Arts and Culture

An Aspects of Love revival feels uncomfortable three decades on

The stage version of Brokeback Mountain is well-meaning, well-acted and well, pointless

Did the Third Reich really have teams of archaeologists dedicated to finding sacred relics in the name of Aryan mastery? The answer, unbelievably, is yes.

After a decade of striving for success, David Bowie finally had it all. And then he seemed to throw it all away by killing off “my monster”

As Portugal sailed the world’s seas in the 15th and 16th centuries, its language spread globally – nowhere further than Macao

This is a dessert worth queuing for. It’s a bit different and absolutely worth trying

The contest looks plausibly like an alternative governmental structure for our fissiparous yet self-loving continent

Wherever she went, the breakout role which made her name always seemed to be at her shoulder

An exile’s redemptive return to track four generations of family history in the “backyard of a country that still thinks it’s an empire”

Decades from now, this once-in-a-lifetime series will still be watched as a cultural artefact of a particular moment in history

The Florida governor has taken on a formidable foe in a battle for the heart of American childhood

Martin Scorsese, Steve McQueen and the late Martin Amis deliver the goods at an unexpectedly soggy Cannes Film Festival

The rivalry and respect between Manet and Degas

1990s musical Once on This Island gets a sensational revival

Martin Amis once confided his belief that his literary legacy would not last long. It was one of the rare occasions that he was wrong

In an age of stultified self-censorship and blandness, we have lost an author who always ran towards gunfire

How the KGB took their Cold War tactics from a Chinese military strategist who died 500 years before the birth of Christ - and why they still work

Based on a WWII deception that fooled the Nazis, Operation Mincemeat is a deft pastiche

Is The Ugly Duchess a work of misogyny, a portrait of deformity or the mocking of an aristocrat? Or all three?

Today only the Hebridean islands remain strongholds of a language that was once dominant across almost all of Scotland

The Austrian’s life was defined by a single event lasting 55 seconds

Having waited his entire life for this coronation service, and having apparently played a central role in devising it, the King was nonetheless unable to memorise his own lines

Romans, in particular, become stressed when dishes are vandalised. Serve this to a Roman nonna and she may well try to conquer you again

As Russian rockets rained down on Ukraine, the contest’s political genie was finally let out of the bottle

Germany has returned 1,117 looted Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, but who really owns them?

East Germany’s first black policeman started the 1990s as a media phenomenon, but ended it in jail. A new series tells his story

Remembering a master, 40 years after his death

The pipe dream that the genie of AI is going to be thrust back in the bottle is just that

How a simple linguistic mistake linked a nymph from Greek mythology to the music genre that originated in the Caribbean

Napoli’s joy at winning Serie A is about much more than their long wait – it is about a history of abuse from their northern rivals

Life need not be completely depressing in modern Britain. Praise be to pie

A meditative masterpiece explores rediscovered friendships and the art of finding simpler ways through our complex world