Culture

When I was up at Oxford, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, my deepest wish was to find a letter one day in my pigeonhole informing me that a distant relative had died and that henceforward I was entitled to style myself the Marquess of Wessex (or wherever), until eventually I inherited my dukedom. That ambition has gone now. As you get older, you grow more accepting of your lot, don’t you? Also, what I’ve noticed is that almost all the people I know who are seriously upper-class are also very seriously f***ed-up. Even more so than I am, which is saying quite a lot. Partly, I suppose, it’s all the inbreeding that has gone on over the centuries.

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons Tate Modern, until 14 September This year, Cy Twombly celebrated his 80th birthday. As the leading modern American artist who decamped to Europe and went his own way regardless of developments at home, Twombly was for many years out in the wilderness. But he held his course and now he is the darling of the art glitterati. However, his work is not so easy for the uninitiated and many feel slightly at a loss when confronted by one of his scribbly canvases. Those with closed minds tend to dismiss him, and, as Nicholas Serota in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue (£24.99 in paperback) points out, Twombly’s art is ‘elusive and, for many people, even enthusiasts of contemporary art, unfathomable’.

Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic ‘No man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.’ Dr Johnson was speaking of a poet who looked to his friends for solace after his verses had been savaged in the press. He got none. That’s the risk all artists take. I’ve been through this experience myself (and I’m about to submit to the ordeal once again), and though I found it hurtful and humiliating to have my work trashed in public, it also enriched my understanding of the theatre and assisted me as a professional critic. In 2005 Toby Young and I collaborated on a sex farce, Who’s the Daddy?, which enjoyed a sell-out run on the London fringe and won a best new comedy award in a trade paper.

Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September Alan Green: Joan Miro Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July  I can never visit the Wallace Collection without lamenting the filling of the erstwhile courtyard with an airless restaurant which scarcely does justice to the noble proportions of Hertford House. Meanwhile, temporary exhibitions are crammed into two smallish rooms in the basement, which just goes to show that apparently we value our stomachs over our hearts. Luckily, the Wallace regularly mounts high-quality exhibitions in its subterranean galleries (rather as the National Gallery occasionally does), and the current one is no exception.

Good grief. This is a terrific, amazing story. Congratulations to Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant. It's almost like an Ealing comedy except, of course, you know, serious. And, I think, really rather wonderful: At first sight, the Kingsway seems an unwelcoming place. Wind whips around the 15-storey tower blocks, the windows in the lobby doors are broken, the corridors are gloomy and bare. Remnants of police incident tape flicker from lampposts and prominent surveillance cameras add an air of menace to its pathways. There is little to dispel the sense that this is one of Britain's forgotten pockets of poverty. But when hundreds of asylum seekers were placed there to live - often for years - while their cases were processed, they were warmly embraced.

Henrietta Bredi joins in the preparations for Vaughan Williams's 'The Pilgrim's Progress' ‘Come, thou blessed of the Lord’ sing the sopranos and altos, and now the tenors and basses are joining them, with a wondrously layered swelling of sound. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end — this is the first rehearsal and the first music I’ve heard from Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which will be given two performances at Sadler’s Wells, on 20 and 22 June. VW, as some people matily refer to him (personally, I wouldn’t dare), died 50 years ago, and celebrations of his life and work are abounding.

We've just uploaded a new set of culture picks from our arts editor, Liz Anderson.  You can access them here.

Don Carlo Royal Opera House Verdi’s Don Carlo is as much of an obsession for me as one of my favourite operas. Though it isn’t perfect, and can’t be made perfect, whatever you include or eliminate from the extraordinary number of options available (including two languages), it has so many prolonged scenes of incontrovertible greatness, and their density increases as the opera proceeds, so that the last 80 minutes or so are all magnificent (ignoring the perfunctory endings of both the last two acts), that it seems to me obvious that it ranks with the Requiem as Verdi’s finest work. Yet this richness brings the inevitable problem of casting a large number of roles from strength.

This weekend, by chance, brought us television biographies of the two most famous British women of the 19th century. They were very different programmes, for good reason. Queen Victoria’s Men on Monday was made for Channel 4, so of course it had to be in that channel’s long iconoclastic tradition: General Custer, a great tactician; Captain Bligh, fine navigator and leader of men; the Few, a bunch of snivelling cowards. So, of course, the woman who gave her name to the very notion of propriety, decorum and discretion — ‘a byword for sexual and emotional repression’, as the script put it — had to be nookie-crazed. Or, at least, a great enthusiast. This is not, to be fair, a recent view, invented the other day over a three-bottle lunch in Soho.