Keith Michell
So the lockdowns end, even in Melbourne, and we get a glimpse of what artistic performance may loom in a…
Kiwi Life
Lorde vs Lana People who live in glass houses really shouldn’t get changed with the lights on. Doubly so, one…
Aussie Language
When New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet announced the re-opening of the state he said: ‘We can’t remain a hermit…
To Di for
Jasper Rees talks to the Chilean director Pablo Larrain about his new film, Spencer, which makes The Crown look like royalist propaganda
The changing face of war
The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies…
Doomed youth
Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer…
On borrowed time
I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It…
Much ado about nothing
Andrew Mitchell, as he readily admits, was born into the British Establishment. Almost from birth, his path was marked out:…
Tongues will wag
One September day in 1649, in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Anthony Dorchester returned from church to the house…
Thoroughly hooked
Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing…
Sin and salvation
Where does the artist end and their work begin? Like 2015’s Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s new ballet swirls creator and…
Letters
Hard to reconcile Sir: Although not an Anglican, I appreciate Michael Nazir-Ali’s dilemma (‘A change of mind and heart’, 23…
Portrait of the week
Home The Queen will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next week; she had resumed light duties after having…
Halloween turnips
You see them everywhere in vast orange mounds: pumpkins, piles of pumpkins, large enough to be turned into a coach…
How to stop another Grenfell
Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry is a gripping, horrifying drama. Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have sifted through the public…
My conflicted loyalty to Newcastle United
The second thing I learned about football, after moving to London, is that you can never, ever switch your allegiance.…
My COP26 message: pay more dividends to save the planet
Climate emergency demands action, not rhetoric. So, on the eve of COP26, which UK news item promises to deliver the…
The art of listening
There’s a great documentary film on Netflix at the moment about the late artist Bob Ross, he of the happy…
Take two women
Passing is Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novella (1929) about two biracial women, one of whom chooses to…
Sunak’s surprise
The Conservative party has always sold itself to voters as the party of low taxation, but it has now pushed…
Satisfaction guaranteed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
