Arts Reviews

Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is nearly two hours of men in bad suits bickering, but if you have to sit through nearly two hours of men in bad suits bickering you would want it to be written (and directed) by Iannucci. So there’s that, but it’s still not up there with his previous film, In the Loop. It’s funny but not as funny, misfires in places, and by the end you are rather thinking: come on, one of you seize power, so we can all just get out of here. On this outing, Iannucci has substituted Whitehall and White House backbiting (The Thick of It, Veep) for Russia

Not many people can say they’ve transformed an entire art form, but Sean Hughes, who died yesterday, aged 51, did just that. His one man show, A One Night Stand With Sean Hughes, changed our preconceptions of what stand-up comedy should be – not by being strident or political, but by rejecting trite one-liners and letting his imagination run riot. I was lucky enough to see this ground-breaking show on its first run at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, before or since. In the summer of 1990, so-called alternative comedy was all the rage – but though the style of stand-up had shifted,

The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919) was Rémy Zocchetto, a 17-year-old apprentice at the Garetta Hotel in Céret in southern France. He is deflated, lopsided, slouch-shouldered, in a chef’s jacket several sizes too big for him. His hat is askew, his body a scramble of egg-white paint. Soutine painted at least six cooks in their kitchen livery. In their chef’s whites they look like meringues that have not set (‘Pastry Cook of Cagnes’, 1922), îles flottantes that do not float (‘Cook of Cagnes’, c.1924), and, in the case of the ‘Little Pastry Cook’ (c.1921) from the

I am, to paraphrase myself, ‘a freethinking middle aged rock ‘n’ roller, still on the toilet circuit hoping it’s a good walk-up.’ Actually, unless I live to be 99 the bit about being middle aged is rather optimistic. Tomorrow it is my half century birthday, but today I hit the road with my Scottish tour manager Jim bound for Ramsgate – Brexit central control. Kent seaside towns are where it all happens: Ted Heath, satanism, Charlie Hawtrey cottaging in maritime pubs. Time stands still in Kent. It’s a very 21st-century kind of place. I am booked on a short tour of the UK to celebrate the release of a new

Want to feel like a kid again? Now, if you’re of a certain age, inclination and fortune, you can. Last week, Nintendo launched its SNES Classic Mini, a modernised and miniaturised version of a console that it first released over 25 years ago. It comes loaded with 20 games from back then, including Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and it has gamers palpitating. The SNES Classic Mini sold out a few frantic minutes after it was first made available to order. Anyone who missed out will have to face the merciless price inflation of eBay. This sort of harkening-back is nothing new

Could it, at times, be frustrating to have taken one of the world’s most famous photographs? Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl’ (1984) is, according to the Royal Geographic Society, the most recognised photo on the planet. You can summon it to mind in a trice: a beautiful young refugee of about 12, her head covered with a rough red shawl, stares out at the camera with those pale green eyes. But what Steve McCurry’s vast, World Atlas-sized new retrospective portfolio shows is just how many other, perhaps even better, photographs he’s taken of the country over the past 40 years; how many other Afghan girls there are in the shadow of