Arts
Fish and fire
Anyone who invited the Russian composer Mily Balakirev to dinner had to be jolly careful about the fish they served.…
Agnes Wales
Something is going on with Agnes Wales. Is it possible that the current board of trustees of the Art Gallery…
V. Namatjira Stand strong for who you are
It is a name deeply imbedded in Australia’s cultural memory. Albert Namatjira’s (1902-1957) was a prolific and immensely popular watercolour…
Life and fate
The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a…
A.G. Cook: Apple
Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a…
A world apart
Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of…
The boys are back in town
There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr)…
Sex and corpses
A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…
Zinger ping pong
Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a…
All together now
It’s the breath I miss most. The moment when a shuffling group of men and women in scruffy concert blacks…
In two minds
Can people of one race really understand the experience of another? asks Colin Grant
Stuck at home with a serial killer
It’s odd when you think of the way television has usurped almost everything else in the time of the virus.…
The odd couple
Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny…
Yusuf/Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2
Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…
Five-star blarney
The Old Vic refuses to reopen. Director Matthew Warchus says the social distancing rules make it impossible for him to…
Dumb and dumber
I think I am supposed to say that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third in a franchise about…
One for the road
The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time…
Spirited away
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
Culture club
In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation…
In defence of George Bernard Shaw
What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad.…
Diana Rigg
It was sad the other day to hear of the passing of that scintillating lady of stage and screen Diana…
Sheku Kanneh-Mason
The world became aware of Sheku Kanneh-Mason when he played the cello at the wedding of Harry and Meghan Sussex…
Class acts
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Marshal law
Covid marshals have invaded theatreland. Arriving for a weekday matinee at the Bridge, I was greeted by stewards holding up…
Who dares wins
‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas —…
