Arts
Finally, a proper, grown-up retrospective from the Tate
A month ago in Hampstead, a work of art stopped me in my tracks. The piece was a vast rectangular…
The wonder of the Bayeux Tapestry
How the Froggies must be laughing. Such a gracious loan. So kind. Like England lending Henry V’s longbows to the…
The sexiest kind of rock star
It’s strange and sad what the world throws at us. We are assailed by musicals – a production of Reg…
Late Fame is exquisite
Late Fame stars Willem Dafoe as a postal worker whose single book of poetry – published nearly 50 years earlier…
Should we take Beryl Cook more seriously?
The late Victoria Wood described Beryl Cook as ‘Rubens with jokes’. This was flattering for an artist whose fat, eye-shadowed…
Festivals are destroying London’s great parks
You could have been forgiven for mistaking Hackney for the site of an El Alamein reunion the other Sunday. Victoria…
Finally: a museum that refrains from moralising
Hull is a city of many quirks, but I didn’t expect a mermaid. Seriously: an actual mermaid, mounted in a…
The violinist who told the Vienna Phil where to stick it
Grade: A The Viennese violinist Arnold Rosé (1863-1946) held a musical civilisation together. Brother-in-law of Mahler, friend to Brahms and…
Dalliance almost made me wish I were Australian
Kids, if you’re appalled by the idea of your parents’ generation having sex, look away now. I’m about to describe…
Marilyn Monroe was a bore
Who Killed Marilyn? is a new show about an old subject. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s play examines the circumstances surrounding Marilyn’s…
The truth about modelling for a great artist
Artists’ models seldom get a chance to tell their side of the story. Yet one model, Anthony Rudolf, believes they…
This silly and drivelling piece of tosh
Every so often something comes along that is so bad it fills the soul with wonder and dismay. It seems…
An agreeable new 2D fighter
Grade: B The final boss of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, who’s called the Champion (they could have tried harder), is…
The terror of Russian prisons
The competition must be pretty stiff for ‘World’s worst airport to be caught with drugs in your baggage’: Bogota? Miami?…
A true visual spectacle: Edinburgh’s The Galloping Cure reviewed
Those lights! Thinking back on The Galloping Cure, Missy Mazzoli’s new opera for the Edinburgh International Festival, that’s what lingers:…
A perfect little exhibition on the Isles of Scilly
I was in the most south-westerly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St Agnes (population:…
A classic Alan Ayckbourn that’s made for Roger Allam
How the Other Half Loves is the play that established Alan Ayckbourn’s name as a writer of farce. Frank and…
When did the Cure become universally beloved?
My, how other so-called legacy acts must envy the Cure. There are plenty of bands of 40 or 50 years…
Ridley Scott’s latest is a ‘hang on, what?’ movie
Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars is his third film in four years after Napoleon (disjointedly strange) and Gladiator II…
Renoir was a master – let no one tell you otherwise
It was summer 1874 at Claude Monet’s house in Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris. Édouard Manet arrived from…
This devastating portrait of Americana
It’s more than 75 years since Lee J. Cobb opened in Elia Kazan’s production of Death of a Salesman and…
The genius of Romeo Castellucci
Birds do not sing. They bleep and rattle and buzz like a dial-up modem. That we consider what comes out…
This giant of romanticism deserves so much more
Pity Carl Maria von Weber. On the morning of 5 June 1826 a servant knocked on the door of his…
Is Alley Cats really that bad?
We first saw Sybylla, the heroine (in every sense) of My Brilliant Career, at a society gathering in 1900 Australia…
Stars can’t rescue this snooze-fest
The film & Sons, in which a patriarch summons his estranged sons to let them in on a secret, has…
