Culture

Culture

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

How the YouTubers beat Star Wars

Last weekend saw the most unlikely battle between David and Goliath. The little film that could was none other than the psychological horror film Backrooms. It was made on a microscopic budget (in relative terms) of $10 million, yet went on to gross a staggering $81.4 million in the US alone in its opening weekend. And the big film that couldn’t was the not-so-eagerly awaited The Mandalorian and Grogu, which had a 70 percent drop at the box office from its (relatively) underwhelming opening weekend. Unless something wholly unexpected happens, it will conclude its run as the lowest-grossing Star Wars property, confirming the predictions of those who suggested that Disney have run the brand into the ground spectacularly.

Kane Parsons

Saturday

Richard Bratby

The Arts Council’s awful vision for the future of opera

English National Opera’s first production created in Manchester is Angel’s Bone, a one-act opera by Du Yun and the librettist Royce Vavrek. It was premiered in 2016 in New York and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, but we shouldn’t hold that against it. Musically, at least, it’s certainly more interesting than recent US imports like Jeanine Tesori’s Blue – worthy, subminimalist Yankslop addressing the fashionable issues of the day. (It’s funny how the classical music world imagines that the way to reach British audiences in 2026 is to program stuff that was relevant to Americans in 2016.) It was a pretty horrible experience nonetheless. Daytime TV-fixated suburbanites Mr. and Mrs. X.E.

opera
Digby Warde-Aldam

The Venice Biennale was just that bit worse than usual

The 61st Venice Biennale arrived freighted with portent. To cut a long story short: Russia and Israel were invited to exhibit, and the prize jurors resigned in protest. Then, on preview day, the city was hit by a storm of biblical force. I sat in the Stansted Wetherspoons for hours, oblivious to the fact that the Ryanair ahead of mine was taking a pummeling that ultimately landed it on the wrong side of the Adriatic. “It was terrifying,” a journalist colleague recounted. “And apparently, Bjork was on board, too.” The bad juju had set in last May when Koyo Kouoh, the program’s curator, dropped dead aged 57. The event was left rudderless, and with all due respect – it shows.

biennale
gambling
Rupert Hawksley

How Rupert Murdoch destroyed the innocent enjoyment of watching sport in Britain

In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change association football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via their remote. And why not? After all, as the Sky Bet tagline reminded viewers: “It matters more when there’s money on it.” For football fans, nothing was ever quite the same again. “It’s difficult to overstate what the slogan did for the normalization of gambling in football,” writes Darragh McGee in his impressive study of how our national sport, seduced by profit, surrendered to the gambling industry.

Garibaldi
Ian Thomson

A weary trek in the steps of Garibaldi and his Redshirts

By the time he died in 1882 at the age of 74, Giuseppe Garibaldi had freed the Italian peninsula from its abhorred Habsburg and Bourbon rulers and united all Italy under the liberally inclined House of Savoy. With his whiskery good looks and wardrobe of red blouses, he was the ideal vehicle for romantic notions of free nationality. When he visited London in 1864, crowds flocked to greet the Risorgimento liberator as he got off the train at Nine Elms. A new football club, Nottingham Forest, adopted Garibaldi red as its color and a “squashed fly” biscuit was named after him. In Queen Victoria’s estimation, though, Garibaldi was an outlaw figure who threatened to subvert the established order. “Garibaldi – thank God – is gone!” she declared on his departure.

arthur miller
Alexander Larman

Why Arthur Miller is back in the limelight

Arthur Miller may have died two decades ago, but America’s answer to Euripides and Sophocles is having a moment. The great tragedian’s plays have been revived, and revived again, ever since he first broke through in 1947 with All My Sons, but even by his standards, the new productions just keep on coming. His most famous play, Death of a Salesman, has opened on Broadway to rave reviews and Tony nominations galore, with a cast-against-type Nathan Lane as the doomed Willy Loman and Laurie Metcalf as his loyal wife Linda. Across the pond, Bryan Cranston has recently finished an equally acclaimed run as Joe Keller in All My Sons.

Friday

James Delingpole

I’m done with Rivals

Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s "based on a true story," there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. "Thought they were just those men in white shirts embarrassing you at the airport by exposing the stash of cheap baccy hidden in your holiday underwear? Think again!" you can imagine the tagline running. The model here, of course, would be Top Gun – the 1986 movie, heavily supported by the US military, which supposedly caused the number of men applying to become US Navy fighter pilots to increase by 500 percent (a figure that’s since been debunked).

rivals
funny
Alex Diggins

Where did all the funny Republicans go?

When did Republican writers stop being funny? Look around at the landscape of contemporary American literature – and, for that matter, TV and film – and you’d be hard pressed to find a genuinely funny literary voice who doesn’t lean liberal, or at least purport to. This isn’t to say that individual right-wing writers aren’t amusing. Often found in these pages, Rod Liddle, for one, is very funny, though I suggest he’d balk at being called a conservative. And Donald Trump is hilarious on Truth Social – his posts may have the subtlety of a bullhorn, but they usually land with a satisfying thunk. During his 2016 campaign and well into his first term, Trump succeeded in part because he understood that politics and entertainment run in parallel.

Martin Gayford

Derek Jacobi on playing Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films during the early 1940s; the only one in which he made the final cut was a farce starring the ukulele-playing comedian George Formby in which his 19-year-old face can be seen peering out of the background in one scene. Years later, Lucian claimed, John Huston asked him if he’d like to play the part of his grandfather Sigmund in a biographical screen drama from 1962 entitled Freud: The Secret Passion (which had, at one point, a script by Jean-Paul Sartre). Eventually Montgomery Clift was cast instead, which was just as well because Freud was definitely an observer rather than a performer.

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?

This slim volume has only one fault. It has no illustrations. So you’ll have to do some Googling or visit the current Duchamp exhibition at MoMA (until August 22) if you want to know what "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" looks like. Otherwise it’s perfect – wittily written and packed with many fascinating characters besides the ever intriguing Marcel Duchamp. He didn’t actually arrive in New York until 1915, but when he did he found himself already famous. His "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" had been included in the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, alongside works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Braque, and completely stole the show. Duchamp didn’t even know the painting was being exhibited.

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Wednesday

Margaret Mitchell

The rise of the Orienfluencers

The term “Orientalism” has always implied some kind of caricature of the eastern world. It was originally coined as a way of describing how the West imagines the East as its negative to shore up self-confidence and justify conquest: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal,’” Edward Said wrote in Orientalism. Now, reverse “the Oriental” and “the European” and you have an idea of the new Orientalism, where the enlightened East becomes the foil to a decadent, violent, barbaric West. The new Orientalists aren’t academics, policymakers or Wall Street Journal opinion columnists.

Andrew Tate

Friday

Alexander Larman

Colbert quit the stage with a whimper not a bang

Before the final episode of the Stephen Colbert-hosted Late Show, President Trump was asked what he thought about the demise of a program that was as well-known for the digs that it leveled at him as for its comedic monologues and high-profile special guests. Trump replied, ominously, “I’ll have a message at a later date.” And the verdict duly came in, as Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” It was broad, self-referential, star-studded and played it very safe.

Colbert

Friday

Nicky Haslam

How to dress a queen

The problem with exhibiting costumes is well known. Should the mannequins be lifelike with human features, or faceless? What about trying a more surreal approach with Perspex or metals? This show of her late Majesty’s wardrobe opts for something more ghostly: hundreds of shoulderless, neckless, wristless, legless figures, floating magically in space, presented in cases at eye level, with others, higher, in serried ranks, like some gorgeously arrayed terracotta army. The unifying factor is that instantly recognizable royal silhouette – from the youthful wasp waist to the later fuller frame.

queen
Anne Margaret Daniel

Meeting Jay McInerney, Manhattan’s sassiest social novelist

Since his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City appeared in 1984, Jay McInerney has been one of the best-known writers whose work is mostly grounded on the long, skinny, granite-bedrocked river isle the Lenape called Manahatta, “island of hills.” He has lived in town for most of the past four decades too, and currently divides his time between a Village penthouse apartment and Water Mill in the Hamptons. McInerney walks into the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, just paces from Washington Square, and heads turn. Young lovelies on their laptops with Mission Control Center-sized cans over their ears and chic hairstyles look up and blink, appealingly. Waiters slide swiftly to his side.

lady chatterley
Frances Wilson

All the gossip about Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB. Described by him as “a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards,” the tale is set in his native Nottinghamshire, which he left in 1912 when he eloped with his aristocratic wife Frieda von Richthofen, who was then married to his tutor. Frieda, who valued her freedom, was enjoying an affair with the Italian officer Angelo Ravagli, who became her third husband after Lawrence’s death in 1930. It is believed that Lawrence was impotent for the last years of his life. In the evenings he would read aloud his finished pages, in which the Lawrentian philosophy is expressed by Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper to Sir Clifford Chatterley.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Riveting: Kokuho reviewed

A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you may one day wish to visit the kabuki theater in Tokyo, although be warned: the shortest production is four hours. Some last all day. Looked at this way, you are getting off lightly here. Directed by Lee Sang-il, and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s two-part novel, the film is a drama spanning 50 years. It opens in 1964, in Nagasaki, with the shocking killing of a crime boss while his 14-year-old son Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa) looks on.

Richard Bratby

A spring mood lifter: Tales of Love and Loss at the Linbury Theater reviewed

This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked by a theme of bereavement. That sounds bleak until you consider that Puccini’s Trittico was originally inspired by The Divine Comedy, and who bothers about that today? Anyway, the three operas that make up Tales of Love and Loss are far from dispiriting in their overall effect. Like Puccini, Talia Stern – who directs all three – has gone for two tragedies plus a raucous, palate-cleansing comedy. And like Gianni Schicchi, the final laugh-fest (Elena Langer’s Four Sisters) plays out around a barely cold corpse and sends you into the night feeling uneasy, but undeniably entertained.

flowers
Melanie McDonagh

The art of flowers

Multisensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there are scent stations where you can smell damask rose or green and black tea from flower-shaped chalices. From the ceiling hang swaths of green muslin. I could have stayed here all afternoon. Right in front of me were also two delicious studies of tulips to illustrate the Dutch craze of the 1630s. Frankly, if it came to a choice of two-tone tulips or bitcoin as a way of squandering money, I know which I’d prefer. There is a print of a sultan’s seraglio in this tulip section.

boyhood
Alex Peake-Tomkinson

They shoot horses: Boyhood, by David Keenan, reviewed

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favorite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

elizabeth
Roger Lewis

The exquisitely dull life of Elizabeth II, expert on cap badges

The dogs, horses, diamonds, furs, full-length evening gowns of lace and pearls; private jets and limousines; the ever-present jostling retinue; the push and shove of photographers and the clamor of crowds – Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth II had a lot in common, each taking herself very seriously and needing to be seen to be believed. Whereas the Hollywood actress was majestic mainly in her vulgarity and brashness, however, the late Queen, as is evident in this pair of biographies, did her level best to be reticent, even nonexistent. The best known of her few recorded utterances are “Oh really?” and “Are you sure?” She had a tendency to stare at a person with “absolutely no expression,” or at best “an expression of controlled irritation.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

How Putin got the Hollywood treatment

Sometimes life disappoints you in interesting ways. I hated Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictional political thriller about the dawn of Putinism, with a shuddering passion. I had, therefore, been looking forward to despising the film version when it arrived in cinemas last month, too.  Yet it turns out that TWotK, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is an impressive film: visually stunning, well cast, a straight story well told. Paul Dano (the greasy-faced young preacher from There Will Be Blood) plays Vadim Baranov, the fictional "Wizard" of the title, a whizkid theater and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin.

Thursday

James Panero

The message behind the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale

“All art is propaganda,” wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Upon this subtle distinction rests the success or failure of whatever art we see at the Venice Biennale.  The Most Serene Republic’s exercise in art-world Olympics is propaganda by design. A garden of national pavilions – small buildings in various styles as you might find in a zoological park – presents exhibitions that compete with one another for a “Golden Lion for Best National Participation.” Here, in the murky parkland of the Giardini in the city’s eastern Castello district, nationalist and anti-nationalist passions mix with art-market imbroglio into a sordid spectacle. Just how bad will it be this year? To discover the answer is why we keep coming back.

Tuesday

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Who says Lauren Sánchez Bezos doesn’t belong at the Met Gala?

Lauren Sánchez Bezos, with her blown-out lip filler, understands fashion. She understands that, unlike the gatekeepers of painting and literature, fashion figureheads aren’t ashamed to dirty their hands by digging around in the money pot. It was only fitting, then, that Lauren and her husband Jeff Bezos sponsored this year's Met Gala. Its theme was "Fashion Is Art." All Kardashian-Jenners present came in bodices protruding in the shape of their nipples Sánchez Bezos showed up to the Met red carpet in a navy-blue gown that nodded to John Singer Sargent's painting of Madame X, a socialite and the wife of a French banker. The painting's portrayal of a pale, corpse-like, high-society woman was considered indecent because of the single strap falling off her shoulder.

liza minnelli
Roger Lewis

Life is a Cabaret: inside Liza Minnelli’s memoir

Though she may well have been “one of the world’s most celebrated, beloved and iconic performers,” who’d have wanted Judy Garland as a mother? When not remaining in bed “for days at a time, heavily drugged and in a deep state of depression,” she was, according to her daughter Liza Minnelli, slashing her neck with a razor blade because “she loved playing the victim… Hospitals are a way of life for her.” Judy died of a (possibly accidental) drugs overdose in 1969, aged 47. At the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side, her corpse was prepared for public view by the very same make-up expert who’d worked years previously on The Wizard of Oz. Twenty thousand people filed past the open coffin – more than had come to gawp at Valentino.

Saturday

Clare McHugh

Lena Dunham is still her own worst enemy

In her seminal 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes of her former self, a 20-year-old naif arriving in New York City for the first time: “Was anyone ever so young?” Lena Dunham – an avowed Didion stan – should have used that line as the title of her new book, an account of the messy process of making Girls, the HBO show she created, scripted, directed and starred in. Despite her inexperience and juvenile blunders Dunham, at age 25, produced a hit. Why, then, call her memoir Famesick? Because, she contends, the most important story she has to tell is how her body turned on her “right in sync with the public.” It’s true that Dunham has been the object of sustained fascination since Girls launched in 2012.

lena dunham

Friday

Michael Moorcock

J.G. Ballard’s surreal fiction continues to resonate through the century

In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM color. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of de Chirico. Set in an Anglo-Spanish colony, it featured a surrealist painter. a racing car driver and a toreador. All love the mysterious Pandora, who is unable to love anyone until the Dutchman drops anchor. To prove his passion for Pandora one suitor takes poison while another pushes his beloved car over a cliff.

j.g. ballard
Graeme Thomson

How good are the Rolling Stones’ alter egos, the Cockroaches?

Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising lineup becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years. Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.

James Delingpole

AI could never replace me

There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate youth, thinks I’m an idiot, that AI is the future and quite mind blowing in its potential to change everything. Probably we’re both right. Personally, I don’t feel quite as threatened by AI as perhaps I should. More by accident than design, I seem to have ended up in one of the very few jobs that AI isn’t going to steal.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai and Jonathan Ruffer

The genius of Zurbarán – and why he vanished

A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbarán was 11 years old. Since Zurbarán never left Spain, he could not have seen any of Caravaggio’s paintings with his own eyes. Indeed, he might never even have heard the artist’s name. Still, there are unavoidable similarities between the two men’s work. Zurbarán shared Caravaggio’s sense of drama and his love of shadows broken up by patches of strong light.

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