His own best creation
Once a beacon at events with his sunglasses and white ponytail, the designer who revived many failing fashion houses has left nothing of himself behind
Courtiers and connoisseurs
Charles I’s patronage of the arts, in particular, inspired his courtiers to commission their own family portraits and spend fortunes on acquiring Venetian masterpieces
Inside the Factory
When two teenage typists employed by Andy Warhol start tagging along to his amphetamine-fuelled parties, their lives spiral out of control
The first scientist
A mere fragment survives of the Greek philosopher’s work, but other sources attest to his bold ideas about the universe, human evolution and the weather
Ghosts of the past
Painful memories resurface for a retired detective when his help is sought with a cold case murder
The masque of life
The actors who appear to be doing nothing are now the ones most revered – but acting is natural, says David Thomson: it’s what we all do all the time
The battle for the Nile
The explorers’ journey to solve the great geographical puzzle of the Victorian age, and the bad blood it resulted in, is described in gripping detail by Candice Millard
A modern witch-hunt
For centuries, elderly women have been scorned as crones, hags and scolds – but it’s not only men who are belittling them now, says Victoria Smith
The problem of our insignificance
Alexander Masters examines the top down cosmology proposed by Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog
What Belarus gets out of its friendship with China
What has Alexander Lukashenko been up to in China? The purpose of the Belarusian President’s three-day visit, according to state…
Business schools are dating apps for the super-rich
“D’you know what the acronym MBA stands for?” The twenty-seven-year-old who asked me this had a deep tan and fluorescent…
San Francisco reparations and the Golden Age of Revision
We live in the Golden Age of Revision. Not everyone has noticed, so let me mention some of the highlights…
Matt Hancock’s Covid social media frenzy
Another day, another painful set of WhatsApp messages about Matt Hancock. Yet again the Daily Telegraph have released another batch…
Super self-own
The libertarians are having an ‘I told you so’ moment. A friend of mine who has long championed not putting…
The green movement faces a painful confrontation with reality
Environmentalism is the ruling ideology of our times. Forget neoliberalism. That peaked around 2000 and was definitively dethroned by the…
Will the last company to leave the City please turn out the lights?
It would have been bad enough if just one major British company had decided to list its shares in New…
The lack of trust in Joe Biden’s government is dangerous
The recent conclusion by the Department of Energy that Covid likely originated in a Wuhan lab is only the latest…
The problem with the BBC’s Manchester bombing coverage
The BBC have reacted to the Manchester Arena bombing, carried out by an Islamist maniac, by providing us with a…
Theresa May is the true villain in this latest Tory Brexit war
The blond bombshell has criticised Sunak’s new Windsor Framework as not passing the Brexit test of taking back control. He’s…
What’s in a name?
Someone, I think it was Martin Amis, once said that you can judge a novelist by how much effort he…
Captain Cook’s Aboriginal spears belong in Cambridge, not Australia
On the eve of the First World War, Trinity College, Cambridge deposited four spears collected by Captain Cook during his…
Four things we learnt from the Boris Partygate probe
Today the privileges committee has published its initial report into whether Boris Johnson lied to the House of Commons about…
The madness of the lockdown trials
I think we can now admit that Covid sent us all a little loopy. Matt Hancock certainly seems it, handing…
How much longer will MI5 cloak its incompetence in secrecy?
The incompetence of MI5 in failing to prevent Salman Abedi detonating his bomb at the Manchester Arena in 2017 beggars…
Five things we’ve learned on day three of Hancock’s lockdown files
Ping! It’s day three of the ‘Lockdown Files’ and a whole new tranche of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s WhastApp…
