Arts
Quiet thunder
Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet…
Poetry in motion
Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen
Rooney tunes
It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set…
A dramatic dream of Australia
1922 is the wonder year of twentieth century literature, the so-called annus mirabilis: T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James…
Soldiery stuff
The Battlegroundpodcast on the wars of the 20th century, said presenter Saul David happily, ‘will have lots of bombs and…
A sentimental surrealist
We’re doing multiverses now. Last weekend, a friend dragged me to see Marvel’s latest product, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse…
Come spy with me
How thriller writers must miss the Cold War! Early John le Carré and Len Deighton had it easy when trying…
Old cud and fleshy frumps
Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer. Laura Gascoigne on the many faces of Walter Sickert
The Muppet show
There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising…
Skin in the game
Drummers are patient chaps, in the main. Think of Ringo in Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles docuseries, Get Back. Lolling around…
Body language
‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining…
Life from both sides now
It’s a strange thing the way we keep interpreting and re-interpreting the different aspects of our culture that have become…
Dark side of the rune
In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later…
The hecklers
Keith Burstein recalls a key moment in the battle for emancipation from the ivory tower of atonalism
Have we got news for you
In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s…
Nattery and nice
Have you ever taken a piece of advice? I’m not asking a rhetorical question. Have you ever once in your…
No more Mr Nasty Guy
In theory, it should be a perfect match. John Morton – the man behind the brilliantly assured sitcom W1A which…
Losing the plot
The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look…
The perfect pop star
Dua Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was released at the least promising moment possible: 27 March 2020, the day after…
Anatomy of a forgettable scandal
An evening of shorts, courtesy of Flickerfest, even at a lustrous cinema like the Kino in the Sofitel complex off…
The lonely path to herohood
Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen…
Bad education
The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams is a sociology essay written in 1938 about a prickly tyrant, Miss Moffat,…
Literally Hitler
To be a Wagnerite is to enter the theatre in a state of paranoia. Mainstream culture has decided that Wagner…
The essential Wellerness
You don’t need to be a historian of pop to realise that having been part of a huge manufactured group…
‘I came, I saw, I scribbled’
Graeme Thomson talks to former Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan about his first art folio
