Arts
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…
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…
