Arts Reviews

It’s 500 years since Martin Luther pinned his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, sparking what would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation. His superficial complaint was against the corrupt practice of indulgences, the Catholic Church teasing money out of the gullible and persuading them that they could buy their way into Heaven. But what Luther, a professor of theology, really wanted was for God to be made accessible to everyone and for worship to be more intimate, more direct, and in the vernacular, not Latin. We think of him now as a man of the text, who believed that faith was so

Gemma Arterton’s new film, Their Finest, is about second world war propaganda. Her character, who is bookish and sensitive, is allowed — because of war — to write film scripts. She discovers two girls — two ordinary, pale, unhappy girls — who steal their father’s boat and sail to Dunkirk for the rescue. She thinks this story will swell hearts: and so she, and her collaborator (Sam Claflin), make a British Casablanca about Dunkirk. They know there must be loss, or nothing has value. I marvelled over two things in Their Finest, even as I dislike the title. First, how the pale, unhappy girls are transformed, for the film inside

A politician once told me ‘You should try to remember to try to encourage us when we get things right and not just scold us when we get things wrong.’ I’m not sure anyone could keep to that civil piece of advice when it comes to politicians. But it should certainly apply to broadcasters. The BBC comes in for plenty of stick, and rightly so at times. But in recent weeks it has done something wonderful. Its adaptation of Decline and Fall – the third and last episode of which aired on Friday night – was a triumph. I had always assumed that this earliest of Evelyn Waugh’s novels was

The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council provides a salutary example of a tiny ‘elite’ foisting ‘anti-elitist’ practices on the ‘non-elite’ — and coming a cropper. Vatican II’s dates are important. The Council was convened in 1962 and concluded in December 1965. These were the high years of the most uncompromising architectural modernism and, just as pertinently, of the craze for theatre-in-the-round, whose champions considered the proscenium arch to be an authoritarian (very possibly ‘fascist’) instrument inimical to ‘participation’. Rome’s neophilia left much of the clerisy bewildered. It was admitting temporal fashions to a spiritual domain. Maynooth’s head was spinning. The Council’s bias was towards the Liturgical Movement’s long-hatched plans for