Two pop-up art fairs border Regent’s Park in London. To the south is Frieze London, an edgy fair-cum-fairground offering the thrills and spills of the latest and most innovative trends in global contemporary art. Launched a decade ago, it was unique among ambitious international art fairs in proving an instant and overwhelming success. Last year
What used to be called the National Film Theatre, now BFI Southbank, is a weird sort of place. On the outside it is unprepossessing to the point of ugliness: a concrete mass sitting beneath the southern end of Waterloo Bridge, squat against the Thames, where it sulks away from the sunlight and overhead traffic. Whereas,
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
Here comes Jane Asher. She swings through the doors of a small Chelsea hotel, chucks her bag on the floor, and sits down with an expectant look. Her voluminous red hair has attractive hints of something blonder on top. Her eyes are pale blue, and extraordinarily intense, and she has a fulsome rack of plump
The past few months have been busy for Jock McFadyen. Substantial commercial shows of his work have been held in London and Edinburgh, he has been elected a member of the Royal Academy, and a retrospective of four decades of his painting is currently on view at the Fleming Collection in Berkeley Street, Mayfair (until
She’s certainly a class act. But how did she manage it? Nina Raine, the 36-year-old writer-director, has established a formidable position in the British theatre. Her first play, Rabbit, opened at a pub venue in Islington in 2007. It transferred to New York and has since been performed all over the world. Last year she
For five weeks from 24 August BBC2 is doing a brave thing: serialising Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s quartet of first world war novels. Arguably the first great modernist English novel and, according to Graham Greene, the greatest novel in English to come out of that war, this £12-million project is a brave thing to
If you were to condense everything that was most quintessentially English about quintessential Englishness — from the green man and morris dancing to Vaughan Williams and The Whitsun Weddings — feed it into a liquidiser, have it remixed by an electronica DJ, and then transformed into the soundtrack of some trendy arthouse film premièred at
The Olympic Legacy List has less to do with the Olympics than its name suggests. True, it is responsible for the long-term cultural programme in the 618-acre Olympic Park but, as one insider put it, the real work begins when the circus leaves town. The word on every Olympic panjandrum’s or British politician’s lips is
No one knows quite why we go. It’s not for the whisky (which is like drinking liquefied peppercorns), or for the shortbread (like eating undercooked biscuit-mix), or for the weather (like walking through a car-wash). Nor does the moaning falsetto of the bagpipes draw us north. But every year, without fail, the London media colony
The jewel in the crown of Sir Michael Boyd’s decade as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company was his 2007–8 staging of the major Shakespeare Histories from Richard II, through Henry IV, V and VI, to Richard III. For a short, alas too short, period, the entire sequence of eight plays could be seen over
A young American documentary film-maker recently said to me, ‘Do you want to know why no British documentary film-maker would ever make a film about something like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations? There was no blood! No violence! No crack babies! No tears! People were happy, and one thing British documentary film-makers hate is happy people
‘I know it sounds arrogant but I think it’s undeniable that it has become fixed in the culture like a stately home,’ says Mark Haddon of his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Arrogant or not, he is probably right. Haddon’s novel about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve the
History, geography, politics, news, entertainment: the world is at our fingertips, staged before our eyes through the click of a mouse. Before the age of the internet was that of television, and radio before that. In the 19th century, you went for your weekly fix of politics, news, opinion and enlightenment to papers such as
Under the statue of Charles III in the Puerta del Sol a hellfire preacher is competing for custom with a mariachi band. ‘Porque la paga del pecado es muerte!’ he shouts. ‘Ay, ay, ay, ay,’ they sing, ‘porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.’ The weather is with the preacher: the cielo is not
The awards season may be over, but can I nominate Neil White for a gong anyway? He genuinely deserves one. After all, he’s the chap from Nottingham who watched all of the 600 or so films that were released into British cinemas last year — and then blogged about them at www.everyfilmin2011.com. You might question
Imagine you had £20 million to spare, burning a big hole in your pocket. What would you spend it on? You could buy a stately home or a private jet, but that would be so boring. Surely the nicest way to spend it would be to ask one of America’s greatest architects to build a
There is hardly ever one of Noël Coward’s old plays not on tour or in the West End. Sometimes you think the commercial theatre would collapse without him. A ‘new’ Coward is therefore an event. Never performed or published, Volcano was written in 1956 when Coward was living permanently in Jamaica as a tax exile.
Andrew Lambirth reflects on the images that help shape our perception of the Queen Her Majesty the Queen has been a global celebrity for 60 years, and she carries her status with a naturalness and dignity that many of the more tearaway celebs would do well to emulate. She graduated from being a young and
As 200 children descend on the Savoy, Niru Ratnam asks why corporations sponsor works of art In July, 200 teenagers from east London will head to the Savoy where they will take over the Lancaster Ballroom for the day. There they will be given the freedom to create a large-scale event — food and performances
