Arts
Cadavers will always captivate. Museums need to chill out
Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been…
Lucy Worsley’s sleuthing is rather impressive
Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all…
Johnny Rotten’s still got it
Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad…
The magnificence of Beare’s Chamber Music Festival
The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one…
Why has the National got it in for Oirish peasants?
The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers…
The genius of Morton Feldman
To accompany an exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2004, a…
Rebels and Rivals
It’s funny how implicated we are in the places from which we take our bearings. Memories of the Lexington-Concord bridge,…
An opera that will actually make you laugh
‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges…
Sublime: Song Sung Blue reviewed
Song Sung Blue is a musical biopic of the real-life Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act and…
One for hardcore Stoppard fans: Indian Ink reviewed
Unusual. After the press night of Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, no one leapt up and cheered. The crowd applauded…
Enough with torture-porn TV
Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway –…
Constable, not Turner, changed the course of painting
Flanders and Swann; Tom and Jerry. Some things come in pairs. Like Turner and Constable, even though our two most…
Who let Men Without Hats make a new album?
Grade: D A Montreal band led by a Ukrainian/Canadian called Ivan Doruschuk, with a histrionic baritone, famous solely for having…
Am I a useful idiot visiting Uzbekistan’s first art biennial?
In the ruins of a 16th-century mosque, in the heart of the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara, dozens of abstract…
The full range of diversions
Who can say what a world of Christmases will unfold this year? Sir Keir Starmer was knighted for services to…
The thrill of Stanley Spencer
‘Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are unaware,’ wrote Stanley Spencer.…
What links Jeffrey Dahmer to the Spice Girls?
The path that links the Spice Girls to Jeffrey Dahmer – necrophile mass murderer of at least 17 men –…
Paddington – The Musical is sensational
Who doesn’t love Paddington? The winsome marmalade junkie has arrived at the Savoy Theatre in a musical version of the…
Why is divorce so seldom addressed in art?
Two years ago I was flown to Reykjavik to interview the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a weird…
The joy of composers’ graves
I called on Hugo Wolf the other week, and he didn’t look too great. He wouldn’t, of course; he died…
The cardinals spill the beans on the conclave
Secrets of the Conclave seemed rather optimistically titled, given that everybody at this year’s papal election had made a solemn…
Intoxicating Elgar from the London Phil
By all accounts, the world première of Elgar’s Sea Pictures at the October 1899 Norwich Festival made quite a splash.…
Rescuing the Nativity from cliché
The Nativity. In ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’, Elizabeth Bishop ends her travelogue-poem – St Peter’s, Mexico, Dingle,…
The sheer scope of his work
When Tom Stoppard, playwright extraordinaire, was at the early height of his fame, with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons in…
Ivo van Hove tries and fails to destroy Arthur Miller
All My Sons, set in an American suburb in the summer of 1947, examines the downfall of Joe Keller, a…
