Real memories aren’t ‘made’
If I could make a new year’s resolution for everyone in the English–speaking world, it would be that we all…
How to get nothing done
I sometimes wonder whether our government makes any decisions at all. In fact I’m trying to think of any area…
‘There’s no point governing with the brakes on’
Simon Clarke on what the PM can learn from ‘radical’ Liz Truss
Low life
Throughout the flat, post-Christmas limbo I lay languishing after another dollop of chemotherapy and read my Christmas present, Thomas Mann’s…
Write and wrong
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’…
Pre-Raphaelite Tintin
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed…
Hit and myth
I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of…
Turkish delight
A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in…
The stuff that dreams are made of
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal…
Surprise! Surprise!
For centuries, grammarians considered it vulgar and warned against using it too freely – but Jane Austen saw the point of it, says Florence Hazrat
Queen of Hollywood
Kate Andersen Brower has had access to the vast, unpublished archive of Hollywood’s queen - famed for her beauty, diamonds and unhappy marriages
Luminous fables
A downcast cellist discovers that his music cures sick mice and rabbits in one of many tales featuring talking animals in eerie, folkloric landscapes
