Terminal whimsy
The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but…
Low Life
From our hypothetical drone-mounted camera let us look down into a secluded valley in the same series of valleys as…
The quiet Glaswegian
Robert Jackman talks to Robert Carlyle about Begbie, playing a Tory prime minister and the merits of keeping your head down
Sloes
The gin craze of recent years has reached a scale that would have horrified Hogarth. You can now buy strawberry,…
Letter from Rome
‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of…
A bottle with the battle
Four hundred and fifty years ago this month, a great victory helped to safeguard European civilisation. The battle of Lepanto…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. During lockdown I made good friends with a neighbour who I would never have met otherwise. This man lives…
Virtue signalling is really status signalling
A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white…
What will you buy that others won’t?
In 1966, the legendary adman David Ogilvy set out to buy a home in France. He boarded a transatlantic liner…
Prolific
The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal…
Diary
The wonderful thing about woke narratives is that you only have to wait a while until they collapse. The core…
An idea whose time has come – at last
Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with…
The problem with ‘David’s law’
Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five and a half years. This, one long-serving MP laments,…
Barometer
Drinks at the palace The Queen was reported to have given up regular drinking. What do we know about her…
The ideology of madness
On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for…
A spiritual meditation
‘One player on four strings, with a bow.’ That’s what Bach’s six Cello Suites boil down to, says Steven Isserlis.…
A passionate patriot
Americans regard George III as a power-crazed petty tyrant – but he was the very opposite, says Kate Maltby
A fine finale
Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by…
Names, not numbers
If Joseph Stalin was right about one thing it was his assertion that ‘the death of one man is a…
God is everywhere
Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and…
