New York
… trailing strands in all directions
Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…
Salt-beef delirium
Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side…
High life
New York If only my wordsmith friend Jeremy Clarke had been with me. What fun he’d have had with…
Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
Weird, wise, thought-provoking and hypnotic: Heart of a Dog reviewed
Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love…
Anna Wintour has dragged the Met Gala into the gutter
New York It was the best of times — downtown — and the worst of times — uptown. Let’s start…
Hearing that 60 is the new 40 makes me want to punch the nearest octagenarian
New York I went downtown to Katz’s the other day and had a pastrami sandwich that made me want…
Modern feminists should come to me if they want the truth about sex
New York Even after all these years, I’m still at times floored by the scale of the place. And…
Robert Mapplethorpe: bad boy with a camera
Robert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn…
Olivia Laing: homeless and tempest-tossed in the Big Apple
Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people,…
Verging on the corny: Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl reviewed
Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record…
Cultured — and combative — criticism from America
Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on…
The ultimate New York parking novel
Publishing a ‘New York’ novel in the months after 11 September 2001 is a surefire, if accidental, way to make…
How New York vulgarians live
I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre-first world war Park Avenue…
Traditional storytelling at its most exquisite: Brooklyn reviewed
Brooklyn is a wee slip of a thing compared to the Bond film, Spectre, and cost $12 million, as opposed…
The sophisticates are wrong about Cleveland, Ohio
To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because…
President Obama’s ‘secret’ lunch was no secret to me
The Metropolitan Club in Washington is so close to the White House that President Obama chose to walk there for…
To tip or not to tip
As I grow older, I find myself increasingly reluctant to travel, which is why it’s been a few years now…
Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?
Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box…
I’ve never thought much of John Lennon’s music – until now
It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it…
Notes on cruising
By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled…
Jonathan Galassi’s fictional poet made me doubt my knowledge of American literature
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
An epic study of trauma and friendship in the age of self-invention
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
What I learned from reshooting the dullest film ever made
Stephen Smith finally sees the point of Empire, one of the dullest films in cinema history
Fashion tips - and replacement hips - from a nonagenarian style icon: Iris reviewed
Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant,…
