Racism
Robert Jenrick is right
I’ve just got back from doing a spot of shopping in my local town – and do you know what…
A summer romance: Six Weeks by the Sea, by Paula Byrne, reviewed
Byrne imagines the twentysomething Jane Austen, on holiday in Sidmouth, falling for the lawyer Samuel Rose – a perfect foil, being a cross between Mr Darcy and Mr Knightley
The scourge of the sensitivity reader
A comparatively new figure with no accredited expertise now dictates to literary agents, senior editors and award-winning authors
The powder keg of 1980s New York
Ed Koch’s mayoralty is beset by violent crime, corruption, racism, Aids and a crack epidemic, with Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump further tormenting him where possible
Britain’s new role as a bastion of black culture
Two books take us from race riots and Teddy Boys to the current ‘Jamaicanisation’ of our cities – and the inflection now hip among white British teenagers
Bristling with meaning: the language of hair in 19th-century America
Beards, moustaches, whiskers, free-flowing curls or cropped coifs – all were signifiers of morality, trustworthiness or political ideology
Marriage, motherhood and money: Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed
Funny, smart stories explore the ‘stale’ married state, the anxieties of parenthood and the sweet-sour nature of female friendship. But do they go far enough?
Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed
Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on
The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed
Our magnificently monstrous anti-hero goes in quest of a cache of reputedly pornographic letters written by the former US president to his mistress
Bad vibrations: Lazarus Man, by Richard Price, reviewed
Shudderings from a subway extension in Harlem causes a tenement building to collapse, killing six people and leading to many missing in this cinematic thriller
The mythic mishmash of Wagner’s Ring
Its towering themes of gods, giants, dragons and magic were not purely Germanic in origin, whatever fever-dream they later conjured in Hitler’s brain
Not for the faint-hearted: She’s Always Hungry, by Eliza Clark, reviewed
An unsettling collection of stories loosely connected by the theme of hunger contains graphic descriptions of violence and cannibalism – as the publishers see fit to warn us
Panning for music gold: The Catchers, by Xan Brooks, reviewed
They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading…
How claims of cultural appropriation scuppered an acclaimed new ballet
On 14 March 2020 I was at Leeds Grand Theatre for the première of Northern Ballet’s Geisha. The curtains swung…
Glamour or guilt? The perils of marketing the British country house
The most angst-ridden sub-category of the very rich – admittedly a lucky bunch to start with – must surely contain…
Falsifying history can only increase racial tension
Frank Furedi argues that historic memory is the key to the identity of any coherent community, and that attacking it undermines a population’s solidarity
Why Britain riots
Riotous summers seem to occur in Britain with about the same frequency as sunny ones: roughly every decade. Sometimes it’s…
The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter
Before his genius was widely recognised, the blues singer known as Lead Belly survived not only America’s most brutal prisons but cruel betrayal by his racist ‘manager’
Visitants from the past: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley, reviewed
An experimental project transports people across centuries. Lieutenant Graham Gore, an Arctic explorer whisked from the 1840s to present-day London, is not overly impressed
Don’t write off Hofesh Shechter – his new work is uniquely haunting
In 2010, when his thrillingly edgy and angry Political Mother delivered modern dance a winding punch right where it hurt,…
Progressives vs. bigots: How I Won a Nobel Prize, by Julius Taranto, reviewed
When a quantum physicist and her partner reluctantly move to a university staffed by cancelled luminaries the scene is set for a darkly comic clash of ideologies
Prejudice in Pennsylvania: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, reviewed
Inspired by his own family history, McBride explores the problems faced by a Jewish shopkeeper and her black neighbours in the small town of Chicken Hill in the 1930s
Expelled from Africa’s Eden
Lucy Fulford never fully explains how this community was so easily scapegoated, nor why Idi Amin’s decree caused such jubilation across East Africa at the time
The new orthodoxy
The decolonisers in Britain’s universities are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them, says Doug Stokes
The great betrayal
Racism in Britain may be less acute than in America or even France, but the false promises made to the Windrush generation have left a bitter aftermath
