Arts
Mild at heart
It’s a sweet, green, glowing dawn in north-west Scotland. All around us are empty hillsides of rock and heather. The…
The heat is on
Boiling Point is a single-take drama set during a busy service at a London restaurant and it has to be…
The drugs don’t work
One of my first jobs in journalism was as the arts correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. I’d hop on my…
His thuggish materials
Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust has been adapted at the Bridge. The yarn is set in Oxford, and the…
Brought to book
‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva…
Second in command
The importance of understudies has been elevated to new heights by the pandemic, says Sarah Crompton
Sigrid Thornton
It was the thought of Stephen Sondheim’s death that made us watch Imelda Staunton in Gypsy. It’s the second musical…
Moomin marvellous
Moomins do not like winter. In one of Tove Jansson’s stories, Moomin’s Winter Follies, young Moomintroll bumps his head when…
1963 and all that
For people who like a good upper-class scandal (or ‘people’, as they’re also known), 1963 was definitely a vintage year.…
By Giorgio
Martin Gayford on a radical Nativity that is the subject of one of the great whodunnits of art history
Last post
It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It…
Grand Dame
Jack and the Beanstalk is a big, sprawling family show that opens with a baffling gesture. A booming voiceover announces…
From Russia with love
The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. The ballet wasn’t always considered quite such a box of delights
From Russia with love
The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score is nothing less than the sound of Christmas
Mother’s ruin
The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel about motherhood that says, quite ferociously: it’s complicated. And:…
The potency of cheap music
Christmas: the most vulnerable time of the year. I heard ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by David Essex on the radio the…
Ed Sheeran: = (Christmas edition)
Grade: C= My wife’s ill with Covid and demanding inexhaustible libations and difficult meals, which she will leave uneaten. The…
Wain’s world
Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s…
Jane Campion
A new film by Jane Campion is always going to be a magnetsing prospect and the idea of it suddenly…
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir…
Elephants in the room
When you first hear that a remake of West Side Story is on the cards, it’s: God, why? Why would…
Northern lights
It’s not everyone’s idea of fun, a trip to Huddersfield in the depths of November. But as any veteran of…
Tiger feat
Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is a complicated organism. The action starts in southern India where we meet a…
Eternity in an hour
Growing up on a farm outside Lima, I was aware that indigenous Peruvians did not understand time in the same…
‘I am not able to answer your question’
Hermione Eyre talks to an irascible Paolo Sorrentino about therapy, Vesuvius and why he kept things simple and easy for his latest film
