Arts
The philosopher and the philistine
The Collaboration is set in the 1980s when Andy Warhol teamed up with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat to create bad…
Avril Lavigne: Love Sux
Grade: B Yay, life just gets better and better. World War Three and now this. More petulant popcorn pre-school punk…
Mourning glory
The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh.…
Rapper’s delight
The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music…
Suited and rebooted
The latest Batman film, The Batman, may be a reboot, or even a reboot of a rebooted reboot that’s been…
Too hot to handle
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Wicked smaht
When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…
A new Arab spring?
Stuart Jeffries on Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning art scene
Got a gun in my hand
The final scene in the brilliant television series The Sopranos is set in a diner where Tony’s family is gathered…
Richard Roxburgh
It’s not often that you get such a rapturous reception for a new show as Fun Home received and the…
The Theroux Paradox
In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to…
Building block
We should learn to love our turn-of-the-millennium architecture, says Helen Barrett, starting with the Dome
Playing hooky
One of the curiosities of modern pop’s landscape is that no one knows any longer how to measure success. An…
Stolen pleasures
The Duke is an old-fashioned British comedy caper that is plainly lovely and a joy. Based on a true story,…
To have and to hold
When you take in the richness of a Pina Bausch production — the redolent staging, the eloquent, eccentric twists of…
Threadbare brain-teaser
The Forest is the latest thriller from the French dramatist Florian Zeller, translated by Oscar winner Christopher Hampton. It’s a…
Cringe benefits
The tagline of This is Dating, a new podcast from across the pond, is ‘Come for the cringe, stay for…
Refugees from Moominland
Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story…
Looking as haggling
Two markers: ‘Cottages at Auvers-sur-Oise’ (c.1873) is a sweet especial rural scene of faintly slovenly thatched cottages with, at its…
Die Walküre
Chesterton said – and the poet Peter Porter loved to repeat – that if a thing was worth doing it…
Beyond a joke
Charlie Chaplin is one of the most famous movie stars ever and is certainly the most famous movie star with…
Clown prince
Never Not Once has a cold and forbidding title but it starts as an amusing tale set in an LA…
Such sweet sorrow
We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to…
Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There
Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new…
Star power and spectacle
London felt like its old self on Friday night. Possibly it was just me; when you visit the capital once…
