Arts
Toxic testosterone
Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by…
Weirder and weirder
The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation:…
Soused in bilge
The Fever Syndrome is a dramatised lecture set in a New York brownstone occupied by the super-brainy Myers family. The…
High and mighty
Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders
Colour in the gloom
Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…
Archangel of Italian film
Like yesterday, there’s the memory of William Weaver, the great translator from the Italian of Umberto Eco’s The Name of…
Strangers on a train
Compartment No. 6 is set aboard a long train journey across Russia, a country we don’t hear much of these…
After the love has gone
Utopia, Limited (1893) is a rare bird, and one that every Gilbert and Sullivan completist simply has to bag. The…
Wings of desire
In 2014, an exhibition of watercolours by the renowned avian artist, John James Audubon, opened in New York. The reviews,…
Tornado Tamara
One wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Tamara Rojo. The most fearsome figure on the British dance…
Changing of the Bard
The NT has rejigged Hamlet for 8- to 12-year-old children. It’s a decent attempt to cover the highlights at a…
Family entertainer
Stormzy occupies a curious place in British pop culture right now. He’s the darling of liberals for all his good…
Lend me your ears
Don’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses, says John Phipps. Listen to it
A true maverick
Art That Made Us is an ambitious new series, firmly in the ‘history of something in a load of different…
Mighty and majestic
There is nothing like a ghastly war, an inscrutable election and a great rush of entertainment high and low to…
Man up
For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be…
Saint or hustler?
Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael
Safe and sound
This year the Oscar for best film went to the drama Coda– ‘Child of Deaf Adults’ – but the ceremony…
In the land of the subtitle
The iron law of TV these days is that if you want to avoid series that are suffocatingly right-on the…
Band of Horses: Things Are Great
Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it…
Shaw thing
It’s good of Nicholas Hytner to let Londoners see David Hare’s new play before it travels to Broadway where it…
Bird brained
Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden…
A darkened stage lights up
An American in Paris was always a stage musical waiting to happen even though it is immemorially associated with Gene…
Bring up the bodies
BBC2’s one-off drama Then Barbara Met Alan(Monday) told the true story of how two disabled performers on the cabaret circuit…
Sheer torture
Cock was written by Mike Bartlett in 2009 while he was in Mexico at a drama conference. The title suggests…
