The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In its pomp, they used to say that what was good for General Motors, Detroit’s Medici, was good for America. Detroit was imperial. Like Rome, it stood for the whole. Michigan Avenue was like something from a Roman urbs: a decumanus maximus of this planned city that created and was enriched by the automobile. Then,
(For Karl) He doesn’t even bother to change out of his uniform, just goes straight to the pub after his walk in his red jacket and stays till late evening. He’s usually drunk by the time I get there — drunk and loud, but always pleased to see you. He must get through a
All hail Taylor Swift. How she must give baby boomers the fear. Not just baby boomers. Also those who came next, the Generation Xers, who seemed to define themselves culturally mainly via goatees, apathy and heroin. And my own rather listless, half-generation thereafter, with our bigger beards and binge-drinking. Taylor Swift makes us all look
Let’s face facts. Kirill Petrenko was no-one’s first choice as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His name came into the reckoning only after 124 orchestra members split fatally down the middle in an all-day election on May 11, half of them voting for the German favourite Christian Thielemann and the other half for
Last week festival goers were disappointed to learn that Foo Fighters had cancelled their headline slot at Glastonbury. While bookies were quick to offer odds on the different musical giants who could take their place at the music festival which takes places this weekend, the organisers ended up simply moving Florence and the Machine, who were already
There is a phrase that has been fashionable for years in wonkland — places like the upper echelons of the civil service and high-end think tanks. The phrase is ‘evidence-based policy-making’. There, I bet that’s got you going. When I was a citizen of wonkland and heard those words from the Sir Humphreys and Lady
L’acqua di Bonifazio This spa town sparkles on its hilltop: hydros, park For ballo liscio; stands For full dress orchestras, where guests remark On benefits for glands And organs as they feel the waters percolate, Diuretic. So, to springs Stiff couples waltz off to another date
I stole a blanket last night. Rather a nice one, in fact. I feel bad about it, of course, but guilt is less inconvenient than pneumonia; and after trying to blow-dry my waterlogged dinner jacket with the winds howling through Garsington Opera’s ‘airy’ pavilion, it seemed like pneumonia or the blanket were the options. Forgive
You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening a dinosaur park. Yet in Channel 4’s new sci-fi series Humans (Sunday), the manufacturers of the extremely lifelike cyber-servants known as ‘synths’ were weirdly confident that nothing could go wrong. Nor did it cross their
I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such a smash show in every way that by rights it would be having a six-month run where everyone can see it, rather than five measly days at the elite Sadler’s Wells dance theatre where people
We opera critics love gazing into crystal balls. We’re particularly good at discovering Ed Milibands and backing them to the hilt. Postwar opera is full of them. Take Hans Werner Henze. He was considered the future his entire life. Yet watching a presentation of two of his chamber operas at the Guildhall School of Music
Mr Holmes stars Ian McKellen as the great detective in his old age and while it could have proved a touching character study — who are you, not just when your mind starts to fail, but when the mind for which you are famed starts to fail? — it veers off in so many tedious
For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but the pipes are now ungummed and wallop! his new bolus of creativity splatters across the Dorfman stage. It’s a wordy three-hander set in the swamp of non-league football. Marber brilliantly captures the grubbiness and despairing
The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people: the Guardian arts desk, which decided he’d lost his mojo as soon as he turned his back on the left; Kirsty Wark, whose squawking is mimicked in MacMillan’s Scotch Bestiary; the SNP, which he detests;
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate the air, a thrill While for a moment everybody stops What they were about to do On the broken street, or in the slow shops, Or looks up for an answer Into the contrailled palimpsest
Look, could everyone please stop denigrating the Entourage movie for spurious reasons like ‘it feels like an extended episode of the TV series’? Since the US release a few weeks ago, critics across the Atlantic have booed and shamed writer and director Doug Ellin’s long-awaited reunion of Vinnie Chase and co for just that. As
After Jeremy Clarkson was suspended from Top Gear following a fracas with a show producer, reports soon emerged claiming Chris Evans would be his replacement. However, the radio host was quick to ‘categorically’ deny these reports: While Mr S had been more than happy to ‘discount’ his candidacy, it turns out that Evans should really never say
This post contains spoilers and discussion of the Season 5 Finale. My name is Kate Maltby, I’m a feminist, and I’m addicted to Game of Thrones. I’ve known I’ve had a problem for some time, really. It all started at the end of Season 3. Languidly cat-sitting for a friend (this is what all feminists do on our weekends),
James Turrell gave me extremely precise instructions. After dinner, I was to walk out through the grounds at Houghton Hall to the skyspace he has built. Here I should observe the gradual darkening above as brightness fell from the Norfolk air. At 9.40 p.m., I was to join him and the Marquess of Cholmondeley to
How many times these days I say those words, Muttering them quietly under my breath Or petulantly as the telephone rings Or shocked at some reported piece of news Or simply as a constant formula For things that pass by daily, and are gone Into the nowhere that life seems to be Day after day,
King John arrives at the Globe bent double under the weight of garlands from the London critics. Their jaunt up to Northampton for the première seems to have cast an opiate glaze over their faculties. Plays that are rarely revived earn their hermit status for a reason. They lack social skills or winning graces. They’re
With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it
The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m sure, even if he directed the Queen’s televised Christmas message. So matching him up at English National Opera with the madness, obsessions and phantasmagoria of Tchaikovsky’s whirring and troubling The Queen of Spades was simply
I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south of France, we had a bonding moment almost Brokeback Mountain-esque in its bromantic intensity. Roberts had hired an expensive speedboat for the day (as Andrew Roberts would) and we’d left very little time to get
Like a lot of essentially cautious people, I like my music to take some risks, play with fire and damn the consequences. In truth, of course, most musicians are every bit as conservative as the rest of us: they do whatever it is they do and if it sells, they keep on doing it until
Evan Davis’s series on business life, The Bottom Line (made in conjunction with the Open University), has become one of those Radio 4 staples, something that’s just there in the schedule and all too easily taken for granted. Productivity, contracts and contacts, the new appreneurs (creators and sellers of apps) are not subjects I feel
For anyone who has been interested in classical vocal music since the middle of the last century, whether choral, operatic or solo, there has been one inescapable name and voice: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. His repertoire was gigantic, surely larger than that of any singer ever. He began public concerts and recordings in the late 1940s and
A tiny fly is moving over the page of my dull book this sultry evening, and it is my conceit that it has a message for me. It pauses on Rigoletto and, skirting pronouns and prepositions, lingers on the hyphen of orang-utan before a significant pirouette over rhubarb tart. When I wake up it is
With 60 million international subscribers and a programme-making budget of about $3bn, Netflix is steamrolling most of the received wisdom about how we make and watch television. Already riding high on the success of prestigious hits like House of Cards and Daredevil, Netflix is expecting to bust new barriers with Sense8, whose 12 episodes became
