This Cultural Life

Jonathan Anderson was appointed as creative director of the French fashion house Dior in March 2025, becoming one of the world’s most influential designers. As creative director of the luxury label Loewe for 11 years from 2013, he led a rebranding of the Spanish company, and was hailed a critical and commercial success. He’s also run his own label JW Anderson since 2008, and launched collaborative lines with high street brands incl...

Jackie Kay is one of the best known and most popular Scottish literary figures. A poet and novelist, she served as Makar - the name for Scotland’s poet laureate - for five years from 2016. Since her debut poetry collection The Adoption Papers in 1991, she has published 20 works of fiction and verse for adults and children, and a memoir about meeting her biological parents called Red Dust Road. Jackie Kay was made a CBE for services...

American artist Kerry James Marshall is one of the world’s most important living painters. Marshall has been making his large-scale, vividly colourful evocations of African-American life for over 40 years. His figurative paintings are rich with symbolism, metaphor and visual references to both social history and his favourite artists from the past. A 1997 painting called Past Times, which evokes works by Seurat and Manet, sold at a...

Swedish-born Alicia Vikander won global acclaim in 2015 for playing Vera Britten in Testament Of Youth, and a humanoid robot in the thriller Ex-Machina. The following year she won an Academy Award for her supporting role with Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, along with a Screen Actors Guild Award and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Since then her diverse range of screen roles have included playing a spy boss in the film Jason...

Classical trumpeter Alison Balsom talks to John Wilson about the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired her career. Having recorded 17 studio albums since 2002, she has been named Gramophone Artist of the Year, won three Classical Brit Awards, along with an OBE for services to music. She has performed with leading conductors and orchestras around the world, including at the Last Night of the Proms.

Producer: ...

Comedian, writer, musician and actor Eric Idle talks to John Wilson about his creative influences. A founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, he wrote and performed across their four television series and films, including The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. As a songwriter, he was responsible for much of the Python’s musical comedy, including Always Look on the Bright Side of Life and The Galaxy Song.

He created the...

Anselm Kiefer is one of the world’s greatest living artists. Born in Germany at the end of the Second World War, much of his work in paintings, sculptures and vast installation pieces, has addressed his country’s history and culture, asking difficult questions about the legacy of fascism and conflict. His paintings, thickly layered and sometimes embellished with straw or molten lead, often depict dark rutted fields or dense forests...

Children’s writer and academic Katherine Rundell is the multi-million selling author of adventure stories including Rooftoppers, The Wolf Wilder and The Explorer which won the Costa Children’s Book of the Year. Impossible Creatures, the first of a five book series, was named Waterstones Book Of the Year in 2023. Her biography of the 17th century poet John Donne was a non-fiction bestseller and she became the youngest ever winner of...

Composer Steve Reich is one of the most influential musicians of modern times. In the 1960s he helped rewrite the rules of composition, using analogue tape machines to experiment with rhythm, repetition and syncopation. As the godfather of musical minimalism, his influence on Philip Glass, David Bowie, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and many other composers, has been enormous. Countless dance music producers also owe a debt to piece...

Painter Jenny Saville, renowned for her large-scale portraits of fleshy, naked women, made her name soon after leaving art school when her graduation exhibition work was bought by collector Charles Saatchi. In 1997, her work was also part of the landmark Royal Academy show Sensation, alongside now iconic pieces by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others. Since then, the main focus of her work - which has been shown in museums and gall...

Composer Alan Menken is the winner of more Academy Awards in competitive categories than any other living person. He’s best known for his scores for the animated Disney films including The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. His first big hit was the musical Little Shop Of Horrors - one of several he created with lyricist Howard Ashman, his longtime writing partner. Other stage musicals include Sister Act,...

Gillian Anderson’s breakthrough television role in the sci-fi series The X Files made her a global star in 1993, and she played cool-headed Agent Dana Scully for nearly a decade. She also starred in period dramas, including an acclaimed film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The House Of Mirth and, on television, in Bleak House, Great Expectations and War and Peace. Her theatre credits include A Doll’s House, A Streetcar Named De...

Pete Townshend is the songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of The Who. The band first stormed the pop charts sixty years ago, with teenage anthems including I Can’t Explain, Substitute and My Generation. Broader songwriting ambitions led him to create the rock opera Tommy in 1969, and the concept album Quadrophenia four years later. Both projects were adapted as films, and Quadrophenia has now been staged as a ballet by Sadlers Wel...

Pianist James Rhodes was a relative latecomer to a professional music, and was 30 when he performed his first concert. In 2010 he became the first core classical pianist to be signed to the world’s biggest rock music label, Warner Brothers. He has recorded nine albums, including his most recent one, Mania, which features work by Bach, Chopin Brahms and other composers. He has also presented television documentaries about classical ...

Since the late 1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has made work in response to conflict and political violence, drawing on the testimonies of victims to create metaphorical sculptures and installations about trauma, loss and survival. She is now recognised as one of the most important living artists, with work shown in museums and galleries around the world, including in the turbine hall of Tate Modern in 2007. Doris Salcedo is...

Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason was born in Nottingham in 1999 into a big musical family. He and his six siblings all grew up learning classical instruments, and appeared on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015. Sheku first made his mark as a solo performer the following year when he won the BBC Young Musician Of The Year competition. In 2018 a global audience of over a billion watched him perform live at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of...

Choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor is one of the most acclaimed, innovative and influential figures in contemporary dance. His works are often the result of creative collaborations with artists, musicians, filmmakers, or with scientists to explore technological issues. In 2006 he was appointed as Resident Choreographer at the Royal Ballet. He has created more than 20 new works at Covent Garden in that time, including Chroma, set to m...

Actor Sir Simon Russell Beale is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest actors of his generation. He has played many leading roles at National Theatre and RSC, including Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. He is currently starring in Titus Andronicus at the RSC. His awards include three Olivier Awards, two BAFTAs, and a Tony Award in 2022 for his leading role in The Lehman Trilogy, which had transferred from London. Simon Russell Beale...

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of nine novels. Her debut, After You’d Gone, was published 25 years ago this year and won the Betty Trask Prize in 2001. Her 2010 book The Hand That First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award; and Hamnet, her hugely acclaimed and bestselling story of the death of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for fiction. Maggie O’Farrell has also written a memoir; I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes w...