Weimar Germany
Weimar Britain: lessons from history in radical times
The Ancient Greeks believed the past was in front of us and the future behind. Man could look history in…
A long goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood’s experiences as a young man in Weimar Germany would be reworked in his autofiction for the rest of his life
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
Joyce DiDonato seduces you within the first 10 minutes: Royal Opera’s Agrippina reviewed
‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina,…
Caricature, satire and over-the-top horror: Magic Realism at Tate Modern reviewed
‘It is disastrous to name ourselves!’ So Willem de Kooning responded when some of his New York painter buddies elected…
Barry Humphries on Trump, transgender ‘rat-baggery’ and causing maximum offence
‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather…
Babylon Berlin is so brilliant I’d advise you not to start watching it
Babylon Berlin (Sky Atlantic), the epic German-made Euro noir detective drama set during Weimar, is so addictively brilliant that I’d…
Life as an outsider
The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each…
