Waking the dead
‘No matter what they take from me,’ sang Whitney Houston towards the end of a peculiar evening in Hammersmith, ‘they…
Bad boys of the Six Nations
Sadly it looks as though the 2020 Six Nations may have to go down with an asterisk and an explanation…
Accentuate the negative
Sky One’s Breeders (Thursday) bills itself as an ‘honest and uncompromising comedy’ about parenting. To this end, the opening scene…
Blind wine-tasting
The cellar room is almost silent save for the sound of slurping and spitting and the odd gentle sigh. One…
Riotous performances
Emma Smith examines the peculiarly disruptive effect of Shakespeare’s plays on American society over the centuries
The worm in the bud
The Mediterranean-centred era spanning a century or so either side of 1492 is filled to the brim with stories. There…
Wild life
Africa ‘Ah, Africa,’ the French scientist sighed contentedly. This was 1995 and all around us was an Ebola epidemic…
The antidote to virus panic is in the hands of entrepreneurs
‘It’s a ghost town,’ said the officer manning the body scanner at Manchester airport — Manchester, New Hampshire, that is,…
Portrait of the week
Home At the beginning of the week 319 people in the United Kingdom had been found to be suffering from…
‘Irish writers don’t talk to each other – they shout abuse’
Sebastian Barry talks to Robert Jackman about family folklore, the joy of writing playsand why he is not an ‘Irish’ novelist
The stuff of nightmares
It must have been hard for Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young to live up to the success of 2016’s devastating…
Apocalypse in East Finchley
I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the…
A thousand and one nightmares
The Moroccan-born Leïla Slimani has made her name writing novels of propulsive intensity. Lullaby, the story of a nanny who…
Letters
Musical inspiration Sir: The interview with Antonio Pappano was splendid for those of us who admire him in Australia but…
The debt virus
It’s always tempting for governments to respond to economic trouble with a debt-fuelled spending splurge, but it’s a notoriously blunt…
The stranglehold of the wokerati
At least none of us will have to pretend that we read Woody Allen’s memoirs. This week the publishers Hachette…
Grandfather’s story
Louise Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa when the US Congress imposed…
Diary
I have been trying to write about a great unpleasantness for some time: the trans debate that we don’t really…
