Arts
Let’s twist again
Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t…
Nepo daddies
Rob Grant releases his debut album, Lost at Sea, this week. A 69-year-old millionaire and former ad man, furniture exec…
Fire and fizz
Are you supposed to laugh at the end of Don Giovanni? Audiences often do, and they did at the end…
False notes
Chevalier is a biopic of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whom you’ve probably never heard of, as I hadn’t. He…
All the rage
Welcome back to Room 101, which has returned to the radio – after nearly 30 years on TV – and…
One hundred years of humiliation
By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries…
Cloth of heaven
Jonathan Ruffer calls for the return to Britain of the Tudor tapestry that proclaims the birth of the Church of England
A campy and colourful role
It’s good to report that the latest revival of The Rocky Horror Show with Jason Donovan as Frank-N-Furter is true…
Home truths
Can we know an artist by their house, asks Laura Freeman
The ex factor
Mrs Doubtfire is a social comedy about divorce. We meet Miranda, a talentless, bitter mother, who tires of her caring…
Shatterer of glass ceilings
Reviewing the Prado’s joint exhibition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana in the Art Newspaper three years ago, Brian Allen…
Metal fatigue
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything worse than Mötley Crüe in Sheffield. Nothing more tuneless, empty, vapid and dismaying.…
This was England
In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…
All quiet on the western front
Zoe Strimpel talks to the anti-Putin Russian artists who have been cancelled since the invasion of Ukraine
One kind of masterpiece
It’s strange the world of classics and demi-classics and popular classics we inhabit. Right at the moment there’s the chance…
Snapshots from the edge
This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly…
Bring up the bodies
Margaret Mitchell on the ethics of museums of anatomical specimens
Inside story
Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…
Hoists, HD and horses
Scheduling open-air concerts in mid-May in northern Europe is a triumph of hope over experience. I last spent time with…
Lost worlds
One so often hears about famous people who are horrible when they think no one important is looking – barking…
Brief encounters
Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and…
A fight to the Finnish
When I went into the Sisu screening I knew only that it was a Finnish film, so was expecting an…
Station to station
Exiting Peckham Rye station, you’re not aware of it, but standing on the platform you can see a mansard roof…
