Barometer – 210123
Duke out Will the Duke and Duchess of Sussex be invited to Charles III’s coronation? The royal family faced a…
A heroine for our mad times
When the mist lifts and we can see clearly the carnage caused by the trans madness, and we blink and…
Democrat deficit
Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. And this year it was most memorable for two…
What Boris Johnson should do next
If you were rich, foreign and globally mobile, would you choose to move to the UK? The trend, it turns…
Close to perfection
Watch on the Rhine is the curiously misleading title chosen by Lillian Hellman for a wartime family drama that became…
Real life
The nurse fixed me with a disapproving stare: ‘Why is there such a gap between these prescriptions?’ I had gone…
Lounge-funk for vampires
There’s a case to be made for John Cale being the most daring ex-member of the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed…
Low life
Standing at the door was a hospital porter. He was resting an elbow on the back of a heavily padded…
A frog’s-eye view
Whenever I listen to Great Lives on Radio 4, which is often, I am reminded of the gulf between fame…
Made to order
Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end,…
Don’t bank on it
Bank of Dave is the ‘true(ish)’ story, as this puts it, of Dave Fishwick, the Burnley businessman who wanted to…
Worlds gone mad
‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media…
Flights of imagination
Iwan Rhys Morus describes how novelists’ futuristic visions began to be realised by engineers – though the course of invention is more random than he imagines
Cakes and ale
There has never been a golden age or even a very stable one, says Diane Purkiss, in a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time
