Limelight and lucre
Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy…
Battered old bear
The Prime Minister may have lost his bounce –but perhaps that’s no bad thing, says Lynn Barber
Solution to 2477: Rendezvous
The unclued lights take an extra letter to make BRAMBLING (1A), BUDGIE (12A), STARLING (14A), REDSTART (23A), BRANCHER (27A), TURACO…
The gospel of separation
In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance…
Bros your mind
The Climb is, essentially, a bickering bromance as two longtime pals bicker bromantically down the years, and it doesn’t sound…
Hare-brained
Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a…
Who’d want the job of vaccinating the nation?
Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News…
Simply divine
Three shows in a week! Why, it was just like the first week of March. There was, however, little of…
High life
New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no…
Real life
The girl in the posh soap shop put her right arm out, palm flat in my face, and shouted: ‘Stand…
The Hay festival’s uneasy dance with the UAE
The Hay Festival, memorably described by Bill Clinton as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’, has, over the past couple of…
Cannibalism meets feminism
In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England.…
Born in the saddle
The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah…
Solitary drinking
Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing,…
Bridge
When (if) the world returns to normal and live bridge tournaments resume, there are two things I will miss after…
Of man’s first disobedience
Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…
A crazy game of chicken
There’s a reason why No. 10 is always so inclined to ratchet up the tension in any given scenario. Downing…
A race against time
In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from…
Barometer
Special Offa A regulation passed by the Welsh government to prevent people travelling from Covid hotspots in England has brought…
Tabula rasa
Elaborated over a writing career that spans half a century — a career crowned with every honour save the Nobel…
A winning team
Eighty years ago this summer Britain was facing its greatest moment of peril as Göring’s Luftwaffe attacked airfields, cities and…
Fantastic beasts and where to find them
Claudia Massie explores the cinematic majesty and mind-bending visual trickery of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen
A masterpiece of modern manners
Of all the successful modern female writers documenting their search for love, none has been as endearing as Dolly Alderton.…
The staff of life
In the seventh and final chapter of this small but lingeringly powerful book, the author reveals his motivation for writing…
