Arts feature
Meet Fraser Neill, the Scots folk musician behind Eurovision's Emmelie de Forest
To be a folk music fan in Britain today is to be jangling the keys to a cultural palace. For a variety of reasons, we seem to have produced the… Read more
Painting begins at 90 – celebration of Jeffrey Camp, Anthony Eyton and Patrick George
The year 1923 was a good one for British artists, witnessing the birth of three painters who became friends and whose work epitomises a rich strand of realism in the… Read more
Comic-book writer Mark Millar interviewed
In purely demographic terms, Mark Millar isn’t too different from the rest of us. He’s a middle-aged, wiry-haired, churchgoing Scot with two kids. He subscribes to The Spectator, and enjoys… Read more
Artists Open Houses: Brighton’s alternative to gallery going
I’m standing in a palatial flat in one of the most beautiful squares in Brighton, in a huge whitewashed room flooded with natural light. The lucky man who lives here,… Read more
An artistic rebirth: reopening the Rijksmuseum
Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed… Read more
The future of opera
‘It’s an occult-mystery film opera.’ This is how Michel van der Aa describes his new opera, which opened last Friday at the Barbican (and is reviewed here). I had similar… Read more
Why David Bowie is still underrated
Is it just me, or is there quite a lot being written about David Bowie at the moment? Of course, there’s the fact that the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition has coincided… Read more
Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre: Ten years and a million cheap tickets
‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron… Read more
Cross examination
As Easter comes upon us in this bitter spring, many of us are drawn to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passion: his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven. You don’t… Read more
When Picasso was a boy wonder
Exhibitions are only as good as the loans that can be secured for them, as was seen at the Royal Academy’s Manet exhibition recently. The exhibits at Burlington House were… Read more
Book of Mormon – religion hits the West End
Hitchhiking through Salt Lake City as a student in 1976, I asked a local man, who was out shopping, directions to the nearest Salvation Army hostel. Rightly assuming I was… Read more
How Roy Lichtenstein became weighed down with superficiality
On both sides of the Atlantic there are still heated debates about who invented Pop Art, the Americans or the British, but it seems much more probable that concurrently each… Read more
David Inshaw: the great romantic
David Inshaw will celebrate his 70th birthday on 21 March, around the time of the spring equinox. On the eve of this grand climacteric, which will be marked by an… Read more
The dark side of Benjamin Britten
We are only two months into the Britten centenary year and already books, articles and talks (and, of course, performances) swell the flood of existing biographical studies and the six… Read more
Ice Age art at the British Museum: Geniuses of 40,000BC
The best way to approach any exhibition is with a clear and uncluttered mind, without expectations or prejudices. Of course this is often impossible, for all sorts of reasons, particularly… Read more
Medieval mystery
Medieval castles are generally dark and forbidding places that look as if they were built to prove the proposition that ‘form follows function’: the function was to be impregnable, and… Read more
Thoroughly modern Manet
There can’t really be many people who look at art with any regularity who continue to confuse Manet with Monet. But there are those who still think that Manet was… Read more
Obsessed with Pinter
It’s the size of a Hackney bedsit but the ambience is cosily expensive. Sonia Friedman’s tiny office above the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane has warm, pinkish… Read more
Go with the flow
Last November Lutfur Rahman, the independent Mayor of Tower Hamlets, confirmed that the borough intended to sell a Henry Moore sculpture entitled ‘Draped Seated Woman’ (1958–9) that had been historically… Read more
Sex and sensibility
Being wary of men who wear novelty braces is one of those rules of thumb I’ve always tried to adhere to. So when I’m introduced to Ben Lewin, the writer… Read more
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