The problem with empathy
Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs…
I need a helping hand
I first realised something was wrong with my hand last Thursday evening. I’d been invited by a friend to go…
Folk wisdom gets so much wrong
I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom…
Why I’m leaving the UK
I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by…
Do I have a ‘work addiction’?
What follows may suggest that I require an ‘intervention’. Readers might even interpret this column as a cry for help.…
Doom and gloom
Born in Tsarist Kyiv in 1898, Golda Meir grew up with what she called a ‘pogrom complex’. That perhaps explained…
Sledgehammer tactics
If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one.…
Godot with gags: It’s Headed Straight Towards Us, at Park200, reviewed
It sounds like a barking-mad student sketch but the final product is marinated in wisdom and maturity. It’s Headed Straight…
Band of brothers
Over the past few years, the National have become the most important band in modern rock music. The strange thing…
Embarrassing bodies
While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive…
The full English
Opera North has launched a ‘Green Season’, which means (among other things) that the sets and costumes for its new…
Comic relief
‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls…
Romancing the stone
Calvin Po on the revival of building in the solid, sustainable, dependable material that lies readily beneath our feet
