Arts
Culture buff
We’ve established that capital city festivals are for other people. Their principal purpose is to bring people into the city,…
Dance One last dance
I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger…
Chorus of approval
One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had…
Chorus of approval
One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had…
Death of a screenwriter
Cinema is tough right now for writers. Thomas W. Hodgkinson reports from the front line at the Austin Film Festival
Erotic review
It has been a vintage season for mannequins. At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an exhibition called Silent Partners looks…
Bear necessity
‘Please look after this bear,’ reads the famous label hanging round Paddington’s neck, and this film does that, admirably, handsomely,…
Poor show
Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has…
From the sacred to the secular
Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the…
Second coming
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
Law of the jungle
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
Sister act
She was the sequinned star of the airwaves back in the 1920s, the first preacher to realise the potential of…
Culture Buff
John Hearder was a society photographer whose studio and display window were on Castlereagh Street between Rowe Street and the…
Second coming
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
Second coming
Earlier this month the Wigmore Hall was sold out for a Schubert recital by a concert pianist whose only solo…
Bradford bohemian
David Hockney talks to Martin Gayford about 60 years of ignoring art fashion
In the shadow of Guernica
The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for…
Starry cast
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Curatorial wrongs
The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another,…
Sale of the century
Nothing could have prepared the art world for the astounding moment in 1970 when, at a Christie’s sale on 27…
There’s something about Mary
A bogus history book and a new oratorio turn Mary Magdalene into the wife of Jesus and a human rights activist. Damian Thompson feels sorry for the poor woman
Tales from a strip joint
‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading…
On the Wayne
The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s,…
Still life
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
