Arts
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…
The art of the high street
Daisy Dunn on the painters who celebrate shop fronts
Pot-washers and pole-dancers
The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s…
Moulin Rouge
It seems an aeon ago, the press night of Moulin Rouge, on 26 November. Since then, there has been illness,…
The cowpat myth
He is caricatured as a populist and purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies, says Richard Bratby, but Vaughan Williams was a modernist master of uncompromising originality
Big cats and bad hairdos
The prestige podcasting era began in 2014, when the true-crime Serial gripped us with the ‘did-he-dunnit’ mystery of whether Adnan…
The great pretender
It’s 1993 and you’re studying at a top agricultural college with a bright future ahead of you, perhaps in farming…
Fraudulent tripe
It’s getting silly now. London’s subsidised theatres aren’t just competing to put on the worst play of the year but…
High on the Hogg
The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not…
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Jethro Tull: The Zealot Gene
Grade: C+ I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brickfrom a secondhand shop when I…
Don’t Look Up
How strange it is to be in a supposedly opened-up world, even as the Omicron variety of the virus shuts…
Call of the wild
Francis Bacon sensed our inner beastliness and painted it with astonishing power, says Martin Gayford
Disappearing doilies
This week marks the beginning of modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4, which means it’s time for some…
Boom and bust
Moulin Rouge wins no marks for its storyline. A struggling Parisian theatre is bought out by an evil financier who…
All that pizazz
Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy…
A work of art
Pedro Almodovar’s latest is a film about identity, secrets, lies, buried skeletons, real and metaphorical. But what you mainly need…
Everywhere and nowhere
The second most interesting thing about this digital exhibition is that it is not for art critics like me. I…
There will be blood
Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of…
A great leap forward
The single thing you don’t want when you are beginning a run of four shows in a prestige venue, with…
Good cop, bad cop
Older readers may remember a time when people signalled their cultural superiority with the weird boast that they didn’t watch…
Jeremy Irons in House of Gucci
Any attempt to fictionalise the Gucci story runs into the same difficulties as Ridley Scott’s handsome and absorbing film, House…
