Arts Reviews

Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We almost invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost of accommodation is astronomical — I’ve met Edinburgh natives who pay their annual mortgage with the rent for August. You could conceptualise it as a loss-leader; but there are 1,333 comedy shows this year, and a loss-leader that can’t lead to anything is just a loss. Yet comics still go up. Partly because, for three weeks, there’s the thrill of having a real job: instead of travelling for gigs, you’re at the same place at the same time every day. Partly because comedy is a serious business in Edinburgh:

What could be more British than nosying around someone else’s private property while munching on a slice of cake? The National Garden Scheme allows you to do both, opening up people’s back gardens to the public and offering them a lovely homemade afternoon tea while they’re at it. I grew up poring over the pages of its famous Yellow Book of open gardens, envying the fat borders of geraniums and delphiniums in the rural area where we lived. But the NGS doesn’t just do big walled gardens and sweeping lawns; it has a London Yellow Book, too, and while the gardens are far smaller, the plants, the cakes and even

For Americans, Thomas Cole is a household name. He painted America’s wild landscapes and lamented its destruction by the country’s early industrialisation. Yet the Lancaster-born Cole is little known in Britain, living stateside for most of his adult life. The National Gallery has been working with the Met to bring home Cole and his works. And what a homecoming it is. Inspired by Turner and Constable, Cole was a self-made man, learning to paint through tenacity and a small collection of books. Like Constable, Cole obsessed over nature and ideas of decay (Constable’s crumbling ‘Hadleigh Castle’ was a favourite). From Turner and Claude, Cole learned for the first time that

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden Gray, who uses the stage name Meow Meow. The show was inspired by Humphries’ fascination with Germany’s culture during the interwar years. ‘It was the last song before the nation slid into moral squalor. And I have a long-standing interest — I won’t say “passion” because one gets “passionate” about deodorants — but I have