Dickens

Can we know an artist by their house?

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Can we know an artist by their house, asks Laura Freeman

Ugly and humdrum: Brokeback Mountain, at @sohoplace, reviewed

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and…

Howard Jacobson superbly captures the terrible cost of becoming a writer

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a…

So good I watched it twice: Netflix's The White Tiger reviewed

23 January 2021 9:00 am

The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani…

Fun and likeable and forgettable: The Personal History of David Copperfield reviewed

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and……

The joys of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth

31 August 2019 9:00 am

I first heard Lemn Sissay talking about his childhood experiences on Radio 4 in 2009. At that time he was…

Lara Maiklem mudlarking.

The treasures to be found mudlarking by the Thames

24 August 2019 9:00 am

The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore.…

Lee Evans in Pinter Three. Photo: Marc Brenner

Mean-spirited, muddled, idiotic and puerile: Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark Matter reviewed

3 November 2018 9:00 am

In the year since it opened, the Bridge has given us the following: a harmless Karl Marx comedy by Richard…

In August 1819, the cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 in Manchester who had gathered to demand parliamentary reform

‘The reality was disgusting’: Peter Ackroyd slams Victorian Britain

15 September 2018 9:00 am

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was…

Joanna Lumley plays Mrs God in BBC Radio 4's new play Michael Frayn's Pocket Playhouse (Credit: ITV/ Rex/ Shutterstock)

Only Radio 4 would allow Ian McKellan and Joanna Lumley to play Mr and Mrs God

2 June 2018 9:00 am

One sphere that podcasts have so far not much penetrated is drama. Audible.co.uk is itching to develop its own brand…

‘Horizons II, (Allhallows towards London Gateway Port), England’, 2015, by Nadav Kander

The glorious history of Chatham Dockyard, as told through the eyes of artists

31 March 2018 9:00 am

‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens…

Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia

24 February 2018 9:00 am

It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…

Togas, sandals, breastplates, ketchup and daggers, not guns: Julius Caesar at the Barbican

It’s impossible to muff the role of Scrooge – yet Rhys Ifans manages: A Christmas Carol reviewed

9 December 2017 9:00 am

Maximum Victoriana at the Old Vic for Matthew Warchus’s A Christmas Carol. Even before we reach our seats we’re accosted…

Rumbles in the jungle

26 August 2017 9:00 am

A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…

Plywood at its most curvaceous, acceptable and collectible: Alvar Aalto armchair, 1930 (left), and moulded plywood chair by Grete Jalk, 1963

Grain of truth

8 July 2017 9:00 am

We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked…

A bleak future — without cabbages or kings

7 May 2016 9:00 am

One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…

A butterfly-powered parachute gently ridicules the French obsession with flight in the late 18th century, illustrated in Gaston Tissandier’s Histoire des ballons et des aéronautes célèbres: 1783–1800

Steve Jones’s chaotic theory of history

7 May 2016 9:00 am

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…

Christopher Hitchens (Photo: Getty)

Cultured — and combative — criticism from America

30 January 2016 9:00 am

Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on…

Christmas-themed books — for children and adults

12 December 2015 9:00 am

There’s a moment in a child’s life where Christmas begins to lose its magic. Once lost it cannot be regained,…

The evil genius of Dr Fu Manchu

21 November 2015 9:00 am

In late Victorian south London a ‘lower-middle-class’ boy, Arthur Ward, is lingering over his copy of The Arabian Nights. The…

‘Nocturne in Grey and Gold’ by James McNeill Whistler, 1874

London fog: from the Big Smoke to the Big Choke

7 November 2015 9:00 am

‘A foggy day in London town,’ croons Fred Astaire in the 1937 musical comedy A Damsel in Distress, puffing nonchalantly…

Another ‘big book’ — with big problems — from Jonathan Franzen

29 August 2015 9:00 am

Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series…

Machado de Assis wasn’t the Dickens of Brazil— but he is one of the greats

15 August 2015 9:00 am

The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed…

London shouting: The Clash at the ICA, 1976

Why plotting a sound map of London is impossible

18 July 2015 9:00 am

It’s easy to tag the city’s terrain by writer. But what, wonders Philip Clark, might a map of its music look like?

Murder on Grub Street

18 April 2015 9:00 am

Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…