Race
When did fiction become so dangerous?
The assignment of books for review has always been haphazard. Fellow fiction writers can be tempted either to undermine the…
Perishable goods
Labour of Love is the new play by James Graham, the poet laureate of politics. We’re in a derelict…
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Keeping it in the family
A new orthodoxy governs the casting process in Hollywood. An actor’s ethnicity must match the character’s. If you extend this…
Too Indian to adopt
I am not surprised that the mother of a white Christian girl should be upset that her daughter was placed…
High life
When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the…
This charming man
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is set during the American Civil War and is about a wounded Union solider, Corporal John…
In praise of braindead filth
Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…
Black magic
Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young…
Time out of mind
The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact…
Why I now believe in positive discrimination
The Prime Minister no doubt knew he would be fanning the flames when he waded into the argument about the…
Compelling evidence
From ‘The Position of the Government’, The Spectator, 15 January 1916: Any man who knew the nature of Englishmen, or…
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
During the first ten pages of this long work Paul Theroux, on a journey through the American South, meets two…
High life
To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because…
High life
Serena Williams, according to some commentators the greatest woman who has ever graced this earth of ours, will complete the…
All white on the night
Trevor Nunn is staging Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses without a single black actor. So what, says Robert Gore-Langton
Barometer
Dropping the Clangers The Clangers made a comeback on BBC television. Some Clanger facts: — The actors doing the voices…
Migrant muddle
For a long while, the Conservatives have been puzzled about their lack of popularity among immigrants. In theory, the Conservative…
Stealing a march
Selma, the civil rights film that stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, undoubtedly contains the best and most powerful…
Benedict Cumberbatch and what’s really offensive
How should we refer to non-white people, and foreigners in general, given that of course we do sometimes need to…
High life
I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies…
Lost soul
The deep instinct that the immigration debate still ignores
High life
Welcome to 2015, the year that speaking and writing freely had to stop. Anything that might cause trauma to anyone…
High life
An intelligent letter from a reader, Stanislas Yassukovich CBE, warms my heart. It’s nice to know there are others as…
Douchebags and dartboards
So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you…
