Film, TV, music, arts and culture.
British fashion has always been shaped by creative exchange: forged inside melting pots, authored by radical style communities – and often fuelled by class and migration. Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed the distinct emergence of a new genre centred…
Long before modern medicine could name the invisible terrors ravaging Victorian Britain, the public found a face for contagion: the vampire. A new exhibition at the University of Leeds’s Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the…
What does a haunted castle look like? Perhaps you imagine a ramshackle or imposing structure with towers, pinnacles and undefined spaces hidden in the shadows; some of its “prickly” gothic details picked out by moonlight. Threateningly ill-defined buildings, enough for…
This autumn marks the 20th anniversary of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s elaborate and deeply sorrowful film about a young girl caught between two dangerous worlds in rural Spain in 1944. The film tells the story of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero),…
Fantasy accounts for only about 28 minutes of Pan’s Labyrinth’s 119-minute running time, yet these supernatural scenes are what many viewers remember most about Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film. A rewatch 20 years on makes it easy to see why.…
Chay Tee/Shutterstock Fashion is currently trapped in a hyper-accelerated trend loop. Every week there’s a new “core” or “maxxing” style to contend with – such as balletcore or whimsymaxxing. They zoom in and out of our cultural consciousness with alarming…
Director Lance Oppenheim creates a grim and grubby world in Primetime, steeped in the sweat and compromised ambitions of its characters. But below the film’s grimy surface is a sharp examination of the personal and professional concessions people make in…
Stories of wandering spirits and the restless dead were common in the Middle Ages. These ghostly encounters were recorded in a wide variety of medieval literature. Medieval ghost stories combined folklore traditions with religious doctrine. The widespread belief in purgatory…
Blood is the word. Blood in every sense. Gjak: Tales of Blood, written by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, was a massive success on publication in 2014. It won the prestigious Academy of Athens award and has become one of the most widely…
First awarded by France Football magazine in 1956, the Ballon d’Or has grown from a relatively modest sporting honour into football’s most prestigious individual accolade. Its recent history has been dominated by the superstar rivalry between Argentina’s Lionel Messi and…
Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer (from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) by Richard Redgrave (1836) V&A, CC BY-NC Gulliver’s Travels, first published on October 28 1726, is a masterpiece of satire that continues to have the power to provoke, to…
