Arts and culture
Barbie’s bombshell
Who would have thought the beery blokey jukebox musical The Choir of Man at Melbourne’s Playhouse would be such an…
Maestro Bernstein
What do we know about Leonard Bernstein, who did everything to popularise classical music and wrote the Broadway classic West…
Why are theatres so cowardly?
Looking back at the year’s West End theatre, a few shows stand out. First, the best. Vanya, starring Andrew Scott…
The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles
Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well…
Remembering John Gardner
“Art begins in a wound, an imperfection,” said the late novelist John Gardner, one of the last American writers to…
A very distinguished monster monarch
So the Matthew Warchus/Jack Thorne A Christmas Carol opened again to just as rapturous a response as it did a…
The Crown is going out in a blaze of camp glory
Say what you like about Netflix and Peter Morgan, the producers and creator of The Crown respectively, but they’ve certainly…
The Turner prize doesn’t make sense anymore
In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing…
Every kind of spectacular effect
It’s starting to turn into the season to be jolly (or whatever variant you can manage) with the Melbourne Symphony…
What fiction can teach us about terrorism
The first decade of this century, following Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001,…
Why Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is one of the strangest books of all time
The 2024 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about…
The point of perdition
What will history make of the superior crime stories we seem to be churning out? The late Peter Corris’ Cliff…
When did publishers stop caring what their readers actually want?
It was easy to choose books for my young nieces and nephews this Christmas. First, I ruled out stories about…
The mad cult of Doctor Who
When Doctor Who returned to wild acclaim in 2005, after 16 years off-air and about a generation of being regarded…
Ed Sheeran’s time is up
Who’s the worst pop star of modern times? Some might say that Adele sounds like a moose with PMT –…
Eye-batting nonchalance
What is it about the Egyptians that bewitches us? Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs opened at the Australian…
Tracey Emin and the problem with museum trustees
The Royal Academy has nominated Tracey Emin to be a trustee of the British Museum. There is quite a fanfare…
The brilliance of A.S. Byatt lives on in her writing
Dame Antonia Byatt, the novelist A.S. Byatt, has died after a long illness. With her goes part of the conscience…
People of extraordinary glamour
A refreshing and humbling prospect, in a world where we sometimes imagine cultural coverage gets better, is to revisit the…
In defence of The Crown
Since 2016, we have cultivated a new national pastime: moaning about the latest series of The Crown. Every time Netflix’s…
Rip-roaring satire in Iota
This novel is the ninth book of the satirical series concerning Grafton Everest, a rambunctious, overweight, fictional academic who, as…
Character acting without the character
Miss Saigon may on the face of it seem like an odd choice of musical for Opera Australia to revive…
How the girls sighed
You know the year is starting to come to an end when a new production of A Christmas Carol is…
A naive friend
John le Carré was one of the more extraordinary popular writers of the last half-century (and more) and part of…
Lost in Translation was Tokyo at its bizarre, dislocating best
You can wait ages for a Japan themed Hollywood film and then three come at once. In an odd spasm…
