Stuart Jeffries

The guileful, soulful art of Khadija Saye

18 July 2020 9:00 am

Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…

We all need to be let alone —not just Greta Garbo

18 April 2020 9:00 am

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t…

Radio 4's new H.P. Lovecraft adaptation will give you the chills

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the……

Enchanting – but don’t fall for the mummified rubber duck in the gift shop: Tutankhamun reviewed

18 January 2020 9:00 am

Like Elton John, though less ravaged, Tutankhamun’s treasures are on their final world tour. Soon these 150 artefacts will return…

Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500

21 December 2019 9:00 am

Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…

‘The only place I can’t get my plays on is Britain’: Sir Peter Brook interviewed

2 November 2019 9:00 am

‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café.…

A dog’s life is infinitely superior to our own — so let’s embrace it

5 October 2019 9:00 am

The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a…

‘Body’ and ‘Fruit’, 1991/93, by Antony Gormley

A cast of Antony Gormley? Or a pair of giant conkers? Gormley’s new show reviewed

5 October 2019 9:00 am

While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying…

The poetry of sewers

28 September 2019 9:00 am

‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us…

He’s everywhere and nowhere: Jim Broadbent

‘It could be a disaster’: Jim Broadbent talks to Stuart Jeffries about his latest role

13 July 2019 9:00 am

‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most…

Bertrand Russell was portrayed as Mr Apollinax by T.S. Eliot, wittering incomprehensibly and laughing ‘like an irresponsible foetus’

Oddballs of English philosophy

25 May 2019 9:00 am

Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the…

Jane Haynes, self-styled Desdemona of the consulting room, with her dog Dido

Jane Haynes: the shrink who loves to break the rules

27 October 2018 9:00 am

‘I have fallen in love many times in my consulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean…

Jacques Lacan: shrink from hell or the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud?

The selfish shrink: life with Jacques Lacan

7 April 2018 9:00 am

Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise…

Narvik harbour, March 1940

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat

21 October 2017 9:00 am

Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the…