New York

Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland

25 November 2017 9:00 am

In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…

Security overkill is terror’s real triumph

18 November 2017 9:00 am

The moment the news broke on Halloween that an Uzbek in a rental truck had just killed eight people on…

Despite everything, America is beautiful — especially at West Point

18 November 2017 9:00 am

What is left to say after the church shooting in the Home of the Depraved? Those killed in Texas included…

High life

28 October 2017 9:00 am

I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like way.…

Raw materials

14 October 2017 9:00 am

‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’…

Aircraft carriers USS Midway and the USS Enterprise of the United States NavY, 1945 (Photo: Getty)

On the waterfront

14 October 2017 9:00 am

Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and…

Madness in Manhattan

16 September 2017 9:00 am

Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…

The listening project

9 September 2017 9:00 am

As Classic FM celebrated its quarter-century on Wednesday with not a recording but a live broadcast of a concert from…

A choice of first novels

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…

… trailing strands in all directions

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…

Salt-beef delirium

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side…

High life

26 November 2016 9:00 am

New York   If only my wordsmith friend Jeremy Clarke had been with me. What fun he’d have had with…

True or false? The Temple of Bel, Palmyra, before and after its destruction at the hands of Islamic State

Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries

Hound of love: Lolabelle gets old and Lolabelle goes blind and keyboards are laid out on the floor so that she can bash them with her paws, and enjoy the sounds

Weird, wise, thought-provoking and hypnotic: Heart of a Dog reviewed

21 May 2016 9:00 am

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

14 May 2016 9:00 am

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

7 May 2016 9:00 am

   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

9 April 2016 9:00 am

   New York Even after all these years, I’m still at times floored by the scale of the place. And…

‘Like Georgia O’Keefe, Mapplethorpe eroticised flowers — possibly finding them more biddable than his frisky partners in gimp masks and chains.’ Left: Self-portrait, 1982. Right: Calla Lily

Robert Mapplethorpe: bad boy with a camera

2 April 2016 9:00 am

Robert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn…

Greta Garbo in New York in 1955

Olivia Laing: homeless and tempest-tossed in the Big Apple

12 March 2016 9:00 am

Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people,…

Vinyl, Sky Atlantic

Verging on the corny: Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl reviewed

20 February 2016 9:00 am

Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record…

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…

The ultimate New York parking novel

16 January 2016 9:00 am

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

7 November 2015 9:00 am

I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre-first world war Park Avenue…

Saoirse Ronan as Eilis and Emory Cohen as Tony in ‘Brooklyn’

Traditional storytelling at its most exquisite: Brooklyn reviewed

7 November 2015 9:00 am

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

29 October 2015 9:00 am

To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because…