Ruislip Lido
Most mornings, if I’m not too hung-over, I go for a run around Ruislip Lido — a mile there, through…
Cover stories
These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge…
Girl power
Lady Macbeth, which has nothing to do with boring old Shakespeare beyond indicating a certain archetype (huge sighs of relief…
A familiar Ring
Herbert von Karajan established the Easter Festival in Salzburg 50 years ago with a production of Die Walküre that is…
Revolutionary road
Cairo is deceptively calm, says Egyptian film-maker Mohamed Diab. ‘People were so scared from the fighting in the streets that…
A square dance in Heaven
It’s 500 years since Martin Luther pinned his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, sparking…
The real deal
The other day I had a very dispiriting conversation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you…
Ray Davies: Americana
There is some surprise that after all these years Ray Davies has turned his attention to America. He is the…
Mission impossible?
Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday,…
Fallen angel
The Adèsives were out in force at Covent Garden last Monday for the UK première of their hero’s third opera,…
Pleasing pedantry
Christopher Hampton’s 1968 play The Philanthropist examines the romantic travails of Philip, a cerebral university philologist, forced to choose between…
Ribaldry
In Competition No. 2995 you were invited to submit ribald limericks as they might have been written by a well-known…
2307: Obit IV
Clockwise round the grid from 16 run the titles of four works (4,4,9,6,1,5,3,5,3,4,6) by a late great 3 (two apostrophes)…
to 2304: Hexagon
The HEADWORD (26) ‘bail’ appears six times in CHAMBERS (1D). Its different meanings include CROSSPIECE (1A), BAR (25), FRAME (36),…
Dear Mary
Q. New colleagues invited us to lunch but didn’t warn us that the clippings had not been cleared up from…
The wondrous cross
How did the cross, from being such a loathsome taboo that it could scarcely be mentioned, change into an image…
Europe’s best hope
Go into any high street bookshop and find the European history section. There’s usually a shelf or two on France…
Dark secrets of village life
Jon McGregor’s first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, a surprise inclusion on the 2002 Booker longlist that went…
The gangster life of Ryan
Lisa McInerney found a brilliant way to turn heads and hone her craft as the ‘Sweary Lady’ behind the ‘Arse…
A cuckold’s revenge
Perhaps the least necessary piece of advice ever given to a Hanif Kureishi protagonist comes in 2014’s The Last Word.…
America’s other civil war
‘What makes the Red Man red?’ the Lost Boys asked in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). According to Sammy Cahn’s lyric,…
On the way to a lynching
Southern trees bear a strange fruit in Laird Hunt’s seventh novel, a dark historical fiction filled with dreams and visions…
Boxing clever
Thirty years ago, Russell Davies wrote a weekly sporting column in the New Statesman. It proved unsustainable and was soon…
The curse of the Yeti
This book, according to its author Gabi Martínez, is ‘a non-fiction novel’. It tells the story of Jordi Magraner, a…
Fowl play
Cafe Football is in the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, a shopping centre with a faulty name. It…
