New York
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…
Cruising
By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled…
Idolising Ida
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
I reshot Andy Warhol
Stephen Smith finally sees the point of Empire, one of the dullest films in cinema history
Dedicated follower of fashion
Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant,…
The rich are a different species
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
The London ear
It’s easy to tag the city’s terrain by writer. But what, wonders Philip Clark, might a map of its music look like?
The man who wrecked New York
John R. MacArthur on the bureaucratic titan who gratuitously bulldozed a great city and displaced and demoralised half a million of its inhabitants
Thinking inside the box
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
High life
The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my…
High life
This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking…
High life
If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his…
Diary
I have escaped this rather depressing election campaign by retreating to my home in la France profonde — to be…
Long life
I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was…
High life
A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which…
A family at war
Bad Jews has completed its long trek from a smallish out-of-town venue to a full-scale West End berth. Billed as…
Long life
In 1993, when I was living in Manhattan working for the New Yorker magazine, I was chosen as ‘distinguished visitor’…
Suffering in style
Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…
Home truths
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
Home Party leaders mercilessly launched 100 days of campaigning before the general election on 7 May. David Cameron, the Conservative…
Great coat
A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what…
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
High life
Except for sickness in one’s family or the loss of a life, is there anything sadder than to see a…
