Race
Wuthering Heights’ race row is the height of nonsense
Most of us associate Wuthering Heights with high school English classes or Kate Bush caterwauling over the moors while exhibiting…
Which US city is the most violent?
Black in the day A new book claims William Shakespeare’s works were really written by a black woman and were…
The true villains of our TV crime dramas? The creators
Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame…
Reform’s real race problem
I think it was Zadie Smith who I first heard point out that race is in America what class is…
Is Reform racist?
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
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?
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
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
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
Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more…
Stop the press
The convicted phone-hacker assembling complaints against the tabloids
Death on the Nile
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Return of the Donald
Why I think Trump will be the next US President
Primer time
The Motive and the Cue breaches the inviolable sanctity of the rehearsal room. The play, set in New York in…
Location, location, location
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
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
Professor James H. Sweet is a temperate man. He seeks to avoid extremes. But he also seeks to be bold…
Emancipation man
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
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
‘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
Roy Williams’s new play is a wonky beast. It has two dense and cumbersome storylines that aren’t properly developed. Dawn…
Bloated waffle
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
It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It…
Losing the plot
The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look…
