Arts
Modern myth
Plus: a striking production of an operatic dud at ENO
Heavenly creatures
Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe.…
To be a pilgrim
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an excellent adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s bestselling novel (2012) about a retired old…
Great Dane
Robert Gore-Langton on John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s fraught, botched, triumphant Hamlet
A ravishing sensuousness
What a world of paradox painting confronts us with. The death of John Olsen is a reminder of his stature…
Virtue without virtuosity
If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by…
The war on the audience
Lloyd Evans bemoans theatre’s new hostility towards paying punters
Sex offenders
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
The hair and now
‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable…
The sting in the tale
The Secret Life of Bees is a fairy-tale set in the Deep South in 1964. Lily, a bullied white girl,…
Heaven sent
Haydn’s The Creation is Paradise Lost without the Lost. True, the words aren’t exactly up there: translated into German by…
Songs for a life
Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania,…
Second worst person in the world
Sick of Myself is a satire from Norway that skewers the ‘look at me, look at me’ generation addicted to…
Checks and balances
Angus Colwell is not convinced that the V&A Dundee’s exhibition Tartan is what the city needs
The pity of war
‘My subject is war and the pity of war,’ Wilfred Owen wrote in the poems which Benjamin Britten set to…
Scandi crush
War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one…
Animal magic
It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he…
A grievous and murderous hatred
I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working…
Lost Seoul
Ask a member of Generation Z where in the world they would most like to live, and chances are they…
Milking it
I was tired when I went to see Milk at the Wellcome Collection, having been up for much of the…
The borrowers
I’m not a natural lender. I’m a reasonably soft touch when it comes to money, but regarding the important things…
This will hurt
A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is set in a New York apartment shared by four mega-successful yuppies:…
Catherine the great
Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not…
Wrenaissance man
Adrian Tinniswood on the fall and rise — and fall and rise — of England’s greatest architect
Erotic intensity
We think of television – even in this age of a thousand streamers – as something we pig out on…
