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Happy with unhappiness

This is the time of year when the Royal Opera aims to keep people happy by providing standard fare, usually, it almost goes without saying, about people who are very unhappy indeed. True to form, it is alternating La Traviata and Turandot for almost a month before rising to Mozart. All the more important that

Surrealist legend

The ravishing new exhibition of Lee Miller’s portrait photographs at the NPG is prefaced by a corridor selection of shots of Miller by others — principally by the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene (whose assistant she was on French Vogue in 1930) and her long-standing friend and lover, Life photographer David E. Scherman. Miller (1907–77) was

Cash rich

The best pop video ever made was the one Mark Romanek directed in 2003 for Johnny Cash’s swansong — ‘Hurt’. It’s also definitely the bleakest. The Man in Black was on his last legs when he made it, a doddery, rheumy-eyed 72, and here you see him very consciously bidding farewell to his adoring wife

Taking a break

Tired. I am exhausted. For one reason and another the workload has been intense recently, and the pressures have been unyielding. After a while you wander through the days in a numbed haze, faintly aware of passing deadlines, and thinking only of pillows. The occasional hangovers hit as hard as Mike Tyson circa 1988. Look