Low life
Then dear old Dolly drove down from Essex to pay her respects. It was a brave effort because she hasn’t…
Sentimental value
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
The lady vanishes
Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may…
Going like the clappers
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing…
A toast to democracy
Not everything in the entire world is going to hell in a half-track. A few days ago, I tasted some…
Pulling on the heart strings
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…
Beware the digital revolution
It is often said that Rishi Sunak has no idea what it is like to survive on a low income…
An honest doubter
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s…
Beyond satire
Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’…
Pitched battle
The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram…
…and cold
It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My…
Blowing hot…
Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have…
Oh yes she is!
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog…
Northern star
Laura Gascoigne on the shadowy Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, whose painting in the Uffizi upstages the masterpieces of Botticelli
A true giant of the game
Few sights in the history of cricket have been more thrilling – or more terrifying for batsmen – than the…
Don’t they know it’s Christmas?
When I imagine the perfect Christmas lunch, I think of the end of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge turns…
The rise of the citizen confronter
News and social media loves a good ‘vox pop’; you know, the voices of those near the Main Road of…
Elon Musk makes it up as he goes
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the script has been flipped. Pontificators at all points of the ideological spectrum are spinning…
John Howard was right about Medicare
The Hawke government introduced Medicare in 1984. Once John Howard replaced Andrew Peacock as Opposition Leader in 1985, Howard repeatedly…
Is Putin hiding away?
December is usually a busy month for Vladimir Putin, but not this year. In the run-up to Christmas, Russia’s president…
