History will soon judge this fraught time
Good stories have a dénouement. The Act III moment when all is revealed and the narrative comes in to land…
Don’t blame snowflakes – grown-ups are the idiots
San Francisco must be the virtue capital of the world. (The latest: just across the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted…
Now is the wrong time to tackle rising boardroom pay
The average FTSE 100 chief executive earned £3.5 million last year — 117 times the £29,574 pay of the average…
Battle begins
What makes Boris Johnson an improvement on Theresa May? Those of us who cheered him on into 10 Downing Street…
Germany’s military has become a complete joke
It is not hard to think of times when German military weakness would have been lauded as good news across…
What does Totnes think of Sarah Wollaston, its defecting MP?
‘Totnes? It’s hippie central.’ A friend warned me what to expect when I visited the affluent, left-leaning town in south-east…
‘Bob Dylan? He’s like Confucius’: Cerys Matthews interviewed
‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ was a Christmas classic for more than half a century until people suddenly began to worry…
The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric
Cristiano Ronaldo is a Portuguese expert on forests who also plays football, so when he shared a picture online of…
What I’ve learned from five months sleeping on the streets
Over the years, I have spent around five months sleeping rough on the streets of London, Birmingham and New York,…
A bridge to the past: Tintagel’s complex history
Halfway across the brand new bridge that links the two halves of Tintagel Castle, there’s a gap where you can…
Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?
Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity…
When Decca records were part of everyday life
In 1929 in America, Dashiell Hammett published his debut hardboiled novel Red Harvest, over in Paris Buñuel and Dalí began…
Taking pride in household chores really can ease depression
There are many books about what it’s like to live with mental illness and the aftermath of child sexual abuse.…
Something in the air: Broken Ghost, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
Broken Ghost begins in the aftermath of a rave on the shores of a mountain lake above Aberystwyth, with three…
Sympathy for literature’s least unheroic characters
Whether we see the primary cause as being postmodernism (for decades we’ve been told that our master narratives no longer…
When the Grand Design met ‘le Grand Non’: Britain in the early 1960s
Peter Hennessy is a national treasure. He is driven by a romantic, almost sensual, fascination with British history, culture, and…
If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret
Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time…
Why did Mrs Lowry hate her son’s paintings?
‘I often wonder what artists are for nowadays, what with photography and a thousand and one processes by which you…
Whooshing seedlings and squabbling stems: Ivon Hitchens at Pallant House reviewed
Set down the secateurs, silence the strimmers. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. Ivon Hitchens was a…
Watching Stephen Fry was like being in the presence of a god
Stephen Fry lies prone on an empty stage. A red ball rolls in from the wings and bashes him in…
Why are so many operas by women adaptations of films by men?
Opera’s line of corpses — bloodied, battered, dumped in a bag — is a long one. Now it can add…
The joys of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth
I first heard Lemn Sissay talking about his childhood experiences on Radio 4 in 2009. At that time he was…
Sensational: The Souvenir reviewed
Joanna Hogg’s films are the antithesis of popcorn entertainment so if it’s not the antithesis of popcorn entertainment that you…
I like Brassic but the reason it’s getting such glowing notices is depressing
Brassic (Sky One) feels like the sort of TV comedy drama they last made about 15 years ago but would…
Needed a shot of Stolichnaya: The Tchaikovsky Project reviewed
Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their…
