The wheels have come off
A while back, I decided that I could improve my mornings immeasurably by eschewing the Today programme on Radio 4. Just occasionally, I catch some of it by accident and...
The gumshoe and the...
Oh, how could they ever have doubted her? Yet those who questioned whether JK Rowling deserved her reputation were put in their place when the Harry Potter creator put out...
Passing of a music...
Listening to a turn from the Edinburgh Fringe on the Radio 2 Arts Show with Jonathan Ross last week (Thursdays, R2, 10pm-Midnight), I was so dismayed by the quality of the...
Betrayal and vengance
‘I probably should. But I won’t,’ proclaims Suranne Jones as Gemma, the title character in the returning Doctor Foster (Tuesday, BBC1, 9pm) at a pivotal point in a story...
A mother's defence
There is a marvellously moving scene in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s wonderful Apologia in which a monstrous and, until now, defiantly non-maternal mother removes shards of glass...
Randle the reprobate
As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m a sucker for anything to do with old comedians. Lancashire legend Frank Randle has exercised a huge fascination over me for decades,...
Gifts fit for a queen
This year’s special exhibition for the summer opening of Buckingham Palace is Royal Gifts, with an additional display commemorating the 20th anniversary of the death of...
Raphael, a restless soul
To study Raphael’s drawings is to get under the skin of a complex artist. Urgency, exploration and ambition coexist alongside delicacy, fluidity and introspection. Each...
Same old recipe?
With the departure of the great British Bake Off to Channel 4, the BBC have been forced to looked around and make the best of whatever ingredients they could find to hand...
The private made public
The deceptively evocative paintings – depth lying within detail, colour represented via nuances of shading – produced by Chinese scholar-artists in the 18th and 19th...
The new French wave
France has always had Marianne, that feminine figurehead symbol of French pride designed to represent the Republic – she’s been embodied over recent years by Brigitte...
Yankee dolour!
Love between members of the armed forces has always been something of a minefield. Even today, love between same-sex personnel merely adds to the fevered mix, but during...
Just say not good enough
Tom Cruise doesn’t exactly play a bad guy in American Made – he’s just a very naughty boy. For this jaunty, flashy drug smuggling caper, Cruise re-teams with Edge of...
Going nowhere blues
First things first: Girl From the North Country is not a musical. It’s a play with songs. We expect the numbers in a musical to be more or less integrated with the action;...
Miller's tail
I once described a certain actor’s performance as being like ‘school- play acting ... the kind that believes that acting skill is solely a matter of energy and that just...
Art in Grey Paris
Impishly intelligent actor Stanley Tucci writes and directs this agreeable, miniature study of Alberto Giacometti and a young American writer, James Lord, who posed for the...
Driven to abstraction
When a number of artists, weary of the conservatism pervading Taiwan’s annual Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition, organised their own exposition, they began a movement intent...
Out of this world
Even for a cinematic high-wire act such as French director Luc Besson, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a hell of a gamble. At an estimated budget of $180...
Bring the dodo back
If a programme makes you sit in the car park of a large hardware chain store so you can hear it to the end, it’s fair to assume it is a hit. Thankfully, Ben Garrod’s Bone...
Puffed up dragons
What has happened to Dragons’ Den (Sunday, BBC2, 8pm)? I’m not knocking it, mind you, but I remember the series starting out as a relatively sober-minded platform for...
Southern Discomfort
Fresh from its Cannes debut, Sofia Coppola’s drama of the sexes shimmers with the wooziness of a dream while socking you with the punch of a nightmare. Set in the South in...
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