New York

I once tried to buy coke from the head of Manhattan detectives

23 May 2015 9:00 am

This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking…

I’d move to Kosovo if Ed Miliband became prime minister

9 May 2015 9:00 am

If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his…

Nigel Lawson’s diary: Escaping election tedium in la France profonde

2 May 2015 9:00 am

I have escaped this rather depressing election campaign by retreating to my home in la France profonde — to be…

The fraught business of seat surrender

2 May 2015 9:00 am

I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was…

Neither London nor New York will be livable in ten years’ time

25 April 2015 9:00 am

A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which…

Bad Jews at the Arts Theatre reviewed: strange, raw, obsessive and brilliant

4 April 2015 9:00 am

Bad Jews has completed its long trek from a smallish out-of-town venue to a full-scale West End berth. Billed as…

An Episcopalian vicar made me warm to the principle of women joining gentlemen’s clubs

21 March 2015 9:00 am

In 1993, when I was living in Manhattan working for the New Yorker magazine, I was chosen as ‘distinguished visitor’…

‘Another terrible thing...’: a novel of pain and grief with courage and style

21 February 2015 9:00 am

Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…

A humdinger of a plus: Alfred Molina and John Lithgow in ‘Love Is Strange’

Love Is Strange review: subtle and nuanced in ways which, I’m assuming, Fifty Shades is not

14 February 2015 9:00 am

You will be wondering why I haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey as this is very much Fifty Shades of…

Portrait of the week

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Home Party leaders mercilessly launched 100 days of campaigning before the general election on 7 May. David Cameron, the Conservative…

A Most Violent Year, review: mesmerising performances - and coats

24 January 2015 9:00 am

A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what…

Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx (left to right) enjoy a day at the races

What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers

10 January 2015 9:00 am

Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers

Another New York institution bites the dust

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Except for sickness in one’s family or the loss of a life, is there anything sadder than to see a…

Once upon a time, when a poor farmer came to the big city he put on his only suit

29 November 2014 9:00 am

The leaves are falling non-stop, like names dropped in Hollywood, and it has suddenly turned colder than the look I…

‘Exquisitely dressed and groomed, Stefan Zweig looks simply terrified’

Stefan Zweig: the tragedy of a great bad writer

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of…

Norman Mailer’s wife comes out of the shadows

22 November 2014 9:00 am

‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading…

Snobbery, sneering and secret sniggers: the sad truth about the so-called 'special relationship'

22 November 2014 9:00 am

To the grand Herrera house on the upper east side of Manhattan for lunch in honour of Lord and Lady…

Cecil Beaton with Mickey the cat, Reddish house (self-portrait)

The genius of Cecil Beaton’s interiors

15 November 2014 9:00 am

The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…

Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year

15 November 2014 9:00 am

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…

Martha Graham and Bertram Ross in Graham’s most famous work ‘Appalachian Spring’ (1944), with a prize-winning score by Aaron Copeland

To call this offering a book is an abuse of language

8 November 2014 9:00 am

I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world…

Finding his feet: ‘Untitled (man and two women in a pastoral setting)’, 1940

How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction

1 November 2014 9:00 am

Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in…

The battle for decency has been lost

18 October 2014 9:00 am

An intelligent letter from a reader, Stanislas Yassukovich CBE, warms my heart. It’s nice to know there are others as…

Is New York ready for Cydney the spaniel (and her Facebook friends)?

11 October 2014 9:00 am

As the maître d’ ushered me into the packed restaurant, I leaned in close and intoned softly, so as not…

The camera always lies

27 September 2014 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley explores how the camera shapes our relationship with architecture

Who cleans skyscrapers?

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Tough at the top The clocks on Big Ben were cleaned by abseiling window-cleaners. Some other big cleaning/painting jobs: —…