Arts Reviews

The Estate begins with a typical NHS story. An elderly Sikh arrives in A&E after a six-hour wait for an ambulance and he’s asked to collect his own vomit in an NHS bucket. The doctors tell him he’s fine and sends him home where he promptly dies. His only son, Angad, inherits all his property, which irritates his two daughters, who receive nothing. The personality of the dead Sikh is left deliberately obscure. Newspapers in Britain and India publish glowing accounts of his achievements but his youngest daughter calls him ‘a slum landlord’ who owed his fortune to ‘a lifetime of tax-evasion’. The bad-tempered tussle over his will takes place

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath did something British groups had not done before. Before them, the British Invasion groups – from the Beatles, the Stones and The Who down to Herman’s Hermits and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – had taken American music and sold it to the British public as the American dream, as exotica. And when they exported it back to the States, the Americans – most of whom had never heard the music the groups began by copying – heard in it something fresh and exciting and joyful. Sabbath instead sold the American nightmare back to the United States, filling arenas across North America, a much bigger

Back in the 1990s, if you were disabled in the UK or US, and you believed that being disabled was more about self-determination and less about being left in care homes, you might have protested with banners declaring ‘Nihil de Nobis, sine Nobis‘ (‘Nothing about us without us’).  The call – allegedly first used by a 15th-century Polish political party – was taken up by disability activists who wanted the non-disabled world to consider how the material world was rarely designed or included disabled people. This fact itself was ‘disabling’.  Thus, they asked, why not build a ramp, instead of a staircase, so we can all use it? Or make print

Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? ‘Vapes,’ says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. ‘Lots of vapes.’ Mudlarking – the practice of scavenging at low tide for washed-up historical treasures, oddities or mundane objects – has become a well-gatekept hobby over the past five years. More than 10,000 people are now on the waiting list for mudlarking permits. Of course, anyone can go down to the foreshore to look around and

I am sitting on a neat little park bench in a tiny medieval town in rural Luxembourg, and I am enjoying a peculiar sensation for which the English language has no precise word. It is the beautiful yet bittersweet silence induced by an encounter with undeniably great art. Something so profound, moving and true, it leaves you speechless, maybe even a little breathless. I’ve experienced this feeling just a few times in my life. When I saw the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican Museums. When I read the last pages of Joyce’s Ulysses – ‘yes I said yes I will Yes’. When I listened to the second side of