America

High life

5 August 2017 9:00 am

I’ve stayed far away from the new barbarians with their choppers, tank-like cars, home theatres on board, and fridge-shaped super…

Scabrous and sarcastic: singer-songwriter Randy Newman

His dark materials

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…

Scabrous and sarcastic: singer-songwriter Randy Newman

His dark materials

3 August 2017 1:00 pm

Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…

An airborne early warning system leads fighter jets during a military parade in Beijing

China syndrome

15 July 2017 9:00 am

Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s…

Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar

8 July 2017 9:00 am

Boy is she fat, and getting fatter. I realise this is something we’re not meant to mention when talking about…

The monkey-brained case for Donald Trump

4 June 2016 9:00 am

A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference in New York. ‘Where would be the best…

Even fruitcakes and fascists are more popular than the flaccid centre

28 May 2016 9:00 am

A depression has settled on the Liddle household ever since Norbert Hofer narrowly failed in his bid to become the…

The view from New York tells me that Trump can win it

21 May 2016 9:00 am

   New York I have never seen anything like it. If Adolf Hitler were running for president, he would match…

Long may we Brits laugh at our absurd demagogues

23 April 2016 9:00 am

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of…

Millepied’s final spring programme for the Paris Opera Ballet is brazenly American

9 April 2016 9:00 am

Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a…

Catherine Tate’s talents are wasted on this meandering musical about nuclear fallout

26 March 2016 9:00 am

Miss Atomic Bomb celebrates the sub-culture that grew up around nuclear tests in 1950s America. The citizens of Nevada would…

Sister act: Zawe Ashton and Uzo Aduba in Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’

Jean Genet’s fascinating play, The Maids, is botched at Trafalgar Studios

19 March 2016 9:00 am

The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact…

Donald Trump's angry America

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Welcome to Trump’s America, where greed is great and viciousness beautiful

America would never join anything like the EU. Yet they urge us to stay

20 February 2016 9:00 am

America is urging Britain to stay in the European Union. But it would never dream of joining a comparable organisation

Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugo Glass

I admired it - but also desperately wanted it to end: The Revenant reviewed

16 January 2016 9:00 am

The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish…

What I learned from arguing about gun control with my Texan uncle

9 January 2016 9:00 am

Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the massacre in San Bernardino last month, I think immediately of my…

Could a change of body language make a difference to American policing?

9 January 2016 9:00 am

One of the most shocking items of recent news has been the bald statistic that the number of people shot…

The best - and worst - podcasts

2 January 2016 9:00 am

My resolution this New Year is to get to grips with podcasts, to brace up and embrace this new aural…

It is time to join the fight against IS in Syria

5 December 2015 9:00 am

The Islamic State is as monstrous an enemy as we have seen in recent history. It crucifies and decapitates its…

I’ve never thought much of John Lennon’s music – until now

10 October 2015 9:00 am

It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it…

Robert Peston has got it all wrong about ties —viewers want broadcasters to look humbly respectful

3 October 2015 8:00 am

When Robert Peston, the economics editor of the BBC, interviewed George Osborne on television in an open-necked shirt with collar…

Andrew Garfield in 99 Homes

It will tear your heart out: 99 Homes reviewed

26 September 2015 8:00 am

99 Homes is an American drama about house repossession. Bummer, you might think, but here is what you don’t yet…

Nixon with Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld in 1969

Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is a masterpiece

19 September 2015 8:00 am

I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…

I lived next to St Paul’s Cathedral as a baby in 1940 – it’s a miracle I am alive

5 September 2015 9:00 am

While the Germans were raining bombs on London during the second world war, the architects’ department of London County Council…

Hirohito, MacArthur and other villains

4 July 2015 9:00 am

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…