Review

A new exhibition celebrates the pioneering British artist Eileen Agar and her sideways look at the life aquatic Seven months before the outbreak of the Second World War, left wing and anti-war artists exhibited together at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore and Vanessa Bell were among those contributing some 200 works to the exhibition […]

Tim Walker reviews After Life at the National Theatre – and only awards it one star. The National Theatre re-opened its doors last week with a show called, appropriately enough, After Life. The venue has itself been hovering between life and death for a very long time, like the characters in Jack Thorne’s play, and even its […]

The Kominsky Method is surprisingly thoughtful in the way it grapples with the fundamental fragility of friendship and getting old – if you can ignore the unnecessary swipes against the young When I first watched The Kominsky Method I did so with the full expectation that it would melt into the indistinguishable coterie of bland, almost […]

Tim Walker gives three stars to Walden at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London until June 12 To say that Stella and Cassie are sisters who have grown apart is an under-statement. Cassie (Lydia Wilson) is a celebrated astronaut who’s just returned from a year on the moon. Stella (Gemma Arterton) has, in the meantime, […]

A new exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood serves as a useful opportunity to focus on its female associates, be they muses, mistresses or much more When Stephanie Marrian became the first Page Three girl in the Sun newspaper in 1970 it is possible she was channelling the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Or maybe not. But she was undoubtedly, to use the […]

A history of the radical, revolutionary, rowdy roots of the newspaper industry make for a rip-roaring read “We are afsured from good authority that the First Consul of France – has been swallowed by a Whale!” Give or take the odd “f” instead of “s”, this could have come on the Sunday Sport archive, next to […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a truly epic novel which pays fitting tribute to the female pioneers of aviation One of my favourite historic photographs was taken 99 years ago. It’s of a young woman, wrapped up in a heavy coat and headscarf against a cold wind coming in off the sea, standing alone in a field […]

TIM WALKER on one of the few pieces of ‘serious theatre’ to get going after lockdown Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me Kiln Theatre, London ***** Don’t let anyone kid you that theatre is coming back in leaps and bounds. We’re talking at best about small, hesitant, faltering steps. There’s the occasional costly stumble, too, as […]

The Foghorn’s Lament focuses on an unusual subject that inspires a spellbinding book One of my earliest memories is of foghorns. It’s of my sister and I being wrapped in warm clothing and lifted into wellington boots, sleep-dozy because it’s nearly midnight, and taken by our parents out of the front door of our house […]

Gender bias means that the history of art has been written by men, about men. But there are some signs that the tide is finally beginning to turn It’s been 50 years since the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin posed the provocative question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ – a ground-breaking […]

Theatre reviewer TIM WALKER sees an old favourite returning to the stage after lockdown The Mousetrap St Martin’s Theatre, London ***** There was a lot of talk of a new kind of theatre emerging after the lockdowns – edgier, more relevant and representative – but maybe, after a traumatic experience, there’s something to be said […]

Netflix series Master of None has successfully negotiated a change of focus after its creator was caught up in a #MeToo scandal The first two seasons of Master of None sound awful when described – “an actor bops about New York dating beautiful women and eating at nice restaurants” – and sometimes they are. Aziz Ansari stars as Dev, […]

As club football’s strangest season comes to an end, photographer Stuart Roy Clarke shares images of fans taken during the pandemic I started The Homes of Football photography series more than 30 years ago as a love letter to this country, yet I knew that the Germans and Scandinavians and latterly the Americans revere our […]

Celebrating a dreamlike cult British take on the American road movie… with German influences We begin in a flat in London. We end on a train to nowhere somewhere in the south west. In between times, a man half-heartedly investigates his brother’s suicide, listens to some very good music, takes a detour with a nice […]

WILL SELF on the V&A’s new show: Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser The front of my face felt heavy and swollen while a screed hovered in the mid-distance. “Grab a hedgehog and aim it towards one of the hoops.” It read: “Don’t throw the hedgehog, just open your hand.” I tried doing this, but the hedgehog went high. […]

The artist’s recent artwork for London Underground didn’t seem to quite hit the mark. But a new exhibition and book shows his energy and love for life remain undimmed Air travel stopped, and so did the hum of traffic: as humanity fell silent last year, the natural world took centre stage in an exuberant display of […]

‘Really weird and properly frightening’. That was the tone of the horror film script Mark E Smith, iconoclast leader of The Fall, set out to write in 2007. Fourteen years later, The Otherwise is finally being published Friday February 16th 2007. I’m waiting in the reception at the BBC building on Oxford Road Manchester. I’m […]

A new book about the Anglo-Saxons demolishes faddish myths that aspects of their culture live on today, and instead tells their own story in gripping style We are blessed to live in the golden age of straight-talking history. ‘Straight-talking’ rather than ‘popular’, because the people filling the windows of Waterstones are scholars of unimpeachable renown, often with […]

An extraordinary photographic exhibition focuses on Britain’s most peculiar local folklore rituals. But how are these events still managing to survive changing times and attitudes while attempting to remain true to their traditional roots? How about this to get the health and safety bods hot under the collar? A procession of extroverts in fancy dress […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY has high praise for author Rónán Hession, a unique talent able to tell gently-paced tales of gentle characters Rónán Hession is a tonic for our times. In fact, you know what, he might even be the tonic for our times. I don’t say this lightly. When I read the Dubliner’s debut novel Leonard and […]

Megan Nolan reviews Real Housewives of New York, a show built on an addictive desire to feel superior and perhaps even pity for America’s super-rich This week season 13 of the reality show Real Housewives of New York began. I am badly addicted to this particular iteration of the franchise (there are Real Housewives in Atlanta, […]

A new exhibition brings together the works of four artists who, in their very different ways, emerged at a time when female roles in British society were about to change forever.  They were among the most innovative and, at times, sought-after artists of their day, a quartet of painters who are celebrated together in an […]

New columnist MEGAN NOLAN on The Bold Type, a pleasing Netflix series which tries just a little too hard to hit the zeitgeist In late February, knowing we were still a substantial chunk of time away from being legally allowed to hang out with people again, I decided I needed just one more sustained volley […]

New columnist MEGAN NOLAN on the BBC’s cult series and its world of good cops and bad cops. I moved to England in 2015, when Line of Duty, the beloved BBC drama about an anti-corruption police unit named AC-12, was still dithering between cult fan favourite and mainstream national watercooler conversation. I had never come […]

FLORENCE HALLETT on two new books that offer a corrective to the much mythologised early biography of Francis Bacon, and place him at the heart of the European artistic tradition. At some point in 1944, Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery and chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, walked into Francis Bacon’s South Kensington studio. The […]

A tale familiar to generations of schoolchildren, the savage killing of Thomas Becket, and its depiction in a Canterbury Cathedral window is now the focus of a new British Museum exhibition. For several hours after his assassination the body of Thomas Becket was left where it had fallen on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral choir, his […]

The Arts and Crafts movement provided a bridge from tradition and nostalgia to the modernism that was to follow. Few of its leading lights display this shift as sumptuously as Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo.  Between the Arts and Crafts pioneering work of William Morris and the lean soaring lines with floral motifs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a third and influential “M” helped define the look […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an important new book that concentrates on the societies – not the states – that have emerged from communism. In 1996 Britain was, well, a bit full of itself. Nothing new there of course, but this time there was a tangible positivity about a new and vigorous assertion of Britishness. It felt as […]

FLORENCE HALLETT reports on a new exhibition with a remarkably topical theme – the totemic importance of touch in art and the human condition. From the wall of the Cueva de Las Manos – a cave in Santa Cruz, southern Argentina – handprints reach out to us across the millennia. At 9,000-13,000 years old, they are by no means the oldest […]

A new book by writer and broadcaster David Baddiel gets right to the heart of anti-Semitism, and why it has taken such a hold on the left. Smear. Bundled up in that single syllable are years of pain and anger felt by Jewish people who have failed to persuade the putative anti-racist movement that we know […]

Historian JAMES HAWES reviews Gavin Esler’s new book foretelling the imminent end of the UK. Things that have been a long time coming, finally come suddenly. And the end of the UK has been a long time coming. The band may still be playing, but it is playing on the deck of the Titanic: we […]

BILL BORROWS on a new book about the men at the centre of the Swinging Sixties. There was a knock at the door of 24 Chapel Street, Belgravia, an elegant four-storey Georgian house a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace and, less than three months earlier, the venue for the launch of The Beatles’ eighth […]