Arts
Northern lights
Claudia Massie on the spectacular new galleries that showcase the best of Scottish art for the first time
To die for
Seventy-five years after its release, Powell and Pressburger’s dazzling, much-loved classic is more timely than ever, says Robin Ashenden
Wagner rewilded
In Northern Ireland Opera’s new Tosca, the curtain rises on a big concrete dish from which a pair of eyes…
Cheesy skit
The playwright Sam Holcroft likes to toy with dramatic conventions and to tease her audiences by withholding key information about…
Gods and monsters
The Lesson is a literary thriller that is occasionally heavy-handed but also menacingly entertaining, plus you get Richard E. Grant…
Country’s Van Halen
Pop critics routinely make the mistake of assuming the most important acts are the ones copied by the groups they…
Four-minute wonder
As the sun sets on another too-long summer festival season, let us take a moment to reflect on the Festival…
Forgotten lives
What happens when a museum outlives the worldview of its founder? For publicly funded museums with collections amassed during the…
O come let us adore him
Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the…
Diamond-bright hoot
Oh to be in London with Barrie Kosky calling the shots in the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle Das…
Mermaid out of her depth
It’s strange the different strands of culture we constantly negotiate. The Rolling Stones bring out a new album and this…
Glorious data dump
At the beginning of the 1980s a former ice-cream salesman called Ted Perry drove a London minicab to raise money…
Gone girl
Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on…
Poetry please
It’s now been ten years since Seamus Heaney died, and after a great poet’s death it’s natural, I suppose, that…
Jumping for joy
One could soundly advise any choreographer to avoid music so transcendentally great in itself that dance can add nothing except…
Doors of perception
Sliding doors may change your life, but there’s no mystery in their transparency. A hinged wooden door is another matter;…
Aussie rules
Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third…
Sound and fury
The new Rolling Stones single, supposedly their best in many a decade, is called ‘Angry’. And while on the surface…
Wet, wet, wet
A Haunting in Venice is Kenneth Branagh’s third Poirot film (after Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the…
The ruff stuff
Why is Frans Hals still not considered the equal of Rembrandt, asks Craig Raine
Poets don’t stink
The Australian Book Review poetry prize is upon us again and it’s worth mentioning that the ABR editor Peter Rose,…
‘Moons are in!’
‘My daughter’s moving to Saffron Walden, away from all this,’ said the railway man at Stratford station, gesturing at the…
The weasel under the cocktail cabinet
Macbeth at the Globe wants to put us at our ease and make us feel comfortable with the play’s arcane…
Being Dead: When Horses Would Run
Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to…
Purest hokum
Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…
