Giving the devil his due
The Sopranos – the greatest television show in history – far outshines its progenitors, says Tanya Gold
No cojones
It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard…
Sub standard
Tense, claustrophobic, gripping, thrilling, realistic: just some of the adjectives no one is using to describe BBC1’s Sunday night submarine…
The yumminess of paint
‘Painting has always been dead,’ Willem de Kooning once mused. ‘But I was never worried about it.’ The exhibition Mixing…
Teenage kicks
For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria…
Hot metal and methadrine
They may no longer get many teenagers at their shows spending all their money on merchandise, then throwing up on…
2524: Spelean II
Clockwise round the grid from 20 runs a quotation minus one word (1,2,4,4,4,1,4,1,5,4,4,9) followed by an honest servant’s name. Unclued…
Crime and punishment
How do we have difficult conversations? Especially in an age of polarisation, where everything is immediately politicised? But also where…
Cold spell
Frozen the musical declares war on woke politics. The 2013 Disney movie has been turned into a song-and-dance show that…
Roll out
I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the…
The war that changed the world
It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking…
A family pilgrimage
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
Low life
With a French health card everything is free for us cancer patients, even taxis to and from the hospital. ‘This…
News from nowhere
The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on…
Two class acts
Not many people would have seen that coming. I’m talking of course of last Saturday evening and the women’s final…
High life
Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells…
The scramble for affluence
In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited…
Diary
During one of the interminable lockdowns I mentioned that I didn’t care if I never went to another launch party…
The truth about lies
There were two remarkable things about Emma Raducanu’s wonderful win at the US open last week. The first was the…
