If there’s a phrase that captures the frantic energy of the modern British B-movie, it’s the concept of the ‘heart attack shoot’. And Rhys Frake-Waterfield knows more about it than most. ‘It’s not unusual to spend more than 12 hours on set,’ says the happy-go-lucky thirtysomething director during a short break from promoting his new
I am on the Inspector Morse walking tour in Oxford, which is led by a donnish man called Alastair. We look like the funeral cortege of a man whose death is under investigation. Oxford is a major character in Morse. I think of it as the antagonist. There is something very cold about the city,
Russia is not the only country erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Ukraine itself has been demolishing its own public statues and murals for years. Before the war, in 2015, our parliament passed legislation that criminalised communist propaganda. ‘Decommunisation’ was a deceptively simple idea: it started with the removal of our 1,300 Lenins and a few other
Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition
In a remarkable photograph by Benjamin Stone, from around 1899, six men in breeches of a criss-cross floral pattern hold up great reindeer antlers. (Carbon dating of these objects produced the year 1066, plus or minus 80.) A man in a bowler hat holds a squeeze box and on the right a serious-faced boy stands
Has any artist ever painted fewer pictures than Johannes Vermeer? At the last authenticated count there were 37 still in existence, and five more are known from references in early sources. With allowance for wastage and disappearance historians estimate that he produced no more than 50, a rate of two a year over a career
You may think that roses have always symbolised courteous romance, but art history describes their smuttier private life. Consider the pouting red blooms in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’, which the art critic John Ruskin considered so obscene that he refused to continue his friendship with the painter. Ruskin admired the execution when he first
Most former punks end up touring the nostalgia circuit or cropping up at conventions. Not Christopher John Millar, aka Rat Scabies. When Scabies hit middle age, the legendary drummer with the Damned began to hunt for the Holy Grail. ‘We all started off criticising government and I’ve ended up looking for pixies,’ explains Scabies. In
When I first saw ‘The Triumph of Death’ (1562-63), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the painting throbbed: this land was sick, smothered in smoke; the fires on the horizon had been burning for ever, turning earth into dirt, air into haze. All was dull, lethargic, ill. When I saw the painting again some years later,
I loved music before I could walk. It seemed I could harmonise anything my sisters were singing. I had perfect pitch, a mixed blessing since wrong notes made me cry. I hated music when I first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. I was nine years old. My mother had died when I was two and my
Penwith isn’t an island, but it feels like one. The heathland above the cliffs is filled with mine workings and Iron and Bronze Age relics: menhirs, fogous and quoits. To most visitors Cornwall is as simple as the GWR posters: gaudy pastels, happy children, ice cream. This Cornwall exists for six weeks in the summer
Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s
Tourists who queue for hours outside the Uffizi to see Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and ‘Birth of Venus’ are sometimes surprised to find his world-famous paintings upstaged by the work of a non-Italian they’ve never heard of. At three metres tall and five metres wide, Hugo van der Goes’s ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ – known as the
As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the
In 1954, the psychologist James Olds made a few ordinary rats the happiest rodents that had ever lived. He had directly wired an electrode into the rats’ brains, plugging into the septal area, which he believed might have something to do with the experience of pleasure. When he passed a small electric current through the
I had my birthday recently – one I share with a venerable old aunt who shaped my formative years. Well-travelled and fluent in more than 40 languages, Auntie broadened my horizons well beyond the dreary suburb where I lived. She informed me about events in faraway lands, but also steeped me in ‘our island story’.
The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M. Schulz, whose centenary falls next week, spent nearly 50 years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and a cancer
The musical tastes of King Charles III are more sophisticated than those of our late Queen. That’s not being rude: it’s just a fact. Her favourite musician appears to have been George Formby, whose chirpy songs she knew by heart. No doubt she relished their double entendres – but the hint of smut meant that,
Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do
Three years ago, I killed several thousand people over the course of a single weekend. Late into the night, I ran around butchering everyone I saw, until by the end I didn’t even feel anything any more. Just methodically powering through it all, through the wet sounds of splattering heads, bodies crumpling, shiny slicks of
