For Pester of TSB, like Patterson of BT, the only way is exit
Should he stay or should he go — or will he already have gone by the time you read this?…
Trump vs Nato: the trade war is becoming a security crisis
For Theresa May, the most worrying part of Donald Trump’s talks with Kim Jong-un came two days before the two…
I rented out my home. The tenants turned it into a brothel
I had been in Los Angeles for less than a month when I received the call from a concerned neighbour…
All hail Æthelflæd! The first Brexiteer
This week, Prince Edward was paying tribute to a much-loved Queen. Not ‘Mummy’ — but Queen Æthelflæd, Alfred the Great’s…
Marxism didn’t die. It’s alive and well and living among us
I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my…
Becoming German has helped me understand Brexit
In the end, after all the waiting, the document didn’t look like much — a sheet of A4 paper adorned…
I rely on soup kitchens for food and friends
I was born in north London, at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and at the age of 62, after many…
No wi-fi, no TV and no neighbours – staying with the Landmark Trust is bliss
About halfway across Lundy, if you’re trudging from the landing bay towards the north lighthouse, there’s a tiny holiday cottage…
It took a long time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’
When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies:…
The story of the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade is a high adventure
Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the…
The scandal of American shipping – incompetence, venality and shocking safety standards
‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions…
Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There: A Novel, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of…
Russia’s obsession with securing a warm-water port changed the history of Central Asia
In the 13th century, having overrun and terrorised Europe as far as Budapest, and in the process possibly bringing with…
American Histories, by John Edgar Wideman, reviewed
This new collection of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories comes across the pond as one of four handsomely packaged volumes…
The Shape of the Ruins, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, reviewed
What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the…
Happy Little Bluebirds, by Louise Levene, reviewed
In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote…
Climbing Everest with Brian Blessed is the nearest anyone will get to encountering the yeti
In 1969 the body of an ape-like creature, preserved in ice inside an insulated box, came to light in Minnesota.…
It’s the wreckage of alcoholism, not the road to recovery, that makes for enthralling reading
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Colombia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever,…
The wit and wisdom of Dr Johnson is still of benefit to us all
The most irritating of recent publishing trends must be the literary self-help guide, and Henry Hitchings’s contribution to the genre…
Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers, by Ryan O’Neill reviewed
Almost 120 years ago, the Australian writer Henry Lawson offered some counsel to those who came after him, writing that…
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
Why has the National given over its largest stage to one of the nation’s smallest talents?
The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been…
A full-on Freudian Oklahoma! at Grange Park Opera
Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side…
Longborough continues to be a refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing idiotic productions
Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off…
Exhilaratingly original, C4’s Flowers is much more than just a ‘dark comedy’
On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines,…
