Arts
Don’t believe the naysayers
A user’s guide to how pop music works in the 21st century. Step one: you see a great new band.…
‘I have uncancelled myself’
David Starkey’s commentary on the Queen’s funeral on GB News was generally agreed to be the best of all the…
Imperial march
If being asked to write music for the coronation of a king is an honour, then doing it for an…
Hook up
Peter Pan & Wendy is Disney’s latest live-action remake (the animated version was in 1953) and it’s quite the sombre…
Upstart Crow without the jokes
The Swan Theatre has reopened after an overhaul and praise god: they’ve replaced the seats. The Swan is a likeable…
Sins of the father
Dixon and Daughters is a family drama that opens on a note of sour mistrust. We’re in a working-class home…
Crowning glory
Dan Hitchens on the art that has shaped our image of the coronation
The preternatural nature of his genius
Is it being a dominion country, a well-heeled colony, that makes this country good at comedy? The death of Barry…
Nuttier and nastier
I was making my way slowly through one of my dismally prosaic little to-do lists – ‘pay the water bill’…
Vaudeville villainy
Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what…
Americana Coldplay
Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and…
The yin and yang of abstraction
In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World…
Deadbeats, halfwits and losers
Snowflakes, an excellent title, rehashes The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. A guest in a hotel room is visited by…
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…
