Books
Salman Rushdie overcame his fear
After Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1989, Julian Barnes gave Salman Rushdie…
What we can all learn from Jim Corbett’s tiger tales
What we can learn from Jim Corbett’s big-cat tales
The perfect pairing of books and wine
In the West End of London there is an alley which insinuates its way between the Charing Cross Road and…
The endless tiny errors of the NHS
I wrote recently elsewhere about Jeremy Hunt’s good new book examining unnecessary deaths in the NHS. Someone should write a…
My Sally Rooney conversion
I tried to dislike the writing of Sally Rooney. But I failed. I retain some resistance to Sally Rooney the…
‘I came, I saw, I scribbled’: Shane MacGowan on Bob Dylan, angels and his lifelong love of art
Graeme Thomson talks to former Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan about his first art folio
The chief characteristic so far has been nervousness: Chivalry reviewed
Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life.…
A wonderfully unguarded podcast about the last bohemians
Ordinarily, if a podcast purports to be revelatory, you can assume it is anything but. There’s a glut of programmes…
The cult of sensitivity
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
The books that made me who I am
Gstaad This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in – skiing, cross-country,…
Some of the best social commentary around: Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily reviewed
When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…
In praise of the Dome
We should learn to love our turn-of-the-millennium architecture, says Helen Barrett, starting with the Dome
Why don't I come with a trigger warning?
Last week brought the news that some universities have attached more ‘trigger warnings’ to certain books, concerned that students may…
Why do British galleries shun the humane, generous art of Ruskin Spear?
Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is…
Robert Harris on Boris Johnson, cancel culture and rehabilitating Chamberlain
Nigel Jones talks to the writer Robert Harris about Blair, Johnson and Polanski, cancel culture and his quest to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
Meet climber, photographer and filmmaker extraordinaire Jimmy Chin
Jimmy Chin is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough: he both climbs snow, ice and rock and films other mountaineers doing it too, writes Theo Zenou
In 1980s Bennington it was a badge of dishonour not to have slept with your professor
It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood.…
Fight club: when book groups turn nasty
When book groups turn nasty
Granada’s Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series
Sumptuous, glorious, luminous, lavish: Granada’s 40-year-old adaptation of Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series, says Mark McGinness
Dave Eggers cancels Amazon
Selling books through Amazon is now part and parcel of a working author’s life. It would be a brave writer…
Kate Clanchy and the new censorship in publishing
‘There’s more than one way to burn a book’, wrote Ray Bradbury, in a coda to the 1979 edition of…
Why I gave up writing fiction
When, three years ago, I announced my retirement from writing fiction, the only thing that surprised me was the surprise…
The best theatre podcasts
All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts,…
The rise of the 'sensitivity reader'
Zoe Dubno on the rise of the ‘sensitivity reader’, a seductively cheap way for publishers to cancel-proof their books
Thoughtful and impeccable: Ken Burns's Hemingway reviewed
Ken Burns made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, the justly celebrated 11-and-a-half-hour documentary series that gave America’s…
