Everything is now an Instagram photo op
On Sunday morning, in Puy-en-Velay, I climbed the 275 volcanic steps to the tiny chapel of Rocher Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe. There,…
Is Emmanuel Macron having a meltdown?
Emmanuel Macron was elated when France won the World Cup in July. The photograph of him leaping out of his…
The National Student Survey is having a terrible effect on academia
Should university students really feel ‘satisfied’? Or would we rather they felt challenged? For the honchos of higher education, the…
The guilty pleasure of the McDonald’s drive-thru
My wife and I have a set routine after landing back at Gatwick. We collect our bags, clear customs and…
Books of the year – part one
Andrew Motion Short stories seem to fare better in the US than the UK, and among this year’s rich crop,…
Celebrating the 1918 Armistice resulted in thousands more deaths
Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice…
Boys’ Own adventures in the war-torn Middle East
Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need…
Baron Haussmann: the man who set Paris straight
Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera…
Unfolding mysteries: the drama of drapery in Italian art
The striking yet subtle jacket image from Donatello’s ‘Madonna of the Clouds’ announces this book’s quality from the outset. Its…
Farewell to cricket as the archetypal English game
At the beginning of August this year, the England test team played what is supposed to have been the 1,000th…
The Statue of Liberty is a deeply sinister icon
Immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century discovered in Upper New York Bay, after a long, uncomfortable…
The Victorian melodrama that led to murder and mayhem
Early on the morning of 6 May 1840, a young housemaid in a respectable Mayfair street discovered that her master,…
The ancient Greeks would have loved Alexa
Among the myths of Ancient Greece the Cyclops has become forever famous, the Talos not so much. While both were…
A darkly comic road trip: The Remainder, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, reviewed
You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays…
For the sake of art as much as society, it’s time to stop remembering the war
A cascade of poppies falls from ‘weeping windows’ across Britain. A 50-metre drawing of Wilfred Owen appears in the sand,…
One of the best plays I’ve ever seen: I and You at the Hampstead Theatre reviewed
Lauren Gunderson’s play I and You opens in the scruffy bedroom of 17-year-old Caroline. Lonely, beautiful and furious, she’s unable…
Like today’s conceptual artists, Burne-Jones was more interested in ideas than paint
‘I want big things to do and vast spaces,’ Edward Burne-Jones wrote to his wife Georgiana in the 1870s. ‘And…
Thanks to Making a Murderer, Wisconsin’s bovine incompetence has been exposed
I wonder if Wisconsin has any idea what an international embarrassment it has become? By rights it ought to be…
When the first world war ended, many soldiers were left with ‘a terrible empty feeling’
‘It was so unreal,’ said one of the first world war veterans about the long-awaited Armistice. It was the most…
Why David Byrne deserves every penny he makes from his tour
Let’s get the ‘was-it-good?’ stuff out of the way first. Yes, it was good. It was better than good. It…
Exquisite and riveting: Wildlife reviewed
Wildlife is an adaptation of the 1990 novel by Richard Ford about a family coming apart at the seams, and…
One of the last living avant-gardists speaks – Gyorgy Kurtag on his new Beckett opera
Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last…
There’s nothing radical about Mike Leigh’s films
So there I was in Soho Square on a cold and rainy morning, nibbling my complimentary almond croissant and eagerly…
Trump has driven the American media mad
New York An old-fashioned party is a gathering of friends invited by the host or hostess, who foots the bill.…
The perils of smoking three-year-old Glaswegian skunk
Three years ago we were given a bag of skunk, Catriona and I, provenance Glasgow. It was one gigantic dried…
