The Windrush debacle is not as straightforward as it seems
The idea that left vs right has been replaced by open vs closed is one of the most self-serving conceits…
Why China’s happy couples are spending thousands to stand by Big Ben
If you’ve walked by the red telephone boxes on Parliament Square, chances are you have seen an Asian couple in…
The Catholic Church is absent in Ireland’s abortion referendum
The Irish referendum on abortion takes place in just under three weeks’ time, and while the polls suggest a hefty…
Diary of a revolution: Paris 1968, through the eyes of Nancy Mitford
In May 1968, civil unrest, bordering on revolution, exploded on to the streets of Paris. Student protesters and striking workers…
Good grief: Death isn’t something you just get over
Just over a year ago, my best friend dropped dead. He was in his early sixties and many of us…
Welcome to Matlock Bath, the ‘Switzerland of Derbyshire’
Revisiting cherished childhood memories can be dispiriting; everything appears diminished and one leaves questioning the nature of perception. Were we…
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
The songs my father’s mistress taught me ignited my love of France
When John Julius Norwich was a boy, his father was British ambassador in Paris.School holidays were spent in the exceptionally…
The best single-volume history of the Great War yet written
The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians…
The splendour and squalor surrounding the Sun King
The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established…
Zen tales and flights of fancy: Patient X reviewed
The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of…
Root and branch: Richard Powers is determined to save the world’s trees
This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a…
Knickerbocker glories: feminism, fashion and the bicycle
One September day the 16-year-old Tessie Reynolds got on her bike. In a homemade suit, she pedalled from London to…
The ordeal of being married (twice) to John Bellany
Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013)…
The futile gang wars of New York
I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging…
The long arm of the Russian super mafia
Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…
Couldn’t Diana Evans’s fretful couples just shut up and deal with it?
My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I…
The misery of policing the US–Mexico border
Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona…
Who needs Jordan Petersen when we have Ferdinand Mount?
You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star…
The London painters that conquered the world
This is an important, authoritative work of art criticism that recognises schools of painters, yet displays the superior distinctions of…
The young Descartes: I fought, therefore I thought
Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking.…
How Riccardo Chailly brought joy – and Italian opera – back to La Scala
As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has…
Is PewDiePie the new Harold Bloom?
The most subscribed to channel on YouTube — by far — belongs to a rather strange young Swede named Felix…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
Arlott and Swanton — the Disraeli and Gladstone of cricket?
E.W. Swanton’s first published article appeared in All Sports Weekly in July 1926, soon after his 19th birthday. Thence, swiftly,…