More from Arts

Grade: A ‘God games’, as they used to be called, have a storied history. SimCity, Civilisation and the excellently sadistic Dungeon Keeper have all been responsible for many a PhD thesis being delivered late. The Almighty seems to have smiled on the latest iteration of the genre. The product of a one-man-band independent developer, Greg Styczen, its current pre-release version scored a million downloads on the first day it was available. You can see why. It’s made with such care and love. You take the role of a medieval lord of the manor – choose a surly avatar and a coat of arms – who starts with a handful of peasant families in a tented encampment in a drizzly forest. Zoom down and watch them as they drag timber about with their mangy ox.

Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty curves and the calming pleasure, instead, of a mildly absorbing repetitive task which whiles away the idle hour in the way you might pass it flicking through a set of worry beads or making a cat’s cradle with a ball of string. The unexpected sleeper hit House Flipper (2018) was one such. It was boring, but in a good way. Its sleeker, prettier sequel has had the wisdom not to depart far from the formula. The premise is that you travel around a breezy seaside town sprucing up properties for profit. You start small.

Grade: A- One thing videogames are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles... Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the spooky crackle of the Geiger counter in Silent Hill; nor needing fresh trousers after that dog jumps through the window in the first Resident Evil. The granddaddy of them all was Alone in the Dark – which, when it came out in 1992, essentially invented the survival horror genre. It sent you crawling through a spooky old mansion solving puzzles, fretting about your inventory and being jumped by sluggish monsters. Now a lavish and loving reboot stars B+-listers David Harbour and Jodie Comer. The former is grizzled PI Edward Carnby; the latter his employer Emily Hartwood.

Grade: B- There was much to hope for with this game. Its developer is Rocksteady – the studio which gave us the superb Batman: Arkham series. A lot of money was poured into it, and a lot of time (the release date was much delayed). The premise is a winner, too: the Suicide Squad – Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark (a massive bloke with a shark’s head) – are dispatched to murder the noisome goody-goodies of the Justice League because, y’know, alien invasion, mind control etc, etc. Who wouldn’t be tickled by the prospect of having Harley slap Wonder Woman upside the head with a giant mallet, or – a boy can dream – seeing King Shark stuff the top half of the Flash in his mouth in one go so just his legs are sticking out?

Grade: A- Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it. Moira sets off to meet her Uncle Hamish at the lighthouse – but like Virginia Woolf’s lot, takes her sweet time getting there. Once you’re 100 yards from her front door, she has no idea where she is. Despite her och-aye-hoots brogue, she turns out to be no less clueless than the tourists who head up Ben Nevis in flip-flops and have to be helicoptered back to civilisation by mountain rescue three days later. Think of this as a getting-lost-in-the-glens simulation.

My pilgrim companion William Parsons and I did not call our first journey a pilgrimage. Rather, it was a song walk: a walk with a purpose of taking a song, ‘The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy’, back to where it came from. It was also an attempt to reclaim my place in the world, after too much time spent in front of my computer. Stepping out and walking with intention. It did the trick. When we arrived at the monument that commemorates those who had drowned, we were met by chance by a couple who had three ancestors who had died in the Medway tragedy but did not know the song. Thus we returned the song to its bloodline, not just its place.

There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about William Morris, where he spends most of his time in Paris inside the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant because ‘that is the only place where you can’t see the damned thing’. Aviva Studios risks a similar fate. Designed by architects OMA as the permanent performance venue for the Manchester International Festival and headquarters for its organisers, Factory International, it’s been savaged by critics and citizens alike for its ugliness. But not unlike the Eiffel Tower, it is from within that one can really witness the spectacles it has in store.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney’s company. The first cartoons it was founded to produce – the animation/live-action shorts Alice Comedies – are largely forgotten, eclipsed not least by the resounding success of Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse grabbed much of the attention from the get-go, including that of several philosophers, sociologists and critical theorists, who perceived in him an emblem of the best and worst of the modern age. Also celebrating its 100th anniversary this year is the founding text of western Marxism, Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness.

While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive connection. Her works are large drawings (sometimes very large – one reclining figure is more than two-and-a-half metres wide), and each one zooms in on a single figure seen in close-up, often larger than life-size. They reminded me of something, but for a while I couldn’t place it. About halfway round I got it. They look a little like fragments from the cartoons Renaissance masters made as templates for painting. These, too, tend to concentrate on the human body on a monumental scale.  Those who dedicate themselves to drawing and work from live models are scarce.

There should really be a special word for it: that vicarious fragility you feel when hearing of a minor decision with catastrophically heavy consequences, as if a falling acorn had tipped a boulder. In the case of John O’Hegarty, the subject of the engrossing podcast I’m Not Here To Hurt You, the catalyst for disaster was a quick short cut the wrong way down a one-way Dublin street while working as a bicycle courier. It would ultimately lead him – an academic with a master’s degree in psychology – into heroin and crack cocaine addiction, followed by a stint as a bank robber and eight years in prison.

In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son] was staying the night here… It was most embarrassing because Randolph was very drunk…’ In October 1957, she was in Paris: ‘The Dutchess [sic] of Windsor came… I did a show of Rock & Roll. It was all great fun. Bon Soir!’ But, amid all the luxury, a note of seriousness enters – there was art, too. Clandeboye became a kernel of art, literature and music. Vikram Seth stayed.

If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021 at the age of 89, knew it too. Her sinuous, characterful cat pictures, watercolours mostly but also oils and prints, helped cement her place as the nation’s favourite painter. She was an establishment favourite too, becoming the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy in London. In 1995, her cats adorned a set of Royal Mail stamps and, in 2001, she became the first woman to be appointed as Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner, a position unique to the Royal Household of Scotland, previously occupied by the likes of Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie and David Young Cameron.

One of the annoying things about too many contemporary museums is that, having ditched old-fashioned closely typed descriptive labels and display cases, they often seem to be pitched at the level of a 12-year-old. So it’s refreshing to go to a museum that really is for 12-year-olds – or, at least, babies to 14-year-olds. Three cheers for the Young V&A, formerly the Museum of Childhood. It’s a combination of museum and playground, with an engaging Alice in Wonderland feel to it.

As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a perverse negotiation as the invigilator struggled with the theoretical parameters of his orders; apparently the watercolour may stain the furniture but dry media like pencils aren’t allowed either; actually, all art-making is not allowed in any of the exhibitions, ‘but photography is OK’.

I have a soft spot for specimen jars and skeletal remains. Museums of natural history, surgical pioneering or anthropological oddities have always struck me as equally suitable for lunch breaks and first dates as for serious study and research. As far as public and casually accessible encounters with mortality go, these kinds of museums are the most straightforward way of confronting the realities of human nature. But whether we should have this kind of casual access is now increasingly being questioned. Telling history through displays of human remains presents a challenge for curators.

Hermitage, where the heel of Roxburghshire kicks into the once-lawless Debatable Lands, seems an unlikely place to find a botanical artist. It’s hard to make anything grow here, let alone an exhibition-load of rare and sometimes exotic plants. Lorded over by Hermitage Castle, a menacing hulk of medieval brutalism described by George MacDonald Fraser as ‘shouting “sod off” in stone’, this is a remote, rarely visited stretch of the border. Once the playground of reivers, and the graveyard of their victims, today it’s a land of sheep farming, forestry plantations and cruel May frosts. But there, hunkered against the wind in the foot of the Hermitage valley, is the studio of Emma Tennant, who has lived, farmed and painted here for more than 50 years.

David Starkey’s commentary on the Queen’s funeral on GB News was generally agreed to be the best of all the TV coverage, and now he is covering the coronation, and has made a three-part documentary about it for GB News called The Crown. Of course he knows the history, going back to King Edgar’s coronation in 973, but will he also be expected to recognise the guests? Will he have to say: ‘Oh look, there’s Elton John?’ No, he laughs, he leaves all that to his co-presenters. His job will be to explain what the coronation is about, and indeed that is what he proceeds to do when I arrive at his house in Highbury. He talks so seamlessly there seems very little chance of my ever asking any questions.

War has broken out in theatreland. Managements are increasingly at odds with the audiences who fund their livelihoods. A recent stand-off involved James Norton’s new show, A Little Life, which contains a couple of scenes in which the actor removes his clothes. A punter at a preview in Richmond secretly photographed the moments of nudity and posted the images online. This sparked a furore in the newspapers and the majority of commentators took the producers’ side against the theatre-goers. Dr Kirsty Sedgman, a media studies lecturer, spoke piously to the Independent about ‘an absolute violation of the unwritten contract between audiences and performers’. The Mirror reported that ‘drastic measures’ might be needed to ensure that similar ‘privacy breaches’ don’t occur.