thu 28/11/2024

Arts News

Listed: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the...

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Listed: The 10 Most Tasteless Album Covers

OK, R Kelly is gross. We knew that. The number of deeply creepy and abusive acts he's been accused...

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Listed: Television's long-runners

In the past weeks there has been a frenzy of publicity about the timelessness of a Time Lord....

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Listed: Who shot/staged/fictionalised JFK?

On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime...

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Listed: The Best of Joni Mitchell

Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better...

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Listed: Nights to remember at the National Theatre

The National Theatre tonight hosts its 50th-birthday gala, 11 days after the English-speaking...

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Listed: Linda Thompson's Top 10 Traditional Songs

"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published...

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Listed: Jane Austen provides

Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of...

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Listed: The 20 best movie songs

Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled...

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Listed: Freudian Analysis

Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th...

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Listed: Screen Bastards

John Lennon once said, "You have to be a bastard to make it. That's a fact. And the Beatles were...

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Listed: Poems inspired by paintings

Poetry has always inspired artists. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the...

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Listed: Sitcoms that became movies

This week sees the release of the eagerly anticipated Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa. And while...

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Listed: Female buddy crimebusters

There's good cops and bad cops, hard cops and soft cops, old cops and young cops, funny cops and...

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Listed: International pop-disco hits

As someone detached from pop music (more a world, classical, jazz kind of guy) I conducted an...

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Listed: Pop tributes to pop icons

Leonard Cohen sang, somewhat indiscreetly, about Janis Joplin “giving head” on his unmade bed, Bob...

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Listed: Whistleblowers

Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone...

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Listed: Actors playing themselves

Imagine a scenario in which Daniel Day Lewis is cast as himself. To get into character, he adopts...

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The best and worst national anthems? Time to award the medals

The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies...

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Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Landman, Paramount+ review - once upon a time in the West

Is there only one Taylor Sheridan? His output is so prolific you’d think there must be half a dozen of them. Although little acknowledged in the...

The Dead, ANU, Landmark Productions, MoLI Dublin review - vi...

James Joyce’s Misses Morkan have gone up in the world for their Christmas gathering this year, from the upper part of a “dark, gaunt house” on the...

All We Imagine as Light review - tender portrait of three wo...

The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light...

Album: Hibernacula - Three Cane Whale

Since their eponymous 2011 debut, Three Cane Whale have kept it small without losing scale. A trio of Spiro’s Alex Vann, Get The Blessing’s Pete...

Jeff Young: Wild Twin review - a box of tricks

The writer, performer, and lecturer Jeff Young’s latest, Wild Twin, tells – ostensibly – the story of his barefoot, Beat-imitative...

Album: The Innocence Mission - Midwinter Swimmers

A sycamore tree is described to an appaloosa horse before it is mounted to ride off to visit a friend. The thread used for sewing evokes a map...

Witches review - beyond the broomstick, the cat, and the po...

From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical ...

EFG London Jazz Festival round-up review - youth, age, and t...

Jazz music crosses, mixes and unites generations, and the 10 concerts I’ve seen at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival (out of more than 300 in...

First Person: singer-songwriter Sam Amidon on working in Din...

Walking in the morning from my Airbnb along the road in West Kerry...