Arts
Pulling on the heart strings
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…
An honest doubter
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s…
Pitched battle
The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram…
…and cold
It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My…
Blowing hot…
Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have…
Oh yes she is!
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog…
Northern star
Laura Gascoigne on the shadowy Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, whose painting in the Uffizi upstages the masterpieces of Botticelli
Howdy, pardner
Someone told me the new TV streamer The English had a weird resemblance to Cormac McCarthy who has just published…
The greatest showman
Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share…
A painter of rural doings
‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of…
Historical lucky dip
Like so many of history’s great catastrophes, the story begins with an eccentric Victorian Englishman. Francis Galton was a maker…
Back to the future
These days, everyone who was knocking around a few decades ago predicted the internet. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the internet…
Manhattan transfer
Crude eccentricities damage the potential brilliance of Othello at the National. Some of the visual gestures seem to have been…
Sheer delight
Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous…
‘What happened in Russia can happen anywhere’
Oliver Basciano talks to Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot about Putin-baiting, Ukraine and western hypocrisy
And introducing Michael Caine
It was the night of the Victorian election that might have seen Daniel Andrews fall like Lucifer never to rise…
Love me tender
If you’re of my generation, I expect your first encounter with D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the (well-thumbed) book…
Stranger things
‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an…
Absolute Rodness
Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all…
Hair brained
It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really…
The glee of hatred
For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of…
Christmas cracker
Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent…
As camp as Christmas
Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling…
The pleasure principle
Sam Kriss on how we became addicted to ASMR
