1 hour ago Sumo stars balance power, intricacy and spectacle at London showcase

An enraptured crowd soaked up the atmosphere at the first official sumo tournament held outside Japan in 34 yearsAt 6pm exactly, the first, and only, professional sumo dohyo anywhere outside Japan was finally ready. It had taken four days to build. The clay, shipped up from Kettering, where, the experts said, the earth had just the right consistency, had been shaped, sculpted, pounded into a stage, the six-tonne wooden canopy had been joined, and hung from the roof, the rice-straw bales had been beaten into shape with empty beer bottles, brought over especially for the purpose, and laid in a circle around the ring, the arena had been blessed by three priests, doused with saki, and strewn with salt.Outside, an eager crowd was gathering underneath the streaming banners. There were corporate sorts, charging their bar bills to company expenses, a troop of diplomats, going to glad hand the Japanese ambassador at a VIP reception, and an awful lot of sumo super fans, some of them big ...

Politics

6 h. ago ‘Theatre is an elitist artform for privileged people’: Daniel Day

Speaking at the London film festival, the triple Oscar-winner mounted a fierce defence of movies and method acting, although he conceded My Left Foot couldn’t be made todayThe actor Daniel Day-Lewis railed against audiences being priced out of theatres, and what he perceived as a continued snobbery concerning cinema in the UK at an event at the London film festival.Speaking to the critic Mark Kermode for a lengthy conversation in front of an audience at the BFI Southbank, Day-Lewis said he felt “there’s still an elitism in this country that theatre is the superior form”. His drama training at the Bristol Old Vic school had encouraged in him the sense that theatre work was the goal. “Then there’s films: bit dodgy. Television: like, really? OK, you gotta pay the gas bill. That was the thinking. Continue reading...

Politics

6 h. ago $3 million Gabriele Münter painting leads Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2025 opening sales.

$3 million Gabriele Münter painting leads Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2025 opening sales.  Artsy

Economics

10 h. ago A notorious nude and pages from the Guardian? Claire Fontaine’s dazzling show has got the lot!

The duo behind Claire Fontaine discuss their new exhibition, which explores everything from prison atrocities to neon profanities – and even pairs this newspaper with a Courbet masterpieceThe work of Claire Fontaine is filled with rich and complex objects and images whose status and meaning is constantly in flux. There are jokes. There is a handwritten text in watercolour, copied out again and again, freeing the writer from the injustices of their ancestors (I AM FREE, it concludes). There is work riffing on Marcel Duchamp’s moustachioed and goateed Mona Lisa, swapping his ribald but puzzling 1919 caption LHOOQ with LGBTQ+. There are book jackets about Palestine’s wrecked ecology and visual activism in Palestine post 7 October, each wrapped around blocks of stone, like messages to be sent crashing through somebody’s window.At the 2024 Venice Biennale, Claire Fontaine’s neon signs reading Foreigners Everywhere appeared and reappeared, written in dozens of languages, around the Giardi...

Politics

10 h. ago Frieze London 2025: Big Galleries Report Strong Sales by Early Afternoon

Frieze London 2025: Big Galleries Report Strong Sales by Early Afternoon  ARTnews.com

Politics

12 h. ago Dana Schutz review – an orgy of gloop from the painter who outraged New York

Thomas Dane, London The artist, whose painting of Emmett Till caused a scandal, is back with a grotesque, cartoonish, deeply political commentary on American societyDana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. The American artist’s first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but there are some big messages smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick. Continue reading...

Politics

18 h. ago More rice, bigger chairs and reinforced toilets: sumo wrestling comes to London | Andy Bull

Royal Albert Hall to host Grand Sumo Tournament marking only the second time a full competition is held overseasThey play Major League Baseball at the Olympic Stadium, Tottenham’s ground is a second home for the National Football League, the National Basketball Association is staging a game at the 02 Arena next year, and South Africa just beat New Zealand in a rugby Test at Twickenham, but it’s been a long time since London has hosted anything on the scale of the Grand Sumo Tournament taking place at the Royal Albert Hall this week. Forty wrestlers have flown over from Japan to compete in it. That’s around six tons of elite athlete to be fed, watered, transported and supported.“We’ve actually had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight,” says Matthew Todd, the Royal Albert Hall’s harassed director of programming. “Our usual standard is only 100kg.” They’ve also had to reinforce the toilets. “It’s the ones that are screwed into the wall which are the most ch...

Politics

18 h. ago More rice, bigger chairs and reinforced toilets: sumo wrestling comes to London

Royal Albert Hall to host Grand Sumo Tournament marking only the second time a full competition is held overseasThey play Major League Baseball at the Olympic Stadium, Tottenham’s ground is a second home for the National Football League, the National Basketball Association is staging a game at the 02 Arena next year, and South Africa just beat New Zealand in a rugby Test at Twickenham, but it’s been a long time since London has hosted anything on the scale of the Grand Sumo Tournament taking place at the Royal Albert Hall this week. Forty wrestlers have flown over from Japan to compete in it. That’s around six tons of elite athlete to be fed, watered, transported and supported.“We’ve actually had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight,” says Matthew Todd, the Royal Albert Hall’s harassed director of programming. “Our usual standard is only 100kg.” They’ve also had to reinforce the toilets. “It’s the ones that are screwed into the wall which are the most ch...

Politics

31 h. ago Runner dies after collapsing at finish line of London's Royal Parks Half Marathon

Kory Russell received medical treatment before being rushed to hospital by ambulance

Events

32 h. ago Albert Herring review – ENO heralds new era with witty staging of Britten’s story of a mummy’s boy

Coliseum, LondonEnglish National Opera’s first shared production between London and Salford is a fluent and finely sung take on Britten’s 1947 comic opera. Antony McDonald’s lively staging gives the slender tale a sitcom feelThis is English National Opera’s first production shared between London and Greater Manchester – where the company has been obliged to plan to move its base, following Arts Council England’s diktat. The choice of a relatively small-scale opera – necessary in the circumstances – means it was never going to be the kind of show to announce the new era with a bang. Albert Herring is Britten’s 1947 work based on a slender 19th-century French story about a mummy’s boy suddenly finding freedom calls for only a small orchestra and no chorus, so the company won’t be heading en masse to Salford next week. It’s regular fare at music colleges thanks to its large and even cast, but this staging, surprisingly, is an ENO first.Billing Antony McDonald’s production as a semi-sta...

Politics

34 h. ago Thousands gather at London’s Trafalgar Square to celebrate Diwali 2025 in grand style. Watch | Trending

Thousands gather at London’s Trafalgar Square to celebrate Diwali 2025 in grand style. Watch | Trending  Hindustan Times

Politics

35 h. ago NFL London and Dublin 2025: Schedule, reviews and previews ahead of Jaguars vs Rams Wembley showdown

NFL London and Dublin 2025: Schedule, reviews and previews ahead of Jaguars vs Rams Wembley showdown  DAZN

Politics

40 h. ago Ofcom issues update on suicide forum as charity calls for it to be taken down

Ofcom has released an update about an active pro-suicide forum following pressure from a Mirror campaign investigating the stories of suicide victims who ingested a lethal poison

Events

46 h. ago Watch all the panel videos from Deadline's 2025 Contenders Film London event that included the movies Wicked: For Good, F1: The Movie and more. Read more below.

Watch all the panel videos from Deadline's 2025 Contenders Film London event that included the movies Wicked: For Good, F1: The Movie and more. Read more below.  Facebook

Culture

49 h. ago 2025 Week 7 Travel Photos: Rams vs. Jaguars Week 7 | London Edition

2025 Week 7 Travel Photos: Rams vs. Jaguars Week 7 | London Edition  Jaguars.com

Culture

57 h. ago Microsoft (MSFT) Teams Up with London Stock Exchange for ‘Agentic’ AI Built on Financial Data

Microsoft (MSFT) Teams Up with London Stock Exchange for ‘Agentic’ AI Built on Financial Data  TipRanks

Politics

59 h. ago H is for Hawk review – Claire Foy is tremendously authentic in eccentric grief drama

London film festival: Foy convinces as a grieving academic who trains a goshawk in this film based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoirCan training a goshawk cure grief? Or treat it, in some way? Will keeping it indoors – hooded so that it remains calm – and then taking it out hunting allow you to reconnect radically with nature in a way that prissy townies will never understand? Or is this just a domesticated festival of cruelty to both bird and prey and a symptom of serious depression? Philippa Lowthorpe’s intriguing, likably performed if slightly precious film – based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoir from 2014 – addresses these questions, but can’t quite deliver the Hollywood redemption narrative that it appears to offer: the story of a woman in the depths of melancholy who is helped through the darkness and, we have to assume, out the other side, by her goshawk, whimsically named Mabel. (Macdonald used she/her pronouns at the time of publication and came ...

Events

64 h. ago All beliefs are welcome in London – we cannot allow extremists to divide us | Sadiq Khan

Attacks against Jewish and Muslim communities are on the rise, and some politicians are exacerbating tensions by appealing to our worst instinctsSadiq Khan is mayor of LondonFor the first time in three years, hate crime in England and Wales is on the rise. The latest statistics released by the Home Office, showing religiously motivated offences at a record level, are deeply disturbing. But for those who have witnessed some of the appalling scenes on our city’s streets in recent months, they will not be surprising.Over the past two years, Jewish people have faced a rising tide of antisemitism, and the heinous terrorist attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur was a terrible reminder of just how pervasive this poisonous form of hatred continues to be. Between January and June, the Community Security Trust reported more than 1,500 antisemitic incidents. A survey by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that 35% of Jewish people feel unsafe in the UK.Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London...

Politics

65 h. ago ‘A palette unlike anything in the west’: Ben Okri, Yinka Shonibare and more on how Nigerian art revived Britain’s cultural landscape

To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stageSome primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context. The ...

Politics

66 h. ago TfL cinema campaign encourages Londoners to 'befriend' passengers being harassed on the Tube

679 hate crimes, 500 sexual offences and 271 cases of sexual harassment on public transport in London in first half of 2025

Events