Late news: what was really served at the Mansion House banquet
Plus: Why HSBC is wrong to contemplate bringing back the Midland
The invasion of Italy
With 50,000 boat people in just six months, and more to come, the politics of asylum here is becoming increasingly toxic
Fiuggi
L’acqua di Bonifazio This spa town sparkles on its hilltop: hydros, park For ballo liscio; stands For…
Censoring Jews
The bid to ban men from seeing The Gift of Fire sets a very dangerous precedent indeed
Imposter syndrome
The former health secretary’s shift to the left wasn’t a purely cynical move; it’s more personal than that
‘Quitting is suffering’
His life-saving invention has always been designed to drive out cigarettes. Why can’t public health panjandrums see that?
The green house effect
True, I’ve not turned on a radiator for two years – but in spring and summer it’s miserably, and sometimes dangerously, hot
Sharks are awesome!
It’s the fear that makes them so fascinating. If conservationists accepted that, they’d have a better chance of saving them
Country house opera
The English approach to opera and the open air betrays our national discomfort with the art form
Guardians of an ideal
Are the French really natural-born philosophers? Sudhir Hazareesingh’s portrait in How The French Think is affectionate, familiar and fondly teasing
Broken dreams
In The Tsarnaev Brothers Masha Gessen tells the alarming story of a family who didn’t belong anywhere — but were determined to make their mark
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
Swords of honour
Whether dutiful, chivalrous, flamboyant or just plain quarrelsome John Leigh’s literary duellists make engaging subjects in Touché.
Style over substance
The Festival of Insignificance, Milan Kundera’s first novel in a decade, is short, defiantly self-conscious — and fatally lacking in enjoyment
The new rules of dating
Stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari reveals some very unromantic modern mating practices in Modern Romance
Salvation through music
Instrumental is an unflinching misery memoir about abuse from early childhood — but James Rhodes’s anger seems equally directed at himself
Awfully arrayed
Talleyrand should not have sneered at the Austrian regiments — they actually won a surprising number of battles, as Richard Bassett’s For God and Kaiser shows
One vast, blaring cultural circus
Sinclair is one of our finest writers, says Michael Moorcock, and London Overground is one vast, pumping, blaring, rattling, melancholy, celebratory cultural circus
Curious shades of Browne
Hugh Aldersey-Williams ‘wrenches’ the brilliant 17th-century polymath into the 21st century — simply in order to express his own disappointment with the modern world
Elysian fields
Far from being a left-wing utopia, the music festival operates according to principles many Conservatives hold dear
Forward thinking
Damian Thompson thinks Michael Finnissy’s History of Photography in Sound might also hint at a way forward for composers wondering where to go next
Fairground attraction
Plus: some fine paintings reminiscent of Manet at the Serpentine Gallery. And is there more to Duane Hanson than his ability to trick?
Own goal
Plus: a Beckett play that Lloyd Evans found slightly boring, occasionally funny, entirely pointless and rather enjoyable
A sting in the tail
Lumpen, leaden and horribly inert, the film veers off in so many tedious directions you’ll need several espressos to keep you awake
Between Kafka and Crossroads
Plus: a dud from Jonathan Dove at Opera Holland Park and a scorcher from Harrison Birtwistle at Aldeburgh
