Arts
Could she be the new Sade?
Some years ago, when I was the music editor of a newspaper, I called a number of historians of black…
It’s who you know
All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts,…
The totalitarian handbook
How to Become a Tyrant(Netflix) is ideal history TV for Generation No Attention Span. Presented in six bite-sized chunks by…
Too bawdy for the Beeb
Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the…
Grandeur and subtlety
The Victorian dictum ‘every picture tells a story’ is true of Paula Rego’s works, but it’s only part of the…
Martin Clunes
Just as the lockdown imprisons the people of Sydney those in Canberra have had the chance to see that exhilaration…
Opera Australia’s production of Otello
Lockdown must be making me irritable; an article during the week really got me going. It concerns two forthcoming productions…
What a performance
To its huge credit, ITV has managed to find perhaps the last two television celebrities who’ve never before been filmed…
North star
Claudia Massie on the unjustly neglected artist Joan Eardley, who deserves to be ranked alongside Auerbach, Bacon and de Kooning
Good dogs v. lame jokes
Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer…
Tasteless muddle
What shall we destroy next? Romeo & Julietseems a promising target and the Globe has set out to vandalise Shakespeare’s…
Shawn again
Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and…
The real death of rock
What would a rock band have to do now to be seen as heralding the future? Twenty years ago, it…
In search of lost time
Tanjil Rashid on the vivid memory-scapes of Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai
Carry on Bel Canto
Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…
Ethos
A Sydney lockdown on the heels of Melbourne: what price entertainment? It seemed natural as ever to have recourse to…
Jaime Martín
They’re changing guard at our two major orchestras; the Melbourne Symphony and the Sydney Symphony. A couple of months ago…
Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth: Utopian Ashes
Grade: B– Is there anyone in rock music more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie? The rawk’n’roll leather-jacketed self-mythologiser. The…
By Tove!
Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of…
Sense and sensibility
Zoe Dubno on the rise of the ‘sensitivity reader’, a seductively cheap way for publishers to cancel-proof their books
The best thing on TV ever
I’ve been trying to avoid the house TV room as much as possible recently because it tends to be occupied…
One of life’s irregulars
Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What…
Grand designs
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
Bach to basics
Bach & Sons opens with the great composer tinkling away on a harpsichord while a toddler screeches his head off…
Bring me sunshine
Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency —…
