Auden
‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend
When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend,…
Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?
Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that…
A poet in prose
Literary reputation can be a fickle old business. Those garlanded during their lifetimes are often quickly forgotten once dead. Yet…
From Auden to Wilde: a roll call of gay talent
The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it…
Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
Cars are our cathedrals
Stephen Bayley hails the automobile – a miracle of technical and artistic collaboration – and mourns its demise
ENO's Between Worlds at the Barbican reviewed: too respectful
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Royal Opera's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny review: far too well behaved
Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one…
Climate change, Bruegel-style
The world depicted by the Flemish master is not so different from our own, says Martin Gayford
Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
