Yes sir, we can boogie
It’s dance — but not as you know it. A giddy mass of flying limbs, sashaying hips and pouty faces.…
Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room
The Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room is a gorgeous bit of Inside. Like any coastal town, Southwold has an awful lot…
This charming man
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is set during the American Civil War and is about a wounded Union solider, Corporal John…
Stitches in time
When Martha Ann Ricks was 76 she travelled from her home in Liberia to London to meet Queen Victoria. The…
Jay-Z: 4.44
Grade: B – All criticism is pointless, I suppose, given the sheer magnitude of the Shawn Corey Carter machine —…
Mixed blessings
Japan is the only developed country where people openly espouse two distinct and incompatible religions at the same time —…
The view from Germany
Frankfurt ‘This is not about punishing Great Britain,’ declared Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s interim foreign secretary, on his recent visit to…
The lesson of Liu Xiaobo
Eight years into his 11-year prison term, Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner, is dying. He is the…
Game changers
Have you been cheering for the excellent Johanna Konta at Wimbledon? Go, Jo! Or should that be Go, Yo? Johanna…
Free as a jailbird
Food programmes are having a strange effect on me: I watch them and feel nauseated. Masterchef, The Great British Bake…
Letter to my uncle (contd)
Dear Uncle James Thank you for your thought-provoking comments on my last letter (8 July). I accept that personality played…
Risk assessment
Someone at the Buxton International Festival had a wry smile on their face when programming this year’s trio of operas.…
A tale of two artists
Wherever one looked in the arts scene of the 1940s and ’50s, one was likely to encounter the tragicomic figure…
The good Palestinian
Shubbak, meaning ‘window’ in Arabic, is a biennial festival taking place in various venues across London. The brochure reads like…
Diagnosing diversity
Our Constitution and the debates leading to it make clear our founders assumed citizens would enjoy five great liberal democratic…
Laughing matter
In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did…
2318: Groundwork
One unclued light (four words) is the title of a 40 recorded by 43 (two words). This title forms a…
to 2315: Trunk call
4, 40, 43, 1, 3, 16 and 17 were all examples of PORTMANTEAU words, into which are packed the sense…
Dear Mary
Q. Is there an etiquette regarding security gates? My wife and I were invited to dinner by new neighbours who…
I nourish my dream of a fat pill
As good conversation should, the talk meandered from the serious to the playful. One of the serious topics was overseas…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
Beyond the pale
You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of…
Voices of exile
During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of…
China syndrome
Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s…
Self’s obsessions
This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a…
