Arts
If it ain’t broke
At one point in an early Simpsons, Homer comes across an old issue of TV Guide, and finds the listing…
Beano rules
Stuart Jeffries on the cultural influence of the comic that said it was good to be bad
The death of the live album
Next week The The release The Comeback Special, a 24-track live album documenting the band’s concert at the Royal Albert…
Painting everywhere
There’s a faint scent of desperation wafting through the Frieze tent this year. Pre–pandemic, this was where you came to…
Too much bawl and shriek
Yaël Farber’s Macbeth sets out to be a great work of art. The director crams the Almeida’s stage with suggestive…
Terminal whimsy
The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but…
The quiet Glaswegian
Robert Jackman talks to Robert Carlyle about Begbie, playing a Tory prime minister and the merits of keeping your head down
Maggie Smith
And so we look like being able to see live performance again in the two biggest cities in Australia: Sydney…
O what a lovely Waugh!
Sumptuous, glorious, luminous, lavish: Granada’s 40-year-old adaptation of Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series, says Mark McGinness
Bleak, brutal and bloody
Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told…
Heart and Seoul
Should we be worried that Squid Game is the most popular show in Netflix’s history? If it’s a case of…
A licence for licentiousness
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
Simply Shakespeare
Here goes. The Young Vic’s Hamlet, directed by Greg Hersov, is a triumph. This is a pared-back, plain-speaking version done…
Stepmother superior
Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture…
Morrissey remastered
Many of us who grew up loving the Smiths have rather shelved that affection in recent years. Many of us,…
Spooky furniture
‘I’ve actually seen ghosts.’ This statement comes less than ten minutes into the first episode of Dark House, a limited-series…
Clive Owen
A time of plague makes us brood on the culture we share in the absence of personal preference. One person…
Roll over, Beethoven
Ian Pace on musicology’s culture wars
Such sweet sorrow
‘It’s generally agreed that in contemporary practice, this opera proposes significant ethical and cultural problems,’ says the director Lindy Hume…
A spoonful of Sugar
Murder Island features eight real-life ‘ordinary people’ seeking to solve a fictional killing on a fictional Scottish island. What follows…
Di another day
This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as…
Sent to Coventry
The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like…
Hals apoppin’
Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime —…
Remaking history
The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time…
Heath Ledger
It’s weird to hear news of artistic life in the midst of Covid. The Sydney Theatre Company has a new…
