Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to
Having had no operatic performances at all in January, English National Opera is filling February with two hardy perennials, Jonathan Miller’s productions of The Mikado and Rigoletto. Odd, considering how successful they both are, as are so many of his productions, all of which must be thought of as old, that he is not asked
Right from the start of this retrospective exhibition, the complications set in. In Room 1 are four paintings from the 1981 series ‘Dear painter, paint for me’. One of them strikingly depicts a figure (presumably the artist?) seated on a black sofa placed out in the street and surrounded by black plastic rubbish bags. The
Last spring, in honour of the reopening of the refurbished York Art Gallery, the statue of local artist William Etty RA outside the entrance — striking a swagger pose to rival Reynolds’s outside the Royal Academy — got a wash and brush-up from the City Council. This spring, it welcomes the public to an ambitious
Until I had a daughter I used to think the problem with me and girls was me. But when you’re given the chance to observe the female of the species up close from birth onwards under home laboratory conditions, you soon lose any post-feminist illusions you might have about the blame for the war between
Over a year ago my six-year-old grandson Henry Flynn rushed home from his multi-ethnic south London school playground in Streatham with a solemn but urgent question for his father, an art historian, as it happens. So far as is known, incidentally, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic blood flows in young Henry’s veins. ‘Am I a Muslim,
