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…
From now on you can assume that every TV-drama cast is female-led
From time to time, a TV show comes along which is so thrillingly original, so wildly imaginative, that you can’t…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Lean on Pete is a beauty
Andrew Haigh makes inaction films. Weekend (2011) tells of two young homosexuals getting to know each other in Nottingham. In…
No one can beat Mary Cassatt at painting mothers and children
A lady licking an envelope. An intimate thing. It might be only the bill from the coal-man she’s paying, but…
A dated and remote two-hour polemic basking in #MeToo topicality: The Writer reviewed
Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic…
The rise – and rise – of Trump Derangement Syndrome
New York ‘What do we do with these men?’ thundered a New York Times headline. It was followed by a…
On giving and taking offence
‘Slight prick,’ she said. The nurses all say that before they slide the needle in the upstanding vein in the…
Why suburban ladies really play tennis
Because my mother is always telling me everything will be all right if I join a tennis club, I’ve joined…
Tripping in the African bush
Laikipia, Kenya Neighbours Tom and Jo came by with a bucketful of wild African mushrooms, which they had collected in…
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,…