Arts and culture
Literary festivals are no fun
This is the season when literary festivals start to happen all over the UK. From the highlands of Scotland to…
Jenny Boyd goes beyond the muse
The beautiful muse to great male artists is a tricky figure, omnipresent in history but a bad fit for our…
Innocent pertness
There are times when anyone might decide to throw in scanning the range of literature and art and music and…
Readers of Ulysses have a right to be smug
Happy Bloomsday everybody. Today, 16 June, is the day on which the events of James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses, is set…
Always Sunny: going where others wouldn’t dare
Few would believe me If I said that a show about a group of politically incorrect, sociopathic, and narcissistic alcoholics…
A staggering performance
It would be wrong to belittle the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria because the emphasis is on…
The case for conservative comedy
Australia and the UK have a long, storied history of comedy. It has produced some great performers. However, one must…
What the Smiths’ critics don’t get
It’s forty years since the Smiths released their first single ‘Hand In Glove’. We’ve already seen a slew of articles…
Progressive censorship is headed down the same path as the ‘Rushdie bounty hunters’
Salman Rushdie did not die. Attempts to murder the author have been numerous, but Hadi Matar is the one charged…
A campy and colourful role
It’s good to report that the latest revival of The Rocky Horror Show with Jason Donovan as Frank-N-Furter is true…
The redemption of reputation
Scandal-hit celebrities Johnny Depp and Martha Stewart have coincidentally – yet decisively – proved my working PR theory (of several…
In praise of ‘shame’
Does art imitate life or vice versa? This question has troubled some of the world’s greatest minds. Plato agreed with…
Michael Cimino’s gift to cinema
In the spring of 1981, I committed what the entertainment press of that day regarded as an act of self-abuse:…
Succession’s only real flaw
It’s strange to reach the end of something you’ve relished with a sense of relief. HBO’s Succession has given me…
One kind of masterpiece
It’s strange the world of classics and demi-classics and popular classics we inhabit. Right at the moment there’s the chance…
Indiana Jones and the Cesspit of Woke
The adventuring, treasure-hunting, ultra-manly Indiana Jones franchise has defined large portions of story-telling history in Hollywood. Not only did it inspire…
Strange bedfellows
What a whirlwind the world of the arts can be. Gabrielle Carey who changed forever the image of teenage girlish…
The ultimate symbol of Sisu
For Finnish people, the concept of sisu cannot be directly interpreted. Roughly translated, it means strength, perseverance, and a firm determination to…
Rattle and HM
It’s funny to think that at the very moment when King Charles was going through his Coronation, pledging service and…
Dragons, broomsticks and whatnot
It was saddening to hear of the death of the poet John Tranter the other week. For those of us…
The preternatural nature of his genius
Is it being a dominion country, a well-heeled colony, that makes this country good at comedy? The death of Barry…
A ravishing sensuousness
What a world of paradox painting confronts us with. The death of John Olsen is a reminder of his stature…
The pity of war
‘My subject is war and the pity of war,’ Wilfred Owen wrote in the poems which Benjamin Britten set to…
Erotic intensity
We think of television – even in this age of a thousand streamers – as something we pig out on…
Searching in vain for The African Queen
What a weird world we inhabit when it comes to popular culture or indeed to any culture high or low.…
