Arts
Whose line is it anyway?
Songwriting credits are, as we know, not always to be trusted. Since the dawn of music publishing, there has always…
Tate Britain
Things have not been happy at Tate Britain for some time. Last year Waldemar Januszczak wrote an article culminating with…
Tate Britain
Things have not been happy at Tate Britain for some time. Last year Waldemar Januszczak wrote an article culminating with…
Public enemy
Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art
All in the worst possible taste
In the giftshop at the new Elvis exhibition at the Dome, you can buy your own version of his flared…
Elephant in the room
In the centre of the new exhibition Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain there is a huge white elephant. The beast…
Russia with love
They’re doing fantastic deals on five-star hotels in St Petersburg the weekend the Francis Bacon exhibition opens at the Hermitage.…
How J-Lo can you go?
Stateside critics, who panned Jennifer Lopez’s new film The Boy Next Door on its US release last month, may be…
Audience participation
Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of…
Eurocrash and Eurotrash
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Twin peaks
Is there a more beautiful aria than ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi? There are more overwhelming moments…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
What the doctor ordered
Sky1’s new hospital drama Critical (Tuesday) can’t be accused of making a timid start. Within seconds, an urgent request had…
Special effects
No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special…
Culture Buff
Adelaide is the perfect festival city and its once biennial, now annual, Festival has been the pace setter for others…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
Eurocrash and Eurotrash
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Swan’s way
Ismene Brown unpicks the great enigma of ballet theatre
Easy does it
The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as…
Talent show
La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas…
Hand over fist
And so, in the end, I went with my sister, Toni, to see Fifty Shades of Grey and we saw…
State-funded twaddle
‘We hate the system and we want the system to pay us to say we hate the system.’ The oratorio…
There will be blood
LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll…
Ukip’s new recruits
Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to…
