Could your 50p coin be worth much more?
‘I have not found anybody yet who has a good word to say for the new coin,’ Sir Douglas Glover…
Greek tips on how to beat Iran
In 500 BC, Persia (modern Iran) was the most powerful state in the known world, ruling an area of more…
‘Happy Friday!’: resist the tyranny of faux niceness
Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished…
Brace for higher inflation
All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, the 24-mile-wide choke point between Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, through…
Stunningly original: Sound of Falling reviewed
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, which won the Jury prize at Cannes, explores the lives of four generations of women…
Bonkers: Young Sherlock reviewed
Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not…
Morrissey is pop’s prophet of England
Morrissey is back. And he’s sassy as hell. At the O2 on Saturday night, the once-waifish Smiths frontman turned stocky…
Fans of George Eliot are in for a shock: Bird Grove at Hampstead Theatre reviewed
Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is a comedy of manners set in 1841. A portly suitor, Horace, arrives at…
Flexible and imaginative: Wednesday at the Roundhouse reviewed
How is it that two things that are fundamentally the same can be completely different? Two bands, each harking back…
A parade of monstrous and toxic generals: Beatriz Gonzalez reviewed
You might be forgiven for thinking that a charity sale of particularly kitschy furniture has been set up just past…
‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’
By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is…
Will the Houses of Parliament burn down?
What does £450 million get you these days? With that cash, you could buy a Premier League football club. Or…
The curse of gold for the Asante nation
Vast quantities of gold recovered from the alluvial riverbeds of west Africa attracted the attention of British colonialists, leading to ruthless pillage throughout the 19th century
The glory and tragedy of Trafalgar
Nelson’s great naval victory may finally have delivered Britain from the threat of French invasion, but his death left the nation in deep mourning
The sorrows of the young Melvyn Bragg
His first impression of Oxford University in 1958 was of ‘effortless wealth and privilege everywhere’ and, feeling like a foreigner, he pined for the familiarity of close-knit Wigton
Seeing the trees for the wood
Coppicing and pollarding are essential if trees are to produce wood in perpetuity for any useful purpose, making woodland heavily dependent on human management
How Ulysses horrified the stuffed shirts of New York’s literary establishment
The magazine editor Margaret C. Anderson’s spirited attempts to introduce Joyce’s masterpiece to 1920s America resulted in a court case and heavy fine for disseminating obscenity
Ghastly middle-class materialism: The Quantity Theory of Morality, by Will Self, reviewed
Self’s latest satire suggests that a world where the avaricious prosper, and the meek inherit the debts of the unscrupulous, contains a limited amount of morality
A nasty little tale about a marriage: Look What You Made Me Do, by John Lanchester, reviewed
The life of recently widowed Kate is cast into further turmoil by a hit TV series which suggests that her husband had been having an affair with its scriptwriter
‘Evil visited that day and we don’t know why’ – Dunblane 30 years on
Stephen McGinty describes the stunned bewilderment of parents and teachers at the atrocity – and the powerful resistance to the campaign to ban handguns in the aftermath
