thu 25/04/2024

Arts News

Listed: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the...

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Listed: The 10 Most Tasteless Album Covers

OK, R Kelly is gross. We knew that. The number of deeply creepy and abusive acts he's been accused...

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Listed: Television's long-runners

In the past weeks there has been a frenzy of publicity about the timelessness of a Time Lord....

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Listed: Who shot/staged/fictionalised JFK?

On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime...

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Listed: The Best of Joni Mitchell

Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better...

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Listed: Nights to remember at the National Theatre

The National Theatre tonight hosts its 50th-birthday gala, 11 days after the English-speaking...

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Listed: Linda Thompson's Top 10 Traditional Songs

"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published...

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Listed: Jane Austen provides

Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of...

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Listed: The 20 best movie songs

Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled...

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Listed: Freudian Analysis

Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th...

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Listed: Screen Bastards

John Lennon once said, "You have to be a bastard to make it. That's a fact. And the Beatles were...

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Listed: Poems inspired by paintings

Poetry has always inspired artists. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the...

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Listed: Sitcoms that became movies

This week sees the release of the eagerly anticipated Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa. And while...

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Listed: Female buddy crimebusters

There's good cops and bad cops, hard cops and soft cops, old cops and young cops, funny cops and...

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Listed: International pop-disco hits

As someone detached from pop music (more a world, classical, jazz kind of guy) I conducted an...

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Listed: Pop tributes to pop icons

Leonard Cohen sang, somewhat indiscreetly, about Janis Joplin “giving head” on his unmade bed, Bob...

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Listed: Whistleblowers

Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone...

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Listed: Actors playing themselves

Imagine a scenario in which Daniel Day Lewis is cast as himself. To get into character, he adopts...

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The best and worst national anthems? Time to award the medals

The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies...

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latest in today

Eye to Eye: Homage to Ernst Scheidegger, MASI Lugano review...

With a troubled gaze and a lived-in face, the portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti on a withdrawn...

Christian Pierre La Marca, Yaman Okur, St Martin-in-The-Fiel...

The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians...

That They May Face The Rising Sun review - lyrical adaptatio...

In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the...

Album: Pet Shop Boys - Nonetheless

This album came with an absolutely enormous promo campaign. As well as actual advertising there were “Audience With…” events, and specials on BBC...

Ridout, Włoszczowska, Crawford, Lai, Posner, Wigmore Hall re...

Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/...

Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...

Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...

Album: Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice

Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of...

Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...

The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...

Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - ench...

Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital...

Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review -...

In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world –...