Arts
Gothic horror meets Acorn Antiques
Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…
Let’s talk about pecs
Jack Reacher is back on the screen and aficionados of the hugely successful Lee Child airport thrillers in which he…
Everything under the sun
Christopher Howse is bowled over by the astonishingartefacts in the British Museum’s Stonehenge exhibition
Smart and smarter
Tyler Cowen is a man who leaves you at once in awe and perturbed. He is the Holbert L. Harris…
Grace
Does anyone know where we are in the world of arts and entertainment as Omicron advances, boosters abound, RATS are…
(no title)
According to the makers, This is Going to Hurt is intended as ‘a love letter to the national health service’.…
Small wonder
As there are no stand-out films this week aside from Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile — is…
Ill gotten gains
I have heartburn. I probably have heartburn simply because both my parents also had a lot of heartburn, and I…
Hardcore thrills
Even leaving aside its origins as prison slang, punk has always meant different things on either side of the Atlantic.…
Double trouble
A Number, by Caryl Churchill, is a sci-fi drama of impenetrable complexity. It’s set in a future society where cloning…
Face time
In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You…
The art of the high street
Daisy Dunn on the painters who celebrate shop fronts
Pot-washers and pole-dancers
The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s…
Moulin Rouge
It seems an aeon ago, the press night of Moulin Rouge, on 26 November. Since then, there has been illness,…
The cowpat myth
He is caricatured as a populist and purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies, says Richard Bratby, but Vaughan Williams was a modernist master of uncompromising originality
Big cats and bad hairdos
The prestige podcasting era began in 2014, when the true-crime Serial gripped us with the ‘did-he-dunnit’ mystery of whether Adnan…
The great pretender
It’s 1993 and you’re studying at a top agricultural college with a bright future ahead of you, perhaps in farming…
Fraudulent tripe
It’s getting silly now. London’s subsidised theatres aren’t just competing to put on the worst play of the year but…
High on the Hogg
The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not…
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Jethro Tull: The Zealot Gene
Grade: C+ I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brickfrom a secondhand shop when I…
Don’t Look Up
How strange it is to be in a supposedly opened-up world, even as the Omicron variety of the virus shuts…
Call of the wild
Francis Bacon sensed our inner beastliness and painted it with astonishing power, says Martin Gayford
Disappearing doilies
This week marks the beginning of modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4, which means it’s time for some…
Boom and bust
Moulin Rouge wins no marks for its storyline. A struggling Parisian theatre is bought out by an evil financier who…
