Culture
Americans are erasing European culture
Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was…
America’s future looks vulgar
The latest Super Bowl offers the most recent opportunity to reflect on the terminal state of our national culture, held…
Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime
Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already…
France’s bistros are dying
Emmanuel Macron says France’s traditional bistros should be granted Unesco world heritage status. Speaking at the Élysée this week, the…
Pride in Britain? It’s history
A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to…
Smoking is sexy again
It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and…
The invisible boundaries of everyday life
Maxim Samson investigates cultural or imaginary demarcations around the world, including the International Date Line, America’s Bible Belt and the Jewish eruvim
The death of royalty
The cohorts of Hamas have invaded my neighbourhood. I was walking my dog, Maxi, in the afterglow of a shower…
High life
Gstaad A reader’s inquiry as to why I think Paris belongs to yesterday (12 August) has me remembering times past.…
Stop trying to make high culture funky
Clive Myrie, now probably the top face of the BBC, and host of their television coverage of the Proms, had…
Who killed Australia Day?
Australia Day was once a big deal Down Under, but in recent years the annual celebration has been somewhat muted.…
Pop
The Guardian kindly tells us that green is a colour whose time has come: ‘A blazer or a cotton shirt…
Grand tours and package holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
Who’s story is it?
‘Whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three…
The coming of barbarism
There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his…
The mind virus killing academia
We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that…
It’s time to speak out against cancel culture
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue…
High life
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
South Bank Centre
I must have written about this subject 100 times in 30 years and I’m still having to restate the bloody…
Human league
Of course animals have culture
In praise of cultural elitism
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power…
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…
High culture or state-of-the-art murder simulators?: Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt reviewed
For the past few decades, admirers of video-games have every couple of years mounted a new attempt to persuade the…
Nine reasons to be cheerful this year
Since it’s the first week of the New Year I’m going to pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening and focus…
Poor conduct
Last weekend Daniel Barenboim brought the Staatskapelle Berlin to perform at the BBC Proms for a cycle of Elgar’s symphonies.…
