Race

Is Reform racist?

1 November 2025 9:00 am

Sarah Pochin’s gonna take a lot of coachin’. You can’t just turn up on the telly and say you’re sick…

A small world: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, reviewed

21 June 2025 9:00 am

A satire on Oxford university life points up ideological tensions, the pettiness of college politics and the patronising ways of the young and privileged

If ‘wokeness’ is over, can someone please tell the Fitzwilliam Museum?

22 March 2025 9:00 am

Optimists believe that the tide of ‘wokeness’ is now ebbing. If so, the message has not yet reached Cambridge, whose…

The problem with Dawn Butler

9 November 2024 9:00 am

We hear a lot about white supremacy these days. But for some reason we rarely hear about black supremacy. I…

Reinforces the caricatures it sets out to diminish: Slave Play, at the Noël Coward Theatre, reviewed

3 August 2024 9:00 am

Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers…

Cheesy remake of Our Mutual Friend: London Tide, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

27 April 2024 9:00 am

Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more…

Stop the press

1 July 2023 9:00 am

The convicted phone-hacker assembling complaints against the tabloids

Death on the Nile

20 May 2023 9:00 am

The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…

Return of the Donald

13 May 2023 9:00 am

Why I think Trump will be the next US President

Primer time

13 May 2023 9:00 am

The Motive and the Cue breaches the inviolable sanctity of the rehearsal room. The play, set in New York in…

Location, location, location

8 October 2022 9:00 am

The Labour MP Rupa Huq, of Pakistani heritage, has been suspended for suggesting that Kwasi Kwarteng, of Ghanaian heritage, was…

Shame should not be heritable

1 October 2022 9:00 am

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope claims it was ‘inevitable’ that a university ‘as long-established as Cambridge’ would have links to slavery. Now…

One worldview has taken over the historical profession

29 August 2022 7:00 pm

Professor James H. Sweet is a temperate man. He seeks to avoid extremes. But he also seeks to be bold…

Emancipation man

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Winslow Homer may be too all-American for British tastes but a forthcoming retrospective could change all that, says Laura Gascoigne

Viktor Orbán won’t save conservatism

26 July 2022 2:16 am

It’s always the ones you most expect. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, nationalist strongman and post-liberal poster-boy gave a speech…

Why the Tories are more diverse than Labour

15 July 2022 12:21 am

‘The candidates fighting to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative party leader and Britain’s prime minister reflect the country’s rich diversity,’…

Location, location, location

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Roy Williams’s new play is a wonky beast. It has two dense and cumbersome storylines that aren’t properly developed. Dawn…

Bloated waffle

25 June 2022 9:00 am

The Old Vic’s new show, Jitney, has a mystifying YouTube advert which gives no information about the play or the…

The dishonesty of our age

21 May 2022 9:00 am

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It…

Losing the plot

7 May 2022 9:00 am

The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look…

Trumpian lullaby

23 April 2022 9:00 am

Trump is said to be a gift for bad satirists and a problem for good ones. He dominates Mike Bartlett’s…

High life

23 April 2022 9:00 am

New York Our own Douglas Murray is the canary in the Bagel coal mine as of late. The left controls…

Kemi Badenoch: the curriculum does not need ‘decolonising’

18 March 2022 6:34 am

When the government published a report last year by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) into racism in the…

Matter of time

5 March 2022 9:00 am

Are children’s history books racist?