Arts

Arts feature

A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

Hieronymus Bosch was not a natural painter of religious images. His terrifying visions of Hell may have helped to keep congregations on the path of righteousness, but they did not inspire feelings of devotion – which could explain why none of the large altarpieces he painted remained over their altars after his death. In the

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A short history of stained glass

On 13 December 1643, a Puritan minister called Richard Culmer borrowed the Canterbury town ladder and carefully leaned it against the Cathedral’s Royal Window. He then ascended the ladder’s 60-odd rungs, holding a pike; according to his account, modestly written in the third person, ‘Some people wished he might break his neck.’ Culmer had in

The art of walking

My pilgrim companion William Parsons and I did not call our first journey a pilgrimage. Rather, it was a song walk: a walk with a purpose of taking a song, ‘The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy’, back to where it came from. It was also an attempt to reclaim my place in the world, after too much

The Listener

Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

Grade: C+ Maximum points for self-awareness, you have to say. The title track of this pleasant, if largely underwhelming, album include the lines: ‘These recycled riffs aren’t going anywhere, any time.’ Never a truer word spoken. Here, this fitfully engaging singer-songwriter shuffles through predictable chord changes pinioned by forgettable piano riffs and intones – deploying

Theatre

Television

Exhibitions

David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

On 12 November 1549, the 12-year-old Edward VI, newly liberated from the tutelage of his overweening uncle, Lord Protector Somerset, was at last able to enter his father Henry VIII’s private apartments in the Palace of Whitehall. From the extraordinary mixture of treasures and bric-à-brac he found there, he chose one thing: ‘a book of

Cinema

Dance

The best British Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is one of those Christmas traditions that turns out to be not very traditional at all. First performed in St Petersburg in 1892, it didn’t catch on outside Russia until the late 1950s, when Balanchine’s version for New York City Ballet was repeatedly screened on network television in the USA and Festival Ballet’s

Classical