New York

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…

President Obama’s ‘secret’ lunch was no secret to me

29 October 2015 9:00 am

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

24 October 2015 9:00 am

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?

17 October 2015 8:00 am

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

10 October 2015 9:00 am

It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it…

Transatlantic grandeur: A Cunard liner in 1932

Notes on cruising

3 October 2015 8:00 am

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

15 August 2015 9:00 am

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

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…

The eyes have it: Andy Warhol’s gift for second sight was preternatural

What I learned from reshooting the dullest film ever made

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Stephen Smith finally sees the point of Empire, one of the dullest films in cinema history

You can’t keep your eyes off Iris

Fashion tips - and replacement hips - from a nonagenarian style icon: Iris reviewed

1 August 2015 9:00 am

Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant,…

Rich, thin and selfish in Manhattan

18 July 2015 9:00 am

The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…

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?

Robert Moses in 1952

The sadist who wrecked New York, and the last of the great biographers

4 July 2015 9:00 am

John R. MacArthur on the bureaucratic titan who gratuitously bulldozed a great city and displaced and demoralised half a million of its inhabitants

‘Untitled (Tilly Losch)’, c.1935–38, by Joseph Cornell

Poetic or pretentious? Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust at the Royal Academy reviewed

4 July 2015 9:00 am

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…

Take it from Taki — Hillary Clinton will be the next US president

6 June 2015 9:00 am

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my…