The story goes that one day early in the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci was strolling through Florence with a friend. Near the Ponte Santa Trinita they came across a group of gentlemen disputing a point in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Seeing Leonardo, they asked him to explain the passage. At that same moment, Michelangelo Buonarroti
Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even though it came out last year. Why? Because along with simultaneously trying to save American democracy and make humanity an interplanetary species, Elon Musk’s third preoccupation is Diablo IV. When he’s
Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in the western world from the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The play’s co-adaptors, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci, are old enough to recall
In the second of this week’s two episodes of Generation Z (Sunday and Monday), a teenage girl called Finn wondered why her friend Kelly was so distracted and tearful. As a well-informed type, Finn applied the principle of Occam’s razor and decided that Kelly must be pregnant. In this case, though, the simplest explanation definitely
Heretic is the latest horror film from writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quite Place) and stars Hugh Grant, now enjoying the villainous chapter of his career. (See: Paddington 2, The Undoing, The Gentlemen, etc.) Here, he plays a fella who imprisons two young Mormon missionaries as he seeks to torment and terrify them
After opening its 2024/5 season with a run of Christopher Wheeldon’s candy-coloured, kiddie-friendly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Royal Ballet gets down to business with a demanding but exhilarating programme of new work. Newish, to be accurate; the evening’s only previously unseen piece is Joseph Toonga’s Dusk. Crystal Pite’s The Statement is eight years old
Chris Stapleton is a barrel-chested man of 46, who hides his face beneath a beard that must have taken years to grow, hair that tumbles down past his shoulders and a hat that could probably accommodate rather more than ten gallons. He sings songs about being imperfect, with a band behind him making a sound
In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still some tickets left. The price is reasonable but the price doesn’t matter when the band are unequivocally one of the finest of live acts. By whatever means you can, go. When you get there, enjoy
Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly, and I suspect that’ll be a common reaction if you were actually around back then. The director Daisy Evans was a toddler at the time and she imagines a gaudy, tawdry small-town world of bum-bags,
