Arts
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…
Playing it cool
Quite when the concept of coolness became a thing is uncertain, even to etymologists. As early as 1884, an academic…
Taking the biscuit
The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his…
Sonic enchantment
We used to call it a ‘meat and two veg’ programme, back in my concert planning days: the reliable set…
A drama without drama
Past Lives is an exquisite film made with great precision and care about what could have been, even if what…
California dreaming
Adam Sweeting talks to Graham Nash about Joni Mitchell, the Hollies and the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Laurel Canyon idyll of the 1960s
Everybody’s friend
It was cheering in its way to hear, from the lips of that shrewd urbane man Tony Burke, that 246…
A performance with teeth
It’s the Edinburgh International Festival, and Barrie’s back in town. Once, Edinburgh was pretty much the only place that you…
Strange folk
In a few days, Lankum will most likely win the 2023 Mercury Music Prize for their fourth album False Lankum…
Vampire diaries
The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about…
Crimes of Paris
Georges Simenon’s lugubrious detective Maigret has appeared in umpteen screen adaptations and dozens of actors have played him. Now it’s…
