Arts
Salve Regina
We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music…
Splitting headache
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who…
Comic relief
The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge…
Top cat
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021…
Death by a thousand cuts
I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…
We’re off to see the wizard
At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace…
Here comes the Hun
Hungarian culture is living through a golden age, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and the West has much to learn from it
The brutality of ballet
Despite #MeToo and the new resistance to male bullying, the dance world is still ferocious and unforgiving, writes Rupert Christiansen
Heaven knows they’re miserable now
Bands that have hung around, or gone away and come back again, occupy an increasingly sizeable percentage of pop’s bandwidth.…
Pain without gain
It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in…
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
Bad blood
In the 1990s, the BBC had a popular flat-share comedy, Men Behaving Badly, about a pair of giggling bachelors who…
Comrades in arms
There were times during last Friday’s First Night of the Proms when it felt as if we’d been transported back…
Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
Feminist phooey
Finally, the Barbie film is here, for which we must be thankful, as the tsunami of pre-publicity meant you probably…
Kundera’s last laugh
So now Milan Kundera is gone at the age of 94. It’s easy to forget the tremendous weight, the sheer…
How to build the bomb
Graham Greene used to say that none of the great literary works he had read as an adult had the…
Too posh for the cosh
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…
Matters of life and death
Seven years ago, I asked Bruce Springsteen what he meant when he talked of the covenant between himself and his…
A gasp and a guffaw
Blockbuster action movies are designed to stun the audience into submissive acceptance. Complexity, humanity, emotion and beauty are reduced to…
Omission accomplished
Beneatha’s Place, set in the 1950s, follows a black couple who encounter racial prejudice when they move to a predominately…
The great pretenders
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection…
Testament of cliché
‘Ring out your bells for me, ivory keys! Weave out your spell for me, orchestra please!’ It’s lush stuff, the…
Hot air
Can anything serious come from podcasts, asks Sam Kriss
Keeping Ralph on his toes
It would have been interesting to hear Barrie Kosky and Kip Williams talk about the theatre on Tuesday night. In…
