Arts
Petrol, seawater and blood
Tanya Gold talks to cult director Mark Jenkin about his ominous vision of Cornwall
I, Spy
Is the new year a time to reflect on the misjudgments of a life spent opining? Thirty years ago, when…
Write and wrong
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’…
Pre-Raphaelite Tintin
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed…
Hit and myth
I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of…
Turkish delight
A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in…
The stuff that dreams are made of
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal…
Conduct unbecoming
Richard Bratby on monstrous maestros
The intensity of Christmas
What a box of contradictions Christmas is. There’s the quest for presents – which can get urgent and exhilarated in…
Sentimental value
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
The lady vanishes
Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may…
Going like the clappers
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing…
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…
