Race
Biden’s obnoxious promise
In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a black woman, last…
Boom and bust
Moulin Rouge wins no marks for its storyline. A struggling Parisian theatre is bought out by an evil financier who…
Love letter to a titan
Hampstead Theatre has revived a play about Peggy Ramsay, the legendary West End agent who shaped the careers of Joe…
The mind virus killing academia
We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that…
Elephants in the room
When you first hear that a remake of West Side Story is on the cards, it’s: God, why? Why would…
Tiger feat
Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is a complicated organism. The action starts in southern India where we meet a…
High life
New York I’ve never met anyone called Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men…
What’s the truth about Kyle Rittenhouse?
On the night of 25 August 2020, Richie McGinniss, a somewhat gonzo video journalist interviewed Kyle Rittenhouse, for the right-wing Daily Caller website. Rittenhouse wore his…
High life
New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot…
Take two women
Passing is Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novella (1929) about two biracial women, one of whom chooses to…
Roll over, Beethoven
Ian Pace on musicology’s culture wars
Remaking history
The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time…
Heads, shoulders, knees and toes
We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits…
Britain is a tolerant country and a few football racists don’t change that
The racist messages sent to England football players in recent days are shameful, but to suggest that the UK is a festering hotbed…
Why do those who abuse Priti Patel get a free pass?
Remember when Labour MP Clive Lewis got into trouble for saying, ‘On your knees, bitch’? It was at a fringe…
The confusing case of Oli London
Not everyone will have heard of Oli London, a British social media influencer who made news for two reasons last…
Who goes there?
Death of a Black Man is a little-known script from the 1970s written by Alfred Fagon who suffered a fatal…
Don’t blame ‘white privilege’ for the plight of working-class kids
Tory MP Robert Halfon is right to say that the underachievement of white working-class students is a ‘major social injustice’. He is also…
Forget race or class, marriage is the big social divide
The latest spark to ignite the culture wars is a report from the parliamentary education committee on the underachievement of…
Taking the knee isn’t the best way of showing black lives matter
As a black football fan who grew up going to matches in the seventies and eighties, I know more than…
Cambridge deserves better than Stephen Toope
Regular readers may be aware that in recent months I have been having a running-spat with a Canadian lawyer called…
France is divided on ‘taking the knee’
Until this month ‘taking a knee’ has not been a French phenomenon. When the Black Lives Matter movement spilled out of…
Kitsch tomfoolery
The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the…
Dramatically wrong
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
Reparations for slavery don’t add up
Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations…
