The independent bookshops that aren’t what they seem
Independent bookshops remain some of Britain’s loveliest places. Quaint, charming, precarious, they are a bulwark against blandness and offer refuge…
What a shame Andrew Tate didn’t live in ancient Greece
Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As…
Jack Rankin: No to Reform
No to Reform Sir: Perhaps because I have been candid about the Conservative party’s failures in office, I am mooted…
European countries are expanding their militaries. Why aren’t we?
Following America’s extraordinary raid on Venezuela last week, Donald Trump has pointed to Greenland, which belongs to the Kingdom of…
Am I really a tightwad?
Of all the heavyweight books I’ve ever been asked to review, one that most influenced my view of how the…
What has happened to the Paris Opéra Ballet?
Freighted by a 350-year history, the Paris Opéra Ballet is a behemoth of an institution – lavishly subsidised by the…
Ruthlessly manipulative: Hamnet reviewed
Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of…
Cadavers will always captivate. Museums need to chill out
Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been…
Lucy Worsley’s sleuthing is rather impressive
Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all…
Johnny Rotten’s still got it
Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad…
The magnificence of Beare’s Chamber Music Festival
The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one…
Why has the National got it in for Oirish peasants?
The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers…
The genius of Morton Feldman
To accompany an exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2004, a…
The spiritual yearnings of David Bowie
Gnosticism was one of Bowie’s lifelong obsessions and the outer reaches of religious thought inspired many of his lyrics
The scandal of California’s stolen water
Ever since the building of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, begun in 1905, diversion of water by unscrupulous conglomerates has left swathes of the Golden State a toxic desert
Coming of age in Melbourne: Landscape with Landscape, by Gerald Murnane, reviewed
The protagonists of these six linked stories are much like the young Murnane himself, dreaming of becoming a writer and escaping to the wilds of Australia
Odd man out: The Burning Origin, by Daniele Mencarelli, reviewed
An ambitious designer based in Milan returns home to Rome on a visit and finds himself torn between nostalgia for childhood and disgust for his underachieving friends
The many shades of Pink Floyd
Founded 60 years ago, the multi-million-selling rock band has had five incarnations to date, with members dying, resigning or suing each other in a series of blistering law suits
After the party: One of Us, by Elizabeth Day, reviewed
In a sequel to Day’s 2017 novel The Party, the art historian Martin Gilbert dreams of revenge on his former friend Ben Fitzmaurice, now a dazzling Tory politician with a dark secret
The glorious ventilation shafts hiding in plain sight
Victorians took pleasure in artfully disguising these essential life-saving structures – and contemporary architects continue the tradition to equally spectacular effect
The adventures of an improbable rock journalist
Cameron Crowe started writing for Rolling Stone aged just 15. But both as reporter and later as filmmaker, his innate decency made him decidedly ‘uncool’
Global fish stocks have been perilous for decades – so why is still so little being done?
Dredgers continue to destroy the seabed, illegal fishing vessels routinely encroach on no-take zones and governments persist in granting unsustainable catch quotas to their national fleets
