From Shaolin wall-runners to caged birds and S&M clubs, these images have all inspired their own Granta magazine stories – and now is your chance to buy one Continue reading...

The comedian, author and presenter learns about the long shadow of British colonialism. Plus: it’s the Interior Design Masters final. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading...

2024-25 programme includes premieres of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Festen and Wayne McGregor’s Margaret Atwood ballet MaddAddam Eight new productions, a world premiere, a European premiere – and a name change: the Royal Ballet and Opera, as it is now to be known, announced on Tuesday an ambitious programme across the main and the Linbury stages for...

He pitched slave-ship dramas to Ingmar Bergman, cast Marlon Brando as a bisexual man and wrote a Malcolm X screenplay that horrified the FBI. Why was this cinephile spurned by Hollywood?It’s fair to say James Baldwin wasn’t a fan of The Exorcist. “It has absolutely nothing going for it,” he wrote in his 1976 memoir-meets-criticism collection The Devil...

British Museum, London Michelangelo’s drawings were anything but dull, but this exhibition sucks out all the drama by focusing on his spirituality at the expense of his sexuality Lord Elgin, you let us down. With all the masterpieces of world art that Britain’s rapacious collectors grabbed from hither and yon, couldn’t they have got their hands on a...

US research suggests that 92 minutes is the optimum length for a film. But I have sat through long films that felt short and short films that felt buttock-annihilatingly long I can still remember sitting down to Theo Angelopoulos’s legendary epic film The Travelling Players and noting that it was 222 minutes long and thinking … sure, cool, two hours...