Love letter to a titan
Hampstead Theatre has revived a play about Peggy Ramsay, the legendary West End agent who shaped the careers of Joe…
Can he survive?
Boris Johnson is in the worst trouble of his premiership
An artist of the floating world
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s…
Master of dawn and dusk
Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks to the film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul about sleep, Tilda Swinton and VR
Diary
On Monday, I had a whinge-walk with Lizzie, my friend of 47 years. We met at breathing classes for our…
Bridge
Why is defence so difficult? Why do I have to suffer partner’s incredulous face when I play the wrong card…
Dishonest mistakes
On 20 May 2020, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement on social media which summed up the conditions in the…
Low life
The four portraits of four siblings that Catriona had painted from their photographs over four months were framed, hung and…
Letters
Take care Sir: Your editorial (‘Counting the costs’, 8 January) makes valid points regarding the funding of social care. The…
High life
Gstaad Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black and white TV? Actually it was…
Portrait of the week
Home Boris Johnson admitted to attending evening drinks for about 40 staff in the garden of 10 Downing Street on…
The coming of barbarism
There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his…
Barometer
No vax There is nothing new about the anti-vax crowds supporting Novak Djokovic. Organised protest in Britain began with the…
Reading and self-reflection
‘Male writers now are the opposition party, and that may not be such a bad thing for them.’ So Rob…
Stone cold revenge
The statue of the Bristol merchant Edward Colston is apparently guilty of a hate crime. Let us hope that the…
Freedom or death
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has…
The BBC is killing cricket
Full homage to the nail-biting cricketing miracle in Sydney, while bearing in mind that miracles, like lightning, rarely strike twice…
The ghosts of academe
It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being…
A late awakening
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to…
Variations on a theme
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
The Battle for Britain
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The trees are on the move
Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land.…
Booster shots of sunlight
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto…
Her own master
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
Women beware women
As you may have noticed, it’s something of a golden age for TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are…
