Real life
‘We’re renegades now. We’re outlaws. Bandits.’ This was my assessment as the builder boyfriend pulled up outside the house in…
‘Moons are in!’
‘My daughter’s moving to Saffron Walden, away from all this,’ said the railway man at Stratford station, gesturing at the…
The weasel under the cocktail cabinet
Macbeth at the Globe wants to put us at our ease and make us feel comfortable with the play’s arcane…
Being Dead: When Horses Would Run
Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to…
Purest hokum
Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…
Playing it cool
Quite when the concept of coolness became a thing is uncertain, even to etymologists. As early as 1884, an academic…
Taking the biscuit
The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his…
Sonic enchantment
We used to call it a ‘meat and two veg’ programme, back in my concert planning days: the reliable set…
A drama without drama
Past Lives is an exquisite film made with great precision and care about what could have been, even if what…
California dreaming
Adam Sweeting talks to Graham Nash about Joni Mitchell, the Hollies and the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Laurel Canyon idyll of the 1960s
Bad buddy story
A 2023 book about a 1987 film set in 1969, in which multiple characters mourn the end of an era, told through interviews, memorabilia and testimonials from besotted fans
What happened in Berlin?
How it all began: Di Taverner, Service legend David Cartwright and the rest of the Slow Horses make themselves known to the reader in an origin story disguised as a follow-up
Remembrance of feasts past
In 1927, A.J. Liebling sailed from America to study medieval literature at the Sorbonne. Instead, he taught himself how to eat French food
The woman who set our country in a roar
Such was the emotion Anne Boleyn inspired in Henry VIII. But before long that scalding love had turned to a brutalising hatred of his second wife, culminating in her bloody beheading
Fish out of water
As a one-nation Tory, Rory Stewart was not a good fit in the party’s new incarnation. We discover how his desire to make the world a better place was always going to work against him
Sinister science
Set in the near future, the novel examines what is necessary to make us human – while showcasing the base behaviour of those lucky enough to be born with the right genes
A born rebel
Four days after she last saw her, Natasha Walter’s mother Ruth took her own life. The loss throws Natasha into a desperate search for meaning by examining Ruth’s peace-activist past and beyond
A secret sisterhood
Many thousands of women acted as messengers, radio operators and double agents behind enemy lines in both world wars. Here, these resilient and resolute pioneers are retrieved from the mists of history
‘All I desire is fame’
Lucy Hughes-Hallett admires the brave and wayward Duchess of Newcastle, whose idiosyncratic writings astonished 17th-century English society
