Arts
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
Firefighters of bounty
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been with us for as long as we can remember. The story of the unlovely…
The good, the bad and the ugly
TV currently abounds with ‘I thought they were dead’ revival projects: series in which your favourite 1980s movie stars are…
Undramatic melodrama
A heroic Asian woman parachutes into occupied France to work for the resistance and help overthrow the Nazis. This sounds…
Measured in love
If you’re planning on seeing The Last Flight Home at the cinema, don’t make any plans for afterwards as you’ll…
Dazzling gems
The Koh-i-Noor in this Diamond Celebration of 60 years of the Friends of the Royal Opera House garnered the least…
Drift, bloom and sway
Plus: it’s quite clear that MUNA are going to be huge What is it with Icelanders and mushrooms? Just weeks…
Seven women
The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in…
Travels with Auntie
Tanjil Rashid on the BBC at 100
Minimalist but highly imaginative
If you live in the suburb of Hawthorn in the midst of all that leafy greenness, in the federal seat…
Mad about the girl
Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair…
