Arts
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…
Losing the plot
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…
Callous to the core
Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The…
From the sublime to the ridiculous
Godland is a film to see on the big screen: not just for its awesome, immersive cinematography, but because it…
Sweet nothings
Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling…
Hounds of love
Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed,…
Insider art
Stuart Jeffries meets the prisonerartists of HMP Grendon
Searching in vain for The African Queen
What a weird world we inhabit when it comes to popular culture or indeed to any culture high or low.…
If I were a rich man
I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly…
Less than the sum of their parts
Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not…
Whisky and cordite
Most of us are familiar with the notion of writer’s block, that paralysis of invention induced by the appalling sight…
