Arts
Double trouble
There’s courage, there’s fearlessness, and then there’s the sort of sublime audacity you need to do something like sidecar racing.…
Darkness visible
Peter Hoskin looks forward to being scared witless courtesy of the BFI’s feast of Gothic cinema
Conduct becoming
Michael Henderson talks to the youthful conductor Daniel Harding, who realises that the older he gets the more he has to learn
Singing under cardboard
To undertake a concert tour of New Zealand’s cathedrals at the moment is to be constantly reminded of the destructive…
Let’s hear it for the toffs
This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch…
Kissing away kingship
Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending…
Feats of Klee
There is a school of thought that sees Paul Klee (1879–1940) as more of a Swiss watchmaker than an artist,…
Disturbed by Britten
This week chanced to give me a fascinating study in contrasts and comparisons: Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek at the Linbury Studio,…
Mother courage
Philomena is based on the true story of an Irish woman searching for the son stolen from her by the…
Machines and us
This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question, Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or…
Tales of the unexpected
‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ said John Lennon. Quite apposite from a man…
Songs of love and hate
As Sunday night’s storm clouds gathered, one of rock’s great polymath-storytellers whipped up a tempest of his own on the…
Songs of love and hate
As Sunday night’s storm clouds gathered, one of rock’s great polymath-storytellers whipped up a tempest of his own on the…
Songs of love and hate
As Sunday night’s storm clouds gathered, one of rock’s great polymath-storytellers whipped up a tempest of his own on the…
‘The last wild man of modern art’
Andrew Lambirth talks to Malcolm Morley
Poetic mists of memory
One sometimes forgets when looking at French 19th-century art that the painting revolution that produced Impressionism coincided with a political…
Flight of the imagination
Towards the end of his life, Georges Braque described his vision in the following terms: ‘No object can be tied…
What a tease
Perhaps the greatest irony of many in this first solo London show of Sarah Lucas is that it is sponsored…
In defence of developers
When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and…
Entertaining romp
Bold decisions are at the core of great artistic directorship. And Tamara Rojo, the ballet star leading English National Ballet,…
Without motive
There are many pleasures in The Light Princess, a new musical by Tori Amos. George MacDonald’s fairy story introduces us…
Dangerous liaison
It’s taken 40 years, but I’ve finally developed a taste for the one type of classical music that I couldn’t…
Vocal heroes
Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes is his least performed mature opera, even in its more familiar version as I vespri siciliani.…
Two little boys
The Selfish Giant is a British social-realism film in the tradition of all such films from Kes onwards, so it…
Double standards
Will the women on ITV’s The X Factor (Saturday) stop perving? I suppose there are two ways to tackle the…
