Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Paul Mason’s diary: My Greek TV drama

Diary

It’ll be a Skype interview, says the producer from Greek television, and not live. In TV-speak that usually means not urgent and not important, but I’ve become vaguely interesting to Greeks because of the ‘Moscovici draft’ — a doomed attempt to resolve the crisis, leaked to me amid denials of its existence. The interview goes

Small things in the cathedral

Poems

A place to see the little things between the monuments and tombs. As in the chapel of St Gabriel, a pencil. Here they are, behind the obvious. Next to the chapter house, a cupboard with a bowl, four toilet rolls. How small things quietly wait, make us forgivable. Inside the vestry, just inside the door,

The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene

More from Arts

They’re doing fantastic deals on five-star hotels in St Petersburg the weekend the Francis Bacon exhibition opens at the Hermitage. With tensions between Russia and the west at their highest since the Cold War, ‘no one’, I’m told, wants to come here. No one, that is, except large numbers of elderly but well-heeled people from

Lloyd Evans

Muswell Hill reviewed: a guide on how to sock it to London trendies

Theatre

Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of the few individuals who enjoys the twin blessings of a Critics’ Circle membership card and a functioning brain so his views deserve serious attention. The title of Betts’s 2012 play Muswell Hill shifts its target

The pleasures and perils of podcast listening

Radio

No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special for you now.’ Having your radio shows downloaded to your phone, music player or computer, rather than plucked out of the air the old-fashioned way, immediately grants the listener a great deal of extra freedom:

Daffodils

More from Books

These sprightly flowers are no cowards. They poke forth sun seeking heads, proudly proclaim when earth remains clenched in winter’s pale dead. See, before you rise to your day, these shattering yellows hold sway, say something we cannot, or have forgotten, in garden, park and verge, believe, before there is proof, of what will come,

Oscars 2015: Neil Patrick Harris took it too far

Birdman soared past longtime favourite Boyhood at the 87th Academy Awards, as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hilarious Hollywood satire unexpectedly took both of the top prizes – best picture and director – and joint top number of awards overall, in a slightly awkward ceremony where many of the host’s razor-edged jokes drew clear disapproval from the

Will the real Swan Lake please stand up

Arts feature

It is the end of an era — the Royal Ballet’s extravagant Fabergé-egg Swan Lake production by Anthony Dowell is on its last legs. When this 28-year-old production finishes the current run on 9 April, that will be it for one of the most controversial classical productions of the past half-century. It’s the one set

Annie’s Fish

Poems

It hangs, a mobile in the stairwell, always in motion however slight. Each silver scale as it sparkles there a neighbourly lodestar guiding us home to where we shall meet for ever in friendship beyond the darkness of your loss. Nothing you made that did not shine, nothing you dreamed can leave us now. And

The Heckler: how funny really was Spitting Image?

More from Arts

Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team behind Fluck and Law’s puppetry satire show, will be broadcast on ITV this spring. Called Newzoids, it promises to provide a ‘biting look at the world of politics and celebrity’. Cue ecstatic reports in all

Why Putin is even less of a human than Stalin was

Radio

LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll have to sit through a series of bombastic monologues from the host before any punters get a word in edgeways. O’Brien knows everything, and he doesn’t mind telling you. Still, I understand that running a

Where Van Gogh learned to paint

Arts feature

In December 1878 Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the Borinage, a bleak coal- mining district near Mons. He was 25 years old. He’d failed to become an art dealer. He’d failed to become a schoolteacher. Drawing was just a hobby — an artistic career was the last thing on his mind. He’d come here as

The future of the album lies in the gallery

Exhibitions

The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of everything, and in the sentimental memories of those who lament the loss of what once seemed a permanent fixture and the most exciting, unimpeachably authentic way of capturing and keeping music. Many musicians refuse to

Bolivia

Poems

for Lucy Dallas Because they wanted to go home and some bit part, a rat in deep cover, raised the alarm (he had done harm himself, but legally, and hid his shame) or, falling in slow motion, the cashier, shot through the heart for moving a finger, reached with his last breath for the dead