Culture (Page 226)

Review at a glance “I wish I was a child again,” David Bowie sings on Can’t Help Thinking About Me, the 1966 song that was the first he ever released under his assumed name. That’s a feeling he achieved in spirit on Toy, a “lost” album revisiting his Sixties workContinue Reading

Review at a glance Oh dear. In this stiff production by Roxana Silbert, Nell Leyshon’s “play with songs” about the history of English folk music addresses interesting questions about who owns a nation’s culture with clunking obviousness. Which is ironic, given it’s about a man who supposedly saved England’s folkContinue Reading

You know it’s going to be a good year for art when choosing even your top 12 shows is agonising. We are in for a huge art treat in 2022, and a pleasingly diverse one, too. So while there are plenty of timeless crowd pleasers like Van Gogh and Raphael,Continue Reading

But more recently what has made these artists bedfellows is their financial dealings: all have sold the rights to their back catalogues for hundreds of millions. Bruce Springsteen recently sold the rights to his music to Sony for $500 million, the Red Hot Chili Peppers sold their music for aContinue Reading

When 17-year-old Margaret Whigham made her society debut in 1930, resplendent in turquoise in a sea of young women dressed in traditional white, she was an instant sensation. Named London’s “debutante of the year” (one report said she was “a thoroughbred in a field of hacks”) she would be laudedContinue Reading

Review at a glance Things are ominous from the off in this new BBC six-parter. The music is brooding; the landscape, arid and Australian, is bleak; the protagonist, played by Jamie Dornan, is stony-faced and irritable. And within minutes, our man is hurtling through the outback in a rickety oldContinue Reading

Artist Es Devlin is among the capital’s cultural heavyweights recognised in the New Years Honours. The designer and artist, whose work includes West End theatre hits and London’s Olympic ceremonies, has been awarded a CBE. Devlin, who made her name with large scale installations, designed the UK pavilion at theContinue Reading

JK Rowling has admitted to ripping up the first few chapters of her upcoming novel in a tell-all Q&A with fans on Twitter. Answering a fan who asked the Harry Potter author, worth £820 million, for advice on finishing their first book, Rowling replied: “Today, I reread the first 14kContinue Reading

Celebs and chefs, eh? If there’s one they don’t lack, it’s self-belief, as evidenced by the raft of cookbooks they’ve come out with this year. Here, we’ve rounded up some of the most notable releases of 2021, from the actors we knew could perform on screen but had no ideaContinue Reading