Four recessions, runaway inflation, sky-high taxes: who says Baby Boomers had it easy?
Here’s a competition for you: ‘The most irritating discussion on Radio 4 in the past month.’ Answers in not more…
Ruled by the colonies
Men from the Commonwealth – and they are men – are taking over the British establishment’s positions of power
Outplacements
He said, it’s a structural workforce imbalance and I thought where’s the scope for a man of your talents? He…
Last orders at the Death Café
An attempt to break the taboo on mortality with the aid of coffee and biscuits
Fracking the village
What happens when talk of ‘exploratory drilling’ comes to a pretty corner of West Sussex
The war on Barbie
She’s loathed by topless German neo-feminists. But isn’t it time to cut her some slack?
Notes on…Normandy
There are some, I know, who for whom Normandy means the three Cs — cider, cream and calvados. But if,…
Waving, not drowning
Conductors love telling stories, especially stories about other conductors, and every chapter of this otherwise determinedly pragmatic book begins with…
Victorian values
Philip Hensher says that Churchill’s engagement with the empire does not reveal him at his finest hour
Land of hope and envy
Mark Mills is known for his historical and literary crime novels, including The Savage Garden, The Information Officer and House…
No satisfaction
For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues,…
Good timing
‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the…
The Italian job
During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish…
In dialogue with the novel
This year marks the fourth Granta ‘Best of Young British novelists’, begun in 1983, but it is the first time…
Wax now works
Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left…
Siempre
After Neruda Facing you I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred…
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
Virtual art
Michael Prodger finds that new technology is transforming how we experience art – in galleries, on computers and on smartphones too
Bring on the clowns
The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who…
Visual feast
This exhibition was dreamt up by David Boyd Haycock, a freelance writer and curator, following the success of a book…
Taking up the challenge
There are no two ways about it: Wagner’s Ring cycle, the biggest challenge that any opera company can face, has…
Riding high
Wadjda is the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, and was shot by the country’s first female…
