The yin and yang of abstraction
In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World…
Triple time
In Competition No. 3296, you were invited to provide a poem whose rhyme words are all at least three syllables.…
Deadbeats, halfwits and losers
Snowflakes, an excellent title, rehashes The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. A guest in a hotel room is visited by…
Heavenly creatures
Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe.…
To be a pilgrim
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an excellent adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s bestselling novel (2012) about a retired old…
Great Dane
Robert Gore-Langton on John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s fraught, botched, triumphant Hamlet
Real life
After a day’s house-hunting in West Cork, I texted the builder boyfriend to say that we were too late. The…
Low life
Monday morning. In comes Frank. Frank is a carer in his late fifties. He comes daily to wash me. Still…
High life
New York The most likely place to be injured, or even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk,…
A chilling childhood
Growing up in New England, in a town simmering with menace, Ruthie suffers the agonies of parental neglect
Wasting away
Aged 14, Hadley Freeman succumbed to it, and was offered many conflicting explanations. She herself finally attributes it to a fear of approaching womanhood
Saving their own skins
Ian Buruma describes three individuals who saved themselves in wartime by betraying others. But none was a ‘typical traitor’, or essentially different from the rest of us
Adieu to Indochina
Vuillard’s powerful novel analyses the French army’s humiliation in 1954 at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and the motivations of the principal players
Sex, drugs and celluloid
Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 43 highly original films, and was planning another when he died – at the same age, and in the same way, as his idol
A naturally conservative country
Their winning formula has been to present themselves as the party of patriotism and economic competence, while stealing the opposition’s clothes whenever it suited them
Maligned insects
Katty Baird braves the cliffs and wind-blasted moors of East Lothian to identify as many species of these maligned insects as possible
A magnificent melting pot
Central Europe has shaped our history for centuries – but will the West always find it baffling, wonders Peter Frankopan
Straight out of Marcuse
‘The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in…
Alan Jones: the sporting blazer brigade strikes again
If Paris still exists by 2024, after the disgraceful rioting and vandalism that have taken place in recent weeks –…
Can Ukraine afford to keep paying its soldiers a fighting salary?
What salary should a soldier receive in a war-torn country? Obviously, there is no number that can make up for…
