Sicily where Leontes…

All at sea

21 November 2015 9:00 am

The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf…