Letters: AI won’t save the army
Brute force Sir: General Sir Nick Carter is correct to point out the fragility of the UK’s armed forces today…
Japan’s female leader is a bright beacon, but do her sums add up?
My scepticism towards soaring markets with unconvincing fundamentals was nurtured by working in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, when the Nikkei…
The BBC’s Lord of the Flies is mesmerically brilliant
I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding…
Mumford & Sons are trolling themselves: Prizefighter reviewed
It is axiomatic that most artists spend the first few years of their career trying to achieve some level of…
Eye-catching but superficial: ‘Wuthering Heights’ reviewed
Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ had purists losing their minds from the get-go. They lost their minds at the casting –…
No chemistry between the performers: Arcadia at the Old Vic reviewed
The Old Vic’s production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard has a vital component missing. The house. Stoppard’s brilliant historical comedy…
Warhol meets Rauschenberg: John Giorno retrospective reviewed
At the end of last week, I caught a budget flight to Milan to see a woman. As soon as…
The early-music movement is ageing well
The early music movement: it’s grown up so quickly, hasn’t it? The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is 40…
The problem with the new Shakers biopic
Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th–century Manchester, celebrated for put-downs worthy of Coronation Street’s…
Searching for the one and only is futile, say the sexologists
Forget the idea of ‘the perfect match’. Humans are hardwired by evolution to form strong pair bonds and we should marry those who are good for us
The lost world of the pinball machine
In a touchingly Proustian memoir, Andreas Bernard hymns a youth spent flipping small steel balls in bars and resort arcades throughout Europe and America
The citizens of nowhere adrift in the West
Threatened with violence in her native Turkey, the writer Ece Temelkuran finds herself, like countless migrants, permanently ‘unhomed’
No good deed goes unpunished: A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed
Kind, liberal Gloria Bonaventura opens her New York home to a young Honduran woman, but soon comes to regret the decision
The two faces of modern Japan
The principal cities still appear youthful and vigorous, but the interior is near to collapse after decades of neglect and economic stagnation
Why Leonard Cohen felt empowered to pronounce benedictions
The musician, who never really abandoned his Orthodox Jewish hinterland, took to heart the fact that being a kohen entitled him to dispense priestly blessings
Growing up with thieves, murderers and heroin addicts
Aged ten, Jonathan Tepper was manning phones and scheduling deliveries at his parents’ drug rehabilitation centre in San Blas, Madrid – ‘a rescue shop within a yard of hell’
Rupert Murdoch’s warped vision of family
The absentee father, who always put his media empire first, enjoyed playing his children off against one another – with crippling consequences
Trumponomics is working
Remember the old quip about economists? “That’s all very in practice,” they say, “but how does it work out in…
Will Merz get his ‘transatlantic reset’ with America in Munich?
The Munich security conference started with a bang today. Breaking with tradition, German chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference with…
Twelve things we learned this week
When I started out in Westminster in 2001, the parliamentary lobby was a very hierarchical place and the press gallery…
What does it take to get fired from Trump 2.0?
You’re not fired! One of the defining aspects of the second Trump administration so far has been the unwillingness of…
Is this Irish man really an ICE victim?
Over the past few days there has been a flurry of stories and official statements about Irish national Seamus Culleton,…
Palestine Action and the problem with human rights law
The Divisional Court has dramatically upheld a legal challenge to the decision of the then-Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, to proscribe Palestine Action…
