Respighi’s Roman Trilogy: Sinfonia of London/ John Wilson
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
Great Scott
Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…
Return to gender
Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer,…
Lounge pants
At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been…
Vital signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
Dear Mary
Q. My son has moved his girlfriend into our fairly small house for the second lockdown. I am grateful for…
A bit previous
In Competition No. 3175 you were invited to submit a prequel to a well-known poem. C. Paul Evans’s opening to…
Farewell to four of the finest
So the Good Lord really wants to fill out his team: how else to interpret the passing in recent months…
Speed freaks
Writing in January, I described internet bullet chess, where the players have one minute for all their moves, as ‘popular,…
Gravestones
A parishioner in West Yorkshire has been allowed to put an inscription in Chinese on a relative’s gravestone. ‘There is…
High life
New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great…
Letters
Still distant Sir: In James Forsyth’s analysis (‘Boris’s booster shot’, 14 November) he infers that a vaccine, if provided to…
Real life
The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the…
Barometer
Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced…
Bring me sunshine
In the dark days of a terrible winter, Elizabeth David began writing her first book, about Mediterranean food. The timing…
Trump’s revenge
Donald Trump may be a narcissist, but since he is not mentally ill in the technical sense, he is not…
The making of a monster
Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the Great War, is consumed by bloodlust, which…
Portrait of the week
Home Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, left Downing Street after a week in which…
Strength though suffering
Greatness. Genius. Can you bottle it? Is there a formula? Inspired by his Radio 4 series Great Lives, Matthew Parris…
The march of the fascist mushrooms
It has been too long coming. While conscientious and decent liberals have tried to explain why, to their horror, millions…
Seeing anew
The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque,…
