Killing Comrade Hampton
Fred Hampton, the young chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, makes a brief appearance in The Trial of the Chicago…
Kate Winslet
It’s been a strange week in the world of arts and entertainment as we slouched to the weirdest plague-governed Oscars…
Science Gallery Melbourne
Sydney is still thrashing around with the historic Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, known as the Powerhouse Museum, while…
Aussie Life
I’ve travelled to Melbourne several times a year since I was a child and visited last month for the first…
Aussie Language
The expression ‘culture cringe’ was coined in 1950 by literary critic A. A. Phillips to describe the cringing assumption that…
Painted out
Sixty years ago, women were still excluded from the art history canon, says Laura Freeman
Pete the Street
‘I’ve been seeing the bare bones of London,’ explains the landscape artist Peter Brown, who is known affectionately as ‘Pete…
Dramatically wrong
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
The problem with football
Anything been happening in football in the past couple of weeks? No? Moving on then… Hang about though. The doomed…
Sleaze
‘Sleaze, sleaze, sleaze!’ exclaimed Sir Keir Starmer in Prime Minister’s Questions last week, hoping that a triple serving might stick.…
As time goes by
There were many moments in Early Morning Riser that made me laugh out loud in recognition. An episode where the…
Dear Mary
Q. Since the relaxation of lockdown, my brother and his wife have started coming to our garden for takeaway meals.…
Problems of communication
I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the…
A necessary evil
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
Prepare for take-off
Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover —…
The Watts Memorial
Folajimi Olubunmi-Adewole died last weekend saving a woman’s life. Hearing her cries as she fell into the Thames from London…
Lost for words
Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without…
Putting on a brave face
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Puzzle pieces
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Trailing clouds of glory
So far as most of us are concerned, steam trains vanished in a puff of smoke back in the 1960s,…
A sting in the tail
Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to…
