The dangerous cult of ‘toxic parents’
Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion…
Cooking up a storm
I don’t always watch ‘Strongest Viking’ competitions on cable. But the other day I was channel-hopping and became mesmerised by…
Wild life
Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat…
Real life
As I slapped a rude note on a car parked outside my house, I realised that nature was taking its…
High life
Patmos While green Rhodes and greener Corfu burn away, arid Patmos remains fireproof because rock and soil do not a…
Good cop, bad cop
It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…
Clueless
The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which…
Brought to book
‘We all secretly want to be rock stars,’ the 2022 Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka said recently. By ‘we’ he…
Between two worlds
The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men…
More shell shock
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) began as a joke in 1984, a parody of the superhero culture of the time.…
Too hot to Handel
If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is…
Renaissance woman
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The…
All my world was a stage
Robin Ashenden remembers the heyday of local repertory theatre – now sadly in terminal decline
Four disparate intellectuals
Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism
Passports out of hell
Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible
Marks out of ten
Like a weary schoolmaster toiling over his pupils’ homework, Peter Kemp dispenses praise, encouragement or reproof to modern fiction’s big-hitters
The good stepmother
Jean entertains her young stepdaughter Leah with drawings and fairy stories – but the two grow sadly estranged in this haunting novel with its own fairy-tale similarities
Towering infernos
Our unpreparedness was vividly illustrated by the catastrophic Canadian inferno of 2016 – originally judged a minor brushfire beyond Fort McMurray’s city limits
The great betrayal
Racism in Britain may be less acute than in America or even France, but the false promises made to the Windrush generation have left a bitter aftermath
Tunnels of love
With their elegant entrances and blend of Art Nouveau, Romanticism and Modernism, the white-tiled stations of the Parisian underground are works of art in themselves
In the library of Babel
Sarah Hart discusses the Oulipo group, Jorge Luis Borges and Eleanor Catton among other writers who have explored the use of mathematics in their works
