Arts
Country folk
Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer…
Gospel truth
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing…
Gospel truth
‘I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing…
Pop provocateur
After years of being effectively banned from exhibiting in his own country, Allen Jones finally reaches the RA with his first major UK retrospective. Andrew Lambirth meets him
The only way is Essex
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
Artists’ little helpers
A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft…
Art of grunting
Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr…
Becoming Rothko
Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in…
Rough-Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
Mis-en-Mars
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Sexy ladies
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Ballet’s battle royal
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Men behaving badly
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t…
Voices of the world
‘Don’t take it for granted,’ she warned. ‘It’s one of the few places where you can hear diverse voices, different…
Culture buff
I’m oversensitive to criticism of Australia by famous authors. Richard Flanagan, elated at winning the Man Booker Prize for The…
The only way is Essex
We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of…
Ballet’s battle royal
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Supreme painter of the inner life
Martin Gayford sees Rembrandt’s late works at the National Gallery – is this the greatest show on earth?
Surviving the Soviets
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
East up West
David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it…
The price test
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
Signifying nothing
Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a…
