Norway

A dark satanic cult: The Third Realm, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Knausgaard’s unsettling novel continues to explore previous themes in the series, including the strange phenomenon of the black metal music scene in socially balanced Norway

The cast mistake screaming for comedy: Cockfosters, at Turbine Theatre, reviewed

24 August 2024 9:00 am

The Turbine Theatre is a newish venue beneath the railway arches of Grosvenor Bridge in Battersea. The comfy auditorium is…

We must never lose the treasured Orkneys

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Fertile fields and spectacular sea stacks are matched by an extraordinarily rich, dramatic history. No wonder the islands have been so celebrated for centuries

Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.

4 November 2023 9:00 am

If Jon Fosse’s novels are experimental, they are experiments in exhausting banality, says Philip Hensher

Rising star

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The second volume of Knausgaard’s trilogy serves as a prequel to the first, tracing the origins of Norway’s ominous new celestial body

You will feel nothing: The Worst Person in the World reviewed

26 March 2022 9:00 am

The Worst Person in the World is a Norwegian film that has made a big splash. To date, its star…

The ideology of madness

23 October 2021 9:00 am

On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for…

Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

2 October 2021 9:00 am

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…

Whiny, polite and beautiful: Kings of Convenience's Peace or Love reviewed

3 July 2021 9:00 am

Grade: A– The problem with Norwegians is that they are so relentlessly, mind-numbingly pleasant. Well, OK, not Knut Hamsun or…

Does the SNP really want to copy Norway's gender revolution?

16 February 2021 9:30 pm

Five years ago, in June 2016, Norway allowed anyone to change their legal gender. Legislative Decree 71 was everything that…

The farce of the Nobel Peace Prize

9 January 2021 9:00 am

Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel…

arctic

Time to crush China’s Arctic influence

21 April 2020 4:35 am

Eyes are opening to the evil of the authoritarian Chinese regime that represses its people, genocides entire cultures, and influences…

‘The Fisherman’s Cottage’, 1906, by Harald Sohlberg

If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg

23 February 2019 9:00 am

If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter  eschewed the cosy fireside for the great…

An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed

9 February 2019 9:00 am

‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…

Who was the Isdal Woman? And how did she die?

17 March 2018 9:00 am

‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World…

Norway is hard on migrants – but tough love works

25 November 2017 9:00 am

When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the…

Robert Lindsay as Jack Cardiff in Prism

Speech therapy

23 September 2017 9:00 am

Oslo opened in the spring of 2016 at a modest venue in New York. It moved to Broadway and this…

Norway’s noir

17 August 2017 1:00 pm

Valkyrien (C4, Sunday) is the hot new Scandi-noir series, which is being billed as Norway’s answer to Breaking Bad. In…

For fashionable Victorian travellers, the only way was Norway

4 June 2016 9:00 am

‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’…

Might Eurovision determine the outcome of the EU referendum?

14 May 2016 9:00 am

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how…

The BBC Breakfast presenters

Do any of us know what our human rights are?

26 March 2016 9:00 am

Apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’ve never known what my human rights are…

How does anyone keep up with all the good stuff out there on TV?

19 March 2016 9:00 am

‘We have a problem. Yes. At the wind farm.’ Any conspiracy thriller with lines like that has definitely got my…

Karl Ove Knausgaard describes nothing happening — wonderfully

12 March 2016 9:00 am

It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or…

The ‘in’ side’s shockingly bad start in the EU referendum campaign

30 January 2016 9:00 am

David Cameron wants to get the European Union referendum over with quickly — and understandably so. Things are still going…

About strange lands and people: ‘Midsummer Eve Bonfire’, after c.1917, by Nikolai Astrup

Nikolai Astrup - Norway’s other great painter

30 January 2016 9:00 am

The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie