Arts Reviews

At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it on his chest. The tableau is a messy, bloody one, but the message is clear: here the politics of religion and the religion of politics are one and the same. A pietà or the body of a thug? A murderer or a Madonna? It’s all just a matter of spin. In a year of embattled

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. It has been several decades since the art world – that swirling miasma of idealism, virtuosity, pretense and money – has recognised the men of the New York School, also known as the Abstract Expressionists, as truly great artists. Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning have long been in high demand, now more than ever; their canvases regularly fetch hilarious sums, well into the eight and nine figures. But that’s just the men. Paintings by their differently chromosomed colleagues have been going for a relative song. Now, thankfully, that’s changing. Our understanding of this rough and raw, wildly inventive

I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and unpredictable. Like his plays, where the hyper-banal surfaces — the synthetic memories and false nostalgia of Old Times, the aural drivel of Rose in The Room, the bogus familial warmth of The Homecoming — are fragile and about to be displaced by something ugly and authentic, something obscure and violent. Plays where on countless occasions — think of Lenny in The Homecoming or the alcoholic Hirst in No Man’s Land — a speech will take off into dramatic Tourette’s, unstoppable and at the edge of sense. The plays are edgy,

Tintoretto was il Furioso. He was a lightning flash or a thunderbolt, a storm in La Serenissima of Renaissance Italy, a maverick and a cheat. One of his friends, a fellow Venetian, likened him to a peppercorn overwhelming ten bunches of poppies. More often than not, those poppies were rival artists. He trampled them like an overgrown child. Henry James said that ‘if Shakespeare is the greatest of poets, Tintoretto is assuredly the greatest of painters’. He was at least the most aggressive. A series of exhibitions opens in Venice this autumn to mark the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth. If they show him to be half as devious as

‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,’ wrote George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm. It is a line that has gone down as one of the great capsule defences of dissent, made all the more prescient by the fact that the preface, an attack on the self-censorship of the British media during the second world war, wasn’t published until the 1970s. But the lines that follow it are too often overlooked. ‘The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it,’ Orwell goes on, ‘it is the liberals who fear liberty and