Arts

Music

Damian Thompson

I know how to cure my music addiction

About 30 years ago, not long before he died, my father bought an LP of Sir Clifford Curzon playing Schubert’s last piano sonata, in B flat D960. He was slightly defensive about the purchase. You see, he already had a record of Alfred Brendel playing the same piece. ‘It’s a bit of an extravagance,’ he

Arts feature

The best thing to come out of Davos

Another new year and once again the world’s leading CEOs and politicians descend on Davos, transforming this little Alpine town into the world’s most (self-) important talking shop. Yet there’s another side to Davos that’s far more interesting than dry geopolitical debate. Long before it became a stage for the World Economic Forum, this quiet

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Would you have been let in to an ’80s club? 

People will go to extraordinary lengths to get into a nightclub. Nowadays you must wear something tight, and look slinky. But, as Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s at the V&A shows (until 16 February), a handful of Eighties doormen were into something a bit more deviant. The combination of a new London

Theatre

The play to watch if your country is breaking up

Of all the West End’s unloved venues the loveliest is the Arts Theatre. It specialises in creaky off-beat plays like Only Our Own by Ann Henning Jocelyn. We’re in Connemara, in the west of Ireland, in the early 1990s. A family of Anglo–Irish toffs are struggling to cope with their status as universal pariahs. Wherever

Television

After Sherlock, TV will never be the same again

You know the holiday season is over when, instead of being torn between The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night, you have to choose between The Voice and Splash!. The good news for The Voice is that pint-sized superstar Kylie Minogue has joined its judging panel. In the season opener, competition

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