It’s 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. William Cook on the city’s changing face On the west bank of the River Spree, beside the old route of the Berlin Wall, there is a building which sums up the strange renaissance of this wonderful, awful city. The Hamburger Bahnhof used to be a train
Picasso: Challenging the Past National Gallery, until 7 June The ostensible subject of this show is Picasso’s relationship with past art, and accordingly the visitor might expect to see great works of the past hung next to Picassos for purposes of comparison. This does not occur. The exhibition contains only some 60 paintings by Picasso,
Doctor Atomic English National Opera Der fliegende Holländer Royal Opera House John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic, in a production shared with the New York Met, had its UK première at the English National Opera, and was greeted with the kind of cheers that you don’t often encounter in opera houses. It bored me in
The Young Victoria PG, Nationwide The Young Victoria stars Emily Blunt and is based, apparently, on an idea first pitched by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York: ‘I know! Let’s do a film about Queen Victoria, but when she was young, and call it “The Young Victoria!”.’ She is listed as a producer as is, bizarrely,
There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. In 2005, Paul
England People Very Nice Olivier Toyer Arts It’s been a busy year for offence-junkies. Richard Bean’s new play has prompted anti-racism protests at the National. What for? The play is certainly racist in the narrow sense that it mocks the distinctions between races (or regions, for the most part, since Bean belongs to the same
Last weekend we learned that Heston Blumenthal had closed his Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, because 40 or so customers had reported feeling ill. I’m not surprised. I felt ill just watching the start of his new series, Feast (Channel 4, Tuesday), and not a morsel had passed my lips. (Actually, some years ago I
Science fiction has never been the same since Douglas Adams so brilliantly lampooned the genre in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first heard on Radio Four aeons ago, back in the era of flares and hippie hair. Science fiction has never been the same since Douglas Adams so brilliantly lampooned the genre in The
There’s a dog-leg road junction a mile up the lane off which I live that’s made dangerous by the pub that partially obscures traffic from the right. There’s a dog-leg road junction a mile up the lane off which I live that’s made dangerous by the pub that partially obscures traffic from the right. It’s
