Arts
Come let us adore them
It’s not just who our pop heroes are that marks the passing of the generations; it’s how those heroes present…
Fibre optics
Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited…
Hanging offences
Calvin Po laments the pious distortions of history at two of Britain’s best-known galleries
An air of baffled honesty
It’s an exciting prospect, Helen Morse in a play by the great Caryl Churchill. The artistic director of the Melbourne…
Good cop, bad cop
It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…
Clueless
The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which…
Brought to book
‘We all secretly want to be rock stars,’ the 2022 Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka said recently. By ‘we’ he…
Between two worlds
The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men…
More shell shock
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) began as a joke in 1984, a parody of the superhero culture of the time.…
Too hot to Handel
If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is…
Renaissance woman
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The…
All my world was a stage
Robin Ashenden remembers the heyday of local repertory theatre – now sadly in terminal decline
Magniloquent horror
The experience of watching Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, his film with Cate Blanchett as the nun running an orphange…
All’s well that ends well
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…
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…
