Arts
The Pineapple Thief: Versions of the Truth
Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has…
Peake practice
Mervyn Peake’s unsettling illustrations reveal a gentle, kindly man with the soul of a pirate, says Daisy Dunn
Look at the paint!
The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves…
Lost in translation
Listening to the tacky and incomprehensible audio-adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel seriesSandman, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 19th-century…
What cinema is for
Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf),…
Arcadian repose
A friend of mine, a bit of a watermelon really like most of the cultural milieu, asked me why I…
Cynical Theories
They are possibly the most politically incorrect authors in the world. And they have universities squarely in their sights. Helen…
Paradis regained
Selina Mills on Maria Theresia von Paradis, the gifted but forgotten 18th-century composer, whose story will finally be told in a new chamber opera
Wet wet wet
It has roughly the same proportions as Shakespeare’s Globe. The Roman Theatre in Verulamium (St Albans) is an atmospheric ruin…
Me time
‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us.…
The art of the monologue
If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so…
Going solo
Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in.…
Savage beauty
The Painted Bird opens with a young boy (Jewish) running through a forest and clutching his pet ferret. He is…
Books shop
When the Irish comedian Dylan Moran was interviewed on ABC radio last year as a precursor to his (now presumably…
Angus Cerini
No longer confined to the digital space, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is returning to the platform in City Recital Hall…
Battle honours
In the cabinet war rooms in Whitehall in London, there is a chart which registers Atlantic convoys en route from…
National review
Why does the state fund theatres and not gardening and bingo, asks Lloyd Evans
Hundrum
Mulan is Disney’s latest live-action remake, coming in at 120 minutes, compared with the 1998 animation, which ran to 80.…
Stanley and his women
It sometimes rains in Cookham. It rained all day when I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery to see the exhibition…
Sold down the river
The roots of the Southbank Centre’s current crisis stretch back to before the pandemic, says Oliver Basciano
Barely touching the void
The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,…
Bearing all
Few things better capture the crazed cognitive dissonance of our age than this: that while we cower behind masks for…
Churchill
When I first arrived in Australia quarter of a century ago one of the many kind invitations I received was…
Paul Newton
Things are starting to happen culturally, at least outside of Victoria. Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre is rehearsing a play to…
To cut a long story short
Tenet is the latest high-concept, time-bending blockbuster from Christopher Nolan and it’s the film that (unofficially) reopens cinemas in the…
