America
Is there method – or madness – behind Trump’s actions in Iran?
Leaders are often accused of escalating a conflict abroad in order to distract from headaches at home. On Tuesday, before…
What is a ‘tergiversation’?
Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It…
Full of fascinating data and excellent comedy: Messiah at Stratford Circus reviewed
I’ve joined the Black Panthers. At least I think I have. I took part in an induction ceremony at the…
Scorsese at his most leisurely, meandering and engrossing: The Irishman reviewed
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic — a mobster-a-thon, you could say — starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino,…
The story behind Donald Trump’s fake withdrawal from Syria
That noise you can hear is Donald Trump flip–flopping in the sand. Last week, American troops and dozens of tanks…
Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed
The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it…
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
Angry, cold, self-centred, opaque, disconnected and brutalising: Bronx Gothic reviewed
Sometimes it’s hard to describe a play without appearing to defame the writer, the performer and the theatre responsible for…
The fanatical thinking that’s on its way to British schools
For anyone who isn’t following the long march of racial self-flagellation through America’s institutions, last week’s revelations about the excesses…
Adversity is the new diversity – and it disadvantages everyone
To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this…
We’re all self-haters now
As an American coming of age at the fag end of the 1960s, I celebrated self-loathing. Everything about the United…
Nyong’o is spellbinding but the plot is ultimately baffling: Us reviewed
Us is a second feature from Jordan Peele after his marvellous debut Get Out, which was more brilliantly satirical than…
Crackles with nylon, self-regard and unearned privilege: On the Basis of Sex reviewed
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too ill to sit on the Supreme Court. When she saw On the Basis of Sex,…
Portrait of the week: May’s historic loss, Brexit chaos and the US shutdown
Home Brexit threw politics into unpredictable chaos. The government was defeated by an unparalleled majority of 230 — 432 to…
According to BBC4, what was one of the ‘most important inventions in modern music’?
Here’s a tricky quiz question for you. What word completes this sentence from a BBC4 documentary on Friday: ‘The world…
Why 1919 wasn’t the year it’s cracked up to be
Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read…
Trump’s 19ft Christmas tree and 300lb gingerbread house are quintessentially American
The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us…
The man I knew as Vishnu: remembering George H.W. Bush
The world knew him as ‘Bush 41’. I knew him by a different name -during the time I worked for…
The Democrats’ obsession with Beto O’Rourke is a sign they’re in trouble
Washington, DC Ever since America elected Donald Trump, Democrats have fantasised about removing him from power. They’ve dreamed of…
When the first world war ended, many soldiers were left with ‘a terrible empty feeling’
‘It was so unreal,’ said one of the first world war veterans about the long-awaited Armistice. It was the most…
Trump’s anti-Iran vendetta is starting to backfire
It says something about the level of political discourse in America that Donald Trump decided to trumpet sanctions on Iran…
The march of the migrants poses a dilemma for America
Trump has hinted that Democrats may have been secretly funding the ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Honduran immigrants trooping towards…
Its producers should tape a cyanide pill to the programme: The Humans reviewed
Hampstead’s boss Ed Hall was so impressed by Stephen Karam’s play The Humans that he wanted to direct it himself.…
Gloriously macho: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan reviewed
This week’s guilty pleasure is Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime). It’s trash, of course, but very well done, high-octane,…
Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?
The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him…
