James Walton

1967 and all that

29 July 2017 9:00 am

As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…

Playing Stalin for laughs

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…

Candid camera?

15 July 2017 9:00 am

Channel 4’s Catching a Killer offered the rare TV spectacle these days of a middle-aged white male copper leading a…

Mad about the girls

1 July 2017 9:00 am

It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are…

Never knowingly understated

17 June 2017 9:00 am

At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner)…

The sting of betrayal

10 June 2017 9:00 am

This may seem an odd thing to say about a writer who’s been officially declared a National Living Treasure in…

Heaven knows they’re miserable now

3 June 2017 9:00 am

On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in…

Police force

20 May 2017 9:00 am

I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…

1932. Right, John Cockcroft adjusts a pump at the Cavendish Laboratory's atom splitter. Left, Ernest Walton sits working in the detector of a Cockcroft-Walton generator.

Arms race

6 May 2017 9:00 am

Like most documentaries, Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story (BBC4, Wednesday) began by boasting about all the exclusives it would…

Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, 1969, photography by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson

Cover stories

29 April 2017 9:00 am

These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge…

A cuckold’s revenge

29 April 2017 9:00 am

Perhaps the least necessary piece of advice ever given to a Hanif Kureishi protagonist comes in 2014’s The Last Word.…

Psycho thriller

22 April 2017 9:00 am

Psychological thrillers — or ‘thrillers’ as they used to be known — have become almost as ubiquitous on television as…

Age as allegory

8 April 2017 9:00 am

Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most…

The man who’s read everything

1 April 2017 9:00 am

According to Martin Amis in The Information, the last person to have read every book ever published was Coleridge. Faced…

Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope 'wearing the kind of hat not seen since the glory days of All Creatures Great and Small'

Beyond belief

25 March 2017 9:00 am

As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas…

On the money

11 March 2017 9:00 am

Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic…

On the money

9 March 2017 3:00 pm

Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic…

‘SS-GB’ takes the commitment to the crepuscular a lot further than most

Occupational hazard

25 February 2017 9:00 am

Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime…

‘SS-GB’ takes the commitment to the crepuscular a lot further than most

Occupational hazard

23 February 2017 3:00 pm

Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime…

‘SS-GB’ takes the commitment to the crepuscular a lot further than most

Occupational hazard

23 February 2017 3:00 pm

Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime…

The game butcher, with dead rabbits and live, caged ones beneath. (Scene from the 1840s)

Tricks of the trades

18 February 2017 9:00 am

Oddly enough, one of the most historically influential pieces of British writing has turned out to be an essay that…

The game butcher, with dead rabbits and live, caged ones beneath. (Scene from the 1840s)

Tricks of the trades

16 February 2017 3:00 pm

Oddly enough, one of the most historically influential pieces of British writing has turned out to be an essay that…

Impaired vision

11 February 2017 9:00 am

With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having…

Impaired vision

9 February 2017 3:00 pm

With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having…

Hull’s a poppin’

4 February 2017 9:00 am

In early January, lastminute.com recommended its top 15 destinations for 2017. In 12th spot, just above Montreal, Croatia and Japan,…