If you want to make yourself unpopular with a classical musician, bring up the subject of performance anxiety. You can ask soloists how they remember tens of thousands of notes, so long as you make it sound like flattery. But don’t ask how they do it in front of an audience of strangers and critics
There are nearly 160 bronze sculptures ranged throughout the Royal Academy’s main galleries in Bronze, a glorious exhibition (until 9 December) covering a period of 5,000 years — effectively the entire history of the medium. The progression of this durable and universal art form is laid out at a relaxed pace in an exhibition that
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are performing at the Albert Hall: playing their tiny instruments in a very big space. There must be 5,000 people here, but the orchestra’s friendly jokes, the modesty of the ukulele sound and the familiarity of the audience make the concert seem intimate. The Ukes have been going for
London was an industrial city until remarkably recently. It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station was built in 1947, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to burn oil right on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s. What’s more, Gilbert Scott’s other great power station, Battersea, built in 1929, is less than a mile
The Charing Cross Theatre has followed the trends of performance art for more than a century. It used to be a music hall. Then it put in a stint as a cinema. Now it’s a small theatre and it specialises in experimental comedies. The Man on her Mind fits the bill nicely. It opens with
‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive,
I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents. Why do I not
Holy Motors is so mad, deranged, lunatic, bonkers, cuckoo and away with the fairies that, if you were on a bus, and saw it boarding, you’d pray it didn’t sit next to you, although, knowing your luck, it probably would. That said, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so prissy and stand-offish. This film is a
