Arts
Sporting greats
My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of…
Haunted habitats
You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for…
Lost worlds
Daisy Dunn on the mysterious Minoans
Shy old charmer
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra kicks off its 2023 season with a sumptuously ambitious gala concert on the evening of Friday…
Three hours of tripe
Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag,…
Calling time
There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it…
The girls, the gays and the theys
The other week I saw a T-shirt bearing the caption ‘For the girls, the gays and the theys’. And if…
Swimming against the tide
If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old…
Stranger things
Christopher Howse on the transformative power of folk costume
Aristocratic panache
Last week saw the streaming of the sixth and final episode of Happy Valley, the Yorkshire policier with the great…
So damned German
I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi…
The lady on the No. 26
I was sceptical when the lady on the bus to Reading town centre told me that her father knew Liszt.…
Megaphonic honks
Simon Stone claims that his new comedy, Phaedra, draws on the work of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. In fact, the…
Ice cream and pickles
Can you ever truly know a poet? The question arises every time one publishes a collection that looks vaguely confessional.…
Man and boy
For my money – and lots of other people’s – Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father was pretty much a…
Rocky horror show
There is footage on the internet of Robert Smith, lead singer in the Cure, being interviewed on the occasion of…
On Finchleystrasse
Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3,…
Who’s that girl?
Laura Gascoigne on Vermeer’s women
Serious music
The other week this column blithely announced that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra would be performing live that mighty and mightily…
Revival of the fittest
Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these…
Best in show
Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that…
His dark materials
Radio works its strongest magic, I always think, when you listen to it in the dark. The most reliable example…
Going Metric
Why aren’t Metric stars? In their native Canada, several of their albums have gone platinum, but the rest of the…
Chatterbox crackdown
A romcom with an irritating title, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, has opened at the HP Theatre starring Jenna Coleman…
