Arts
Bros your mind
The Climb is, essentially, a bickering bromance as two longtime pals bicker bromantically down the years, and it doesn’t sound…
Hare-brained
Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a…
Simply divine
Three shows in a week! Why, it was just like the first week of March. There was, however, little of…
Cannibalism meets feminism
In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England.…
Of man’s first disobedience
Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…
Fantastic beasts and where to find them
Claudia Massie explores the cinematic majesty and mind-bending visual trickery of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen
Too much of nothing
In the world of the arts, some things keep on even in this time of impossibility which the virus has…
Josh Frydenberg
There has been a fair bit of bleating from sectors claiming to have been ignored in the Budget; in fact…
Spreading the word
Nineteen fifty-six: the Suez crisis, the first Tesco, Jim Laker takes 19 wickets in a match. But also: Trinidadian pianist…
Car-boot sale of the unconscious
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
Mossad’s Lara Croft
If you love Fauda — and of course you do — you’re in for a long wait for season four,…
Home improvement
Squatting, gutting and retrofitting – and a lesson from India: Stuart Jeffries looks at the future of British architecture
Two by two
Mothballed since March when it danced a farewell Swan Lake, the Royal Ballet made a triumphant and joyous return to…
Haunted by Hitchcock
Rebecca is a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic, twisted, never-out-of-print tale of sexual jealousy. It’s directed by Ben…
Panto at Glyndebourne
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
A conspiracy against art
Southwark Playhouse has revived an American show, The Last Five Years, whose run was cancelled in March. In advance, I…
Lockdown
What a strange phase the world of theatre – the world of artistic activity – is going through at the…
Richard Tognetti
They led the way back into the spotlight. Richard Tognetti and members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra were the first…
Rare and precious
Martin Gayford explains why the Royal Academy would be wrong to sell Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’
Sins of the fathers, music of the sons
When Kwame Kwei-Armah took over the Young Vic he strapped a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign over the front of the…
Whistling past the graveyard
Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died…
Porn again
A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie…
Partridge on the menu
In the week Jenni Murray left Woman’s Hour, I was listening to Alan Partridge on his new podcast, From the…
Saints and sinners
Saint Maud is a first feature from writer-director Rose Glass and it’s being billed as a horror film. But it’s…
Are you reading this, Rishi?
Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was…
