Arts
Robo-Tell
Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up…
Disaster movie
What We Did On Our Holiday is written and directed by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the pair who created…
Culture Buff
It all began in the mid-1960s for the Brilliant Creatures: Germaine, Clive, Barry & Bob, now given de luxe treatment…
Net effect
In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new…
A kind of magic
Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I…
Nobs and numbskulls
Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by…
Husband and wives
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
Master of alchemy
Martin Gayford talks to a surprisingly jolly Anselm Kiefer about art and metamorphosis
A Cubist in New York
The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he…
Bach triumphant
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the…
Bad bad acting
It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael…
Douchebags and dartboards
So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you…
Watch that man
Inspired by Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry’s Part of Me (2012) and One Direction’s This Is Us…
In sickness and in health
Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of…
Fashion victim
At a birthday dinner over the weekend I was introduced to this delightful party girl of a certain age whose…
Culture Buff
It’s chamber orchestras at 20 paces. Both the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra have recently announced their…
Bach triumphant
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the…
Bach triumphant
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the…
All too human
Alasdair Palmer reveals the monstrous egomaniac behind Michelangelo’s artistic genius
Independence will lead to artistic ‘desecration’
Daniel Jackson foresees an impoverished cultural landscape for an independentScotland, with artists forced to do Salmond’s bidding
Dance of death
The Imperial War Museum has reopened after a major refit and looks pretty dapper, even though it was overrun by…
Power of one
As everybody in the world except me seems to have seen Kate Bush’s live shows — against all apparent arithmetical…
Femmes fatales
Three operas this week, each of them named after its (anti-)heroine: one of the heroines (the most sympathetic) murders her…
Independence blues
Referendum fever reaches Stratford East. Spoiling, by John McCann, takes us into the corridors of power in Holyrood shortly after…
Pride and prejudice
1984 and all that. Which side were you on? The side of Margaret Thatcher, her hairdo and person standing rigid…
