Arts Reviews

There’s been a lot of fanfare and trailers about BBC Radio’s new ‘online first’ facility. We can now get hold of programmes and listen to them before they go out on air, or download the series and listen to the whole lot in one go. Nothing so strange about that, given the powers of digital, its accessibility and flexibility. But the Radio 4 website is also offering new online-only content, which will never be broadcast in the traditional way. Best Queue is a drama series told in very short (just over four minutes) episodes. Angie and her family are waiting in a massively long queue that promises a large cash

This time of year features my two least favourite festivals, Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night, but the build up to Remembrance Day gives it a run for its money. I don’t mind Halloween being commercial, pagan, fake, foreign and likely to increase diabetes levels, so long as it’s for children; I just don’t know when October 31 turned into International Day of the Idiot. But now Remembrance Day is marred by the silly pressure for people like Jeremy Corbyn to wear poppies. Peter Hitchens is totally correct on this one, when he writes: ‘If you don’t want to wear one, don’t. If you want to wear a White Poppy, then you

The latest challenge was to submit an extract from a novel written by a rock star of your choosing. I was pleased that Adrian Fry went for that genius storyteller Tom Waits although, as Morrissey’s recent stinker demonstrates, being able to write decent song lyrics is no guarantee of literary success (the Guardian’s Michael Hann spoke for many when he described the pope of mope’s novel as ‘an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination’.) Many of you simply strung song lyrics together to create a narrative, which, while expertly done in many cases — ‘It was 11:59: she felt blue as she looked out of

One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a spider’s web, but made of dust’, an object that was both ‘very, very fine’ and in constant motion, like a snake except that ‘no animal’, he thought, had ever made such movements: ‘light and sweeping and always different’. This was, you might say, a revelation of the beauty that lay in extreme thinness and fragility. In Giacometti: Pure Presence at the National Portrait Gallery you see that process of attenuation occurring, in different ways, again and again in his art. In a bronze bust of his younger brother Diego, from