Arts
Maestro maker
When Margaret Thatcher imagined perfect power, she thought of the orchestral conductor. ‘She envied me,’ said Herbert von Karajan, ‘that…
Look back in anger
‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday.…
Elysian fields
Glastonbury is a model for radical policy reform, says Steve Hilton
Forward thinking
The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people:…
Fairground attraction
Gianlorenzo Bernini stressed the difficulty of making a sculpture of a person out of a white material such as marble.…
Own goal
For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but…
A sting in the tail
Mr Holmes stars Ian McKellen as the great detective in his old age and while it could have proved a…
Between Kafka and Crossroads
We opera critics love gazing into crystal balls. We’re particularly good at discovering Ed Milibands and backing them to the…
Walking with cadence
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such…
Bad robots
You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening…
Culture Buff
Surely the most luxuriously sensual of all operas, Tristan & Isolde makes voyeurs of us all. This opera is being…
A sting in the tail
Mr Holmes stars Ian McKellen as the great detective in his old age and while it could have proved a…
Walking with cadence
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such…
Forward thinking
The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people:…
Forward thinking
The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people:…
Bad robots
You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening…
Seeing the light
Martin Gayford talks to the artist James Turrell, who has lit up Houghton Hall like a baroque firework display
The pretenders
Like a lot of essentially cautious people, I like my music to take some risks, play with fire and damn…
Blowing hot and cold
The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m…
Hard reign
King John arrives at the Globe bent double under the weight of garlands from the London critics. Their jaunt up…
Dead behind the eyes
With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done,…
Pet rescue
I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south…
Evan sent
Evan Davis’s series on business life, The Bottom Line (made in conjunction with the Open University), has become one of…
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
For anyone who has been interested in classical vocal music since the middle of the last century, whether choral, operatic…
Culture Buff
Bill Dobell is back in town. At least an aspect of his output, titled Painter in Paradise: William Dobell in…
