Arts and Culture

Without even showing up, Roman Polanski managed to dominate the 76th Venice Film Festival. Of course, if he had appeared, the 86-year-old film-maker and fugitive rapist might have been extradited to the US to face the charge he fled in 1977. That would have been some drama. Louis Garrell as Alfred Dreyfuss and Jean Dujardin […]

Few cities possess as intimate a connection to a musical style as Seville, SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. The cultural energy of Seville pulsates to a musical beat. Whether it’s found in the processions of Semana Santa (Holy Week), where religious statues sway through the streets to a sombre accompaniment of brass bands, or the march of […]

TIM WALKER gives a glowing review of playwright Andre Bovell’s newest ‘epic, big screen’ play. It was the playwright John Osborne who observed that it was a gift from God to be born English. Stiff upper lips, Spitfires, Scott of the Antarctic and sanctimoniousness: we’ve always been encouraged to believe that we’re superior to everyone […]

Claudia Pritchard looks at the Guildhall Art Gallery’s Architecture of London exhibition Fire and water, riots and war, need and fashion, demolition and construction. The forces at work on the architecture of London come from all sides, never letting up, as an exhibition featuring 400 years of the capital’s depiction in art shows. And it […]

A city with a musical pedigree to match any, Sheffield is still producing acts that could not have come from anywhere else, as Sophia Deboick reports Jarvis Cocker, lead singer of English rock band Pulp, performs live on the NME stage at the Glastonbury Festival near Pilton, Somerset on 26th June 1994. Photo: Michael Putland/Getty […]

The recent row over Enid Blyton is nothing new, says Charlie Connelly. The children’s author was always controversial. Enid Blyton isn’t often in the news these days, not least because it’s more than half a century since her death in 1968 at the age of 71. She was however at the centre of a kerfuffle […]

TIM WALKER reviews The Doctor at London’s Almeida Theatre Social media has helped to make identity politics an inescapable part of modern life. This has been as much of a curse as a blessing since it means we’re now required to be in an almost perpetual state of outrage over this, that and the other. […]

TIM WALKER reviews Evita at Regent’s Park Theatre and gives the performance five stars. Stage performance of Evita at Regents Park Theatre. Photograph: Marc Brenner. – Credit: Archant Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Evita is played out on a stage taken up entirely by a staircase that leads up to the rusting capital letters E, V, […]

Charlie Connelly reports on Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, and how two trips to Europe reflected his changing fortunes. Moby Dick is cited by many respected literary eggheads as the Great American Novel. Like many novels dubbed ‘great’, not many people have read it all the way through, which considering it’s a blend of […]

The spiritual home of white America’s very own music genre, Nashville is country music. But it’s not always been all about rhinestones and 10-gallon hats, as SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Hall Willis, Ginger Willis and Tommy Hill stand next to The Louvin Brothers outside the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Picture: Getty Images – Credit: Getty Images […]

JASON SOLOMONS identifies one of the films of the summer and hears from director Gurinder Chadha about how it was inspired by Brexit. Gurinder Chadha, director of ‘Blinded By The Light’. Picture: Getty Images – Credit: Getty Images Blinded by the Light is one of the best films of the summer. A big, bright British […]

They seem an increasingly unfashionable, unoriginal choice now, but package holidays were once little short of revolutionary. SOPHIA DEBOICK tells the tale of the first ever trip, and its visionary mastermind. Tourists enjoy Majorca in the years before mass tourism. Picture: Getty Images – Credit: Getty Images More than 160 years after Thomas Cook organised […]

It’s a case of all aboard for murder as Eastenders star Samantha Womack plays an embittered, unemployed Rachel Watson. Duke of York’s, London, until August 17 In essence, The Girl on the Train is a creaky, old-fashioned whodunnit with ideas above its station. And, yes, a brilliantly clever pun was just intended there. Fans of […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains why some old childhood favourites no longer seem to rhyme. Many of us remember from our childhood the well-known nursery rhyme which goes: “Jack and Jill/Went up the hill/To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down/And broke his crown/ And Jill came tumbling after.” Jill rhymes with hill, and down rhymes […]

Even when staging a musical like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! there’s a perilously thin dividing line between magnificence and naffness says TIM WALKER. A lot of the problem is that there can be few, if any, punters who haven’t now heard all of the big numbers in a sturdy old classic like this at least […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK kicks off a new feature, looking at the musical history of a different city each week. First an examination of Berlin’s remarkably creative heritage, from Dietrich to Depeche Mode, with many in between. Depeche Mode, group portrait, Berlin, July 1984, L-R Martin Gore, Dave Gahan, Alan Wilder, Andrew Fletcher. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty […]

The last hurrah for music hall coincided with Britain embracing a new sound, and both had a big year in 1919. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Rarely had the world been in such turmoil as it was 100 years ago. While the June signing of the Treaty of Versailles declared the First World War officially over, the […]

The new prime minister is part of a long – and largely undistinguished – line of politicians who have turned their hand to fiction. CHARLIE CONNELLY suggests a sense of entitlement might be behind the trend. Boris Johnson’s many current faults and past scandals have already been forensically – and necessarily – dissected, but there […]

TIM WALKER reviews The Night of the Iguana at the Noel Coward Theatre, London. “Oh God, please can’t we stop now?” wails Lia Williams as a downtrodden artist towards the end of James Macdonald’s production of The Night of the Iguana. It was a sentiment I suspect a fair proportion of the first night audience […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK looks back at a significant moment in British history as a new musical culture started to take shape on these shores. Portrait of Pope Gregory I (540-604) known as Saint Gregory the Great. By Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504) Spanish painter. His art is regarded as a transitional style between gothic and Renaissance. Dated 15th […]

TIM WALKER’s take on the ‘mind-numbingly slow and boring’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin at Pinter Theatre, London. I have neither read Louis de Bernières’ romantic novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, nor have I seen the film version, which starred Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz. This clearly put me at a distinct disadvantage as I attempted to make […]

A new film about the touching relationship between the singer and writer and Marianne Ihlen, the muse he met on a hippy hideout in the Mediterranean, comes with an added twist- Director Nick Broomfield was also her lover. He talks to JASON SOLOMONS. Norwegian expatriate Marianne Jensen (also known as Ihlen) (right), Canadian poet, author, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on an island language which vanished after the Europeans arrived The Canary Islands are a long way from mainland Europe, but the Romans knew they were there. Pliny the Elder (23-79AD) referred to them as the Canaria, supposedly because of the large numbers of big dogs (Latin canes) which were reported to live […]

Holey Moley! It’s a miracle Theatre at its very best is miraculous, or at least it amounts to the realisation of what seems impossible. Certainly, Luke Sheppard, the director of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, must have been either brave or mad to have wanted to try to stage Sue Townsend’s much-loved […]

As a new decade began, two men were at work, behind the scenes, on projects that would revolutionise music. MEMPHIS, TN – CIRCA 1957: Photo of Sam Phillips (Photo by Colin Escott/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) – Credit: Getty Images The wartime decade was finally being left behind as Britain hit mid-century, and the future was […]

Félix Vallotton may have been long overshadowed by his contemporaries but a new exhibition aims to redress the balance. The Lie (Le Mensonge), 1897. Credit: The Baltimore Museum of Art. – Credit: Archant Politics and poetry, reviews and radical polemics… the editorial mix in the fortnightly La Revue blanche, on the cusp of the 19th […]

Ibiza: The Silent Movie tells the playful potted history of the world’s most famous capital of hedonism. JASON SOLOMONS talks to the film’s director Julien Temple. STEAMY NIGHTS IN IBIZA (Photo by Stephane Cardinale/Sygma via Getty Images) – Credit: Sygma via Getty Images Like the residents and apartment holders near the Ushuaia hotel when its […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an astonishing travel book that tracks the continent’s myths and sagas and links its past with its present. On the day after the 2016 referendum Nicholas Jubber was sitting in a horse-drawn carriage clopping towards the fairytale castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria with his wife, child and a man from Düsseldorf who […]

PETER TRUDGILL examines the etymological roots of this beautiful plant. It is not a totally straightforward matter to explain how the flower we call the foxglove got its name. We can, though, at least figure out where the glove part comes from: the flowers look like the fingers of gloves; and small fingers, as children […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK looks back to the period in Ancient Greece when music as we know it began. Ancient Greek civilization was at its zenith in the mid-fifth century BC, as was clearly apparent in its art. The sculptor Myron was in the most active phase of his career and created his Discus Thrower, a sculpture […]

TIM WALKER gives his take on the comic play Present Laughter The laws of the land and the social mores that prevailed during most of Noël Coward’s life meant that he had – in common with a great many other playwrights, such as Terence Rattigan – to be subtle when it came to addressing the […]

From Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes, howlers have long haunted writers. CHARLIE CONNELLY reports. Every author will have experienced an icy lurch in their stomach when they read of Naomi Wolf’s recent travails over her new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, which explores the ways in which the British establishment during the […]