Eurofile

Jason Solomons looks at how Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman helped take The Father from French fringe play to the Oscars It started life as a one-set play in a fringe theatre in Paris. Nine years later, The Father is now, as they say, a major motion picture and a very strong contender for this […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why we shorten some syllables and not others, such as in privacy and private. It is an interesting fact about the English language that we pronounce the word nature with a long ‘a’ whereas we say natural with a short ‘a’. Similarly, while we say grateful with a long ‘a’, gratitude has a short […]

The Super League farce may be over, but the conflicting interests of owners and fans mean more trouble ahead. Not even Niccolò Machiavelli, the grandmaster of deception, could have foreseen the manner in which English, Spanish and Italian clubs attempted to carve up European football. “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo,” Machiavelli wrote […]

Journalist Rob Hughes was ignored when he claimed a link between heading footballs and dementia nearly 50 years ago – and the authorities are still to act properly Pardon the cynicism, but when the UK parliament in February finally set aside time to listen to doctors and former professional footballers about dementia in our national […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious process by which neutral phrases for ‘smell’ tend to turn bad. It is rather well known to keen crossword solvers that the English words aroma, odour, scent, smell and stink all have five letters. Crossword clues indicating a five-letter olfactory answer can therefore not be readily resolved without further work and thought. A good question […]

Britain needs its theatres back because Britain IS theatre – a country obsessed with role-playing When I stumbled on the English National Opera’s rendition of Handel’s Messiah recently and watched it for a while, I suddenly burst into tears. There, in the empty London Coliseum where the ENO were performing amidst the shadows of the empty […]

Bill Kenwright’s Love Letters and the National’s After Life have announced opening dates – but a full return for the London stage seems as far away as ever As a theatre critic, I am sometimes asked when am I going to start reviewing theatre again. It is not an unreasonable question, especially now that there appear […]

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD on an artwork, an exhibition and a book which all demonstrate the way that artists have been inspired by trees. In our new, more outdoor life, trees have been a consolation, ever-changing but constant, by turn prickling with promise, brimming with plenty, stripping down for winter, and bubbling into life again. As the […]

Our football correspondent hails the departing Manchester City striker, the Premier League’s highest non-British scorer. In the Netherlands, club legends leave with a garland of flowers. At Manchester City, they are stacking up the statues. Three are on commission right now because in successive seasons Vincent Kompany, David Silva and now Sergio Agüero have retired […]

PETER TRUDGILL on death, and recent revival, of Cornish. After the first arrival of the Germanic Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons in the southwestern peninsula of England, British Celts began migrating across the Channel to Brittany to escape Germanic domination, thus reducing the Celtic population base of the area. By about 800 AD, the Saxons had taken […]

He always set out to shock, but is Serge Gainsbourg now just too creepy for modern sensibilities? When Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, Francois Mitterrand, then president of France, declared “he was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”. Parisians took to the streets for candlelit vigils and recitations of Gainsbourg lyrics. It was an unofficial day of national mourning. For the […]

A recent decision to remake The King and I musical is a striking one, given the production’s politically incorrect undertones and unpopularity in Thailand. Just in time for the 70th anniversary of the Broadway premiere of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I later this month, Paramount Pictures revealed it had purchased the rights to create a […]

Technology may be closing in on making instant, in-ear translation services a reality. But it's still a galaxy away from truly replicating human communication.

Rob Hughes on the financial calculations that mean the ball must keep rolling during a pandemic... if only to keep the money rolling in.

PETER TRUDGILL on whether Scots should be considered a language or not. My column of a few weeks ago, about how the Swiss are encouraged to learn their country’s various languages – and how something similar here might benefit the UK – annoyed reader Bill Cooper, who wrote to The New European to say so. His letter was published […]

The new film The United States vs Billie Holiday is part of a canonisation the singer would have disliked, says BONNIE GREER.

The world is on its knees in a pandemic that is close now to killing three million people. Yet the games go on, albeit as a ghostly, ghastly version of sport in stadiums without spectators. For a year, club football has soldiered on while communities have closed around them. In Europe we have the scarcely […]

The Arts and Crafts movement provided a bridge from tradition and nostalgia to the modernism that was to follow. Few of its leading lights display this shift as sumptuously as Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo.  Between the Arts and Crafts pioneering work of William Morris and the lean soaring lines with floral motifs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a third and influential “M” helped define the look […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many chapters of the Georgian language. As we have observed before in this column, Napoleon was not French, and Hitler was not German. King William III of England was not English, and King George I of Great Britain was not British. But there is another well-known example of the same kind of […]

Should modern football – particularly the gegenpresse fußball coached by Jürgen Klopp – carry a health warning? Liverpool, the runaway English champions less than a year ago, look a broken team, physically and mentally. Their defence is cursed by injuries, their attack appears a wearied parody of what it was last spring.  But more recently, […]

ROB HUGHES on the very different goalscoring talents of Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland and whether Premier League transfers lie ahead for them. No-one knows how Covid will drain the finances of football, but everyone rates two talents that Europe’s richest and most powerful clubs will scramble to buy. They are, of course, goalscorers. Kylian Mbappé was […]

A new four-part HBO documentary assembles a compelling and gruesome case against Woody Allen. JASON SOLOMONS, who has written a book on the director and a long-time fan, describes how watching the series has changed his attitude towards his hero forever. Starting in the pit of my stomach and rising to the bottom of my throat, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how easy it is to make false assumptions about connections between words  Etymology is the study of the origins of words and the development of their forms and meanings. It is a scholarly activity which needs considerable knowledge of large numbers of languages, plus language history, linguistic change, historical linguistics, semantics (the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why the term for spring has not sprung from where you thought. The English word spring has many different meanings. It can refer to a place where water comes up out of the ground – a source or wellspring. It can signify an energetic forward or upward movement – a leap or jump. It […]

Barcelona pioneered a fusion of finance and football. Others are now playing the same game while the Catalan club itself is embroiled in a crisis. The jailing, even for one night, of the former president of Futbol Club Barcelona is not the first, and will not be the last, time it has happened in this club’s […]

JASON SOLOMONS on a new Netflix documentary which places the footballer’s rise amid his country’s oppressive regime. Talk about finding a new angle. I’ve seen that Carlos Alberto goal, the fourth for Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Final against Italy, over a hundred times. Maybe we all have – but never from Alberto’s point of […]

Peter Trudgill on the dubious master of multilingualism. There are many things to be said about Ján Ludvik Hoch, many of them very bad, even though he was a war hero. But this column is interested in his linguistic prowess: he was a remarkable polyglot. Better known as Robert Maxwell, Hoch did not learn English […]

The case of Manchester United’s talented young winger Amad Diallo highlights awkward questions for football about the way it procures young players from abroad, says ROB HUGHES. Bill Shankly, the sage of Liverpool FC, once corrected a misconception of mine. “Listen son, coaches do not make good players,” he said in that familiar rasping Scottish pitch. […]

New French film Slalom creates a creepy atmosphere amid the beauty of the Alps and hothouse atmosphere of its resorts. JASON SOLOMONS talks to its director, and comes up with his favourite movies set in the mountains. Snow falls outside, settling softly on the cars and on the muddy green of a little park. It’s an […]

Our new football correspondent ROB HUGHES on the symbiotic relationship between Barcelona and Lionel Messi, its mainstay, that must one day come to an end. No player has better displayed the joy of football more sustainably than Lionel Messi. I first saw him at La Masia, Barcelona’s academy, when he was 13, and still feel […]

The promotion of languages is a key way of keeping the disparate Swiss nation together, says PETER TRUDGILL. There is much Britain could learn from its example. If our government truly believed in the United Kingdom as a “sacred union”, they would do well to study the example of another union, the united republic of […]

ROB HUGHES on Captain Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford, two Englishmen united in their service. Captain Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford are two of a kind. Separated by three quarters of a century – and last week by death – they epitomise salt of the earth Englishmen, inspiration to the rest of us throughout the hardest of […]