Arts
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
Cut and thrust
Sneer all you like at its prolixities and vulgarities but Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling remains a ballet that packs an exceptionally…
Slippery slope
Downton Abbey: A New Era is the second film spin-off from the TV series and, like the first, it doesn’t…
The age of innocence
Netflix’s share price has collapsed and a major factor, people are saying, is its relentless pushing of agendas. I think…
A peculiar backwards mutation
It’s not hard to sympathise with Christopher Allen’s recent column in the Review section of the Australian decrying the juxtaposition…
Trumpian lullaby
Trump is said to be a gift for bad satirists and a problem for good ones. He dominates Mike Bartlett’s…
Don’t frighten the horses
Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life.…
Thrills, frills and folderols
A clever, original exhibition at the Wallace Collection has Laura Freeman twirling her way through the West End
Pot head
Richard Batterham died last September at the age of 85. He had worked in his pottery in the village of…
Rebel yell
Ordinarily, if a podcast purports to be revelatory, you can assume it is anything but. There’s a glut of programmes…
Father John Misty: Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century
Grade: A– In which Josh Tillman reimagines the whole back catalogue of 20th-century American pop music (except for rock), tilting…
You’re Nicked
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent stars Nicolas Cage playing a version of Nicolas Cage, in a parody of Nicolas…
A remarkable film that gleams with mastery
What a relief it was to see Parallel Mothers the new film by Pedro Almodóvar. There was the tediousness and…
Blowing hot and cold
A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window…
The great deceit
Operation Mincemeat is based on the book by Ben Macintyre, which in turn is based on what Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper…
Toxic testosterone
Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by…
Weirder and weirder
The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation:…
Soused in bilge
The Fever Syndrome is a dramatised lecture set in a New York brownstone occupied by the super-brainy Myers family. The…
High and mighty
Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders
Colour in the gloom
Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…
Archangel of Italian film
Like yesterday, there’s the memory of William Weaver, the great translator from the Italian of Umberto Eco’s The Name of…
Strangers on a train
Compartment No. 6 is set aboard a long train journey across Russia, a country we don’t hear much of these…
