Eurofile

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a barnstorming year when female performers took the lead on pop. Despite April’s Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, war in the Congo and Kosovo and UN weapons inspectors being expelled from Iraq, it was another story that dominated the year. When the Washington Post reported in late January that Bill Clinton […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on pair of new releases, their contrasting receptions and authors, and what they tell us about Britain today. Author Kerry Hudson has published the “astonishing” tale of childhood poverty, Lowborn. Photo: Nick Tucker – Credit: Archant It’s not often I enjoy seeing an author getting an absolute savaging from reviewers but the way […]

PETER TRUDGILL tells the story of Norn, now vanished from the British Isles, though some of its sounds still linger. Philologists generally divide the Scandinavian languages into two historical branches: eastern and western. Swedish and Danish fall into the Eastern Scandinavian division, while Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic form the Western Scandinavian languages, the Faroe Islands […]

Tim Walker reviews stage show Anna. The peculiar acoustics of the Whispering Gallery, directly beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, mean it’s possible to randomly eavesdrop on the conversations of strangers, even if they are some distance away. Ben and Max Ringham, the sound designers of Anna, achieve the same effect in this startlingly […]

For 500 years, Verrocchio has been overshadowed by his more famous pupil, Leonardo Da Vinci. Claudia Pritchard reports on a new exhibition attempting to draw him into the limelight. The distinctions between painter, sculptor, goldsmith and architect were more blurred in 15th century Italy than today, and it was not uncommon for artists and craftsmen […]

TIM WALKER reviews Orpheus Descending at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. I’m on a theatrical bender without end, and, take it from me, I’m on the hard stuff. I’ve downed three Arthur Millers in quick succession and now it’s time for a shot of Tennessee Williams, who is, quite frankly, right up there with […]

Its author might now be deeply unfashionable, but that shouldn’t put us off The Jungle Book, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. The British poet, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), is known for his verse collections and animal stories, including the Jungle Books and Just So Stories. Picture: National Portrait Gallery, London. – Credit: Bettmann Archive Who among us doesn’t […]

These days we hear the word like, meaning ‘similar to’, quite a lot. In fact, in the speech of many younger people today it seems to occur, like, all the time. But it is a word with an extraordinarily interesting and complex history, and one which is not completely understood. One fascinating aspect of its […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY finds a true sense of patriotism in a collection of poems that tries to wrest that word back from nationalists. Chinese Spring by Christopher New will be published later this month to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. – Credit: Archant One of the more frustrating aspects of the […]

TIM WALKER reviews Arthur Miller’s best-known play Death of a Salesman. Musicals and comedies have traditionally always been in demand during bleak times, but London would appear to have come to the view that it’s beyond cheering up and is bingeing on Arthur Miller, the theatrical equivalent of a bottle of Bruichladdich with a Mogadon […]

Two deaths overshadowed an ominous 12 months for Britain and the planet. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. David Bowie during his concert in West Berlin in front of the Reichstag building on the 6th of June in 1987. Photo: DPA/PA Images – Credit: DPA/PA Images According to a Mayan prophecy, doomsday was set for December 2012. In […]

Fifty years ago saw the most controversial Eurovision Song Contest yet held. SOPHIE DEBOICK looks back to an event that began with intrigue and ended in farce. Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco. Photo: Dominique BERRETTY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images – Credit: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Eurovision is rarely without a row, but this year’s contest – […]

As the Premier League draws to a close, PETER TRUDGILL explores the meanings behind some of its biggest names. As is well known to most English football fans – and to the entire population of Norway over the age of three – the manager of Manchester United is called Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Like very many […]

While European sounds veered towards the melancholy, and often morose, America was tuning in to something far more effervescent. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. The Victorian age was being left behind, but in 1904 the western world was still torn between civilized modernity and brutal primitivism. It was the era of the New Imperialism, and April’s Entente […]

Tim Walker reviews stage show Small Island. A white couple find themselves the parents of a black baby and they’ve not adopted him. This sounds like the start of an awful racist joke, but it’s what happens towards the end of Small Island, and, given the setting is post-war Britain, there’s nothing remotely funny about […]

His musical talent and passion might have been overshadowed by other elements of his reign, but Henry VIII deserves his reputation as a king with an ear for a tune, says SOPHIA DEBOICK Henry VIII is known as a musician monarch, but it is a characterisation based on a song he almost certainly didn’t write. […]

Almost by chance, CHARLIE CONNELLY finds himself engrossed in a timely novel set in a Paris beset by rising floods. Most of the books featured in these pages I buy myself. I hear about them, I buy them, I write about them. I’m also sent review copies of forthcoming books and if the right book […]

Still life may lack the drama and passion of other forms of art. But, as CLAUDIA PRITCHARD discovers at an exhibition of one of its great proponents, it is no less intense Battle scenes, expansive nudes, eye-popping abstracts and ravishing views compete in the art gallery to catch the eye, with their scale of ambition, […]

In this week’s stage review, TIM WALKER, reviews All My Sons at the Old Vic. ‘I just want everybody to be happy,’ trills Jenna Coleman, playing the love interest in All My Sons. This being an Arthur Miller play, that was always going to be at best a forlorn hope. Indeed, the sense of despair […]

While the charts were filled with much that was bland, 1948’s standout hits displayed technical innovation and an inspired slice of weirdness. NEW YORK – CIRCA 1949: Singer Patti Page poses for a portrait circa 1949 in New York City, New York (Photo by James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) – Credit: Archant The war may […]

Top Girls is a play that fails the test of time, writes TIM WALKER. The National Theatre rightly sees that it has a responsibility to keep alive old and more modern classics and that’s presumably why it has chosen to revive Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. When it was first presented almost 40 years ago, it […]

The folk musician whose memoir gets closer to the essence of Englishness than most Shirley Collins performs on stage during Supersonic Festival on June 24, 2018 in Birmingham, England. (Photo by Katja Ogrin/Redferns) – Credit: Redferns Think about what fires and inspires great literature. Passion, intensity, strong characters, gripping stories, powerful imagery, a timelessness of […]

The story of how a little corner of Wales retains a very English flavour. If you look at a map of Wales, you will see that the majority of the places in the country bear unmistakably Welsh-language names: Aberystwyth, Caernarfon, Ffestiniog, Llanelli, Machynlleth, Pwllheli, Ystradgynlais. Certainly no one would ever suppose that Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant was somewhere […]

Of two major new exhibitions dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh, one focuses on the artists he admired at the beginning of his career, while the other looks at an artist who looked up to him. With its neat fields and slender trees that pierce a heavy sky, a single picture plays a pivotal role in […]

As a new initiative to encourage the reading of fast fiction is launched, CHARLIE CONNELLY sings the praises of short-form literature. ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’ is the famous response attributed to Ernest Hemingway when challenged to write an entire story in six words. This was the ultimate short story and the quickest of […]

Come rain or shine, CHARLIE CONNELLY has swum in the Channel every day since last summer. He explains how it can boost your energy and self-esteem. If you look closely at the photograph above, you’ll see that between the frost-covered shingle and those majestic massing clouds there’s a tiny speck of a person. That person […]

Grief is the word as TIM WALKER reviews the production featuring Cillian Murphy. Barbican, London, until April 13 Just after 9/11, the Queen observed that ‘grief is the price we pay for love’. The sentiment may not have been original – a psychiatrist named Dr Colin Murray Parkes had more or less coined the phrase […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a reissued classic that celebrates wanderlust and everything that Brexit seeks to deprive us of. Of all the rage-inducing aspects of the last three years, two comments above all continue to have me grinding my teeth and occasionally waking up shouting in the middle of the night. Both of them came from […]

TIM WALKER gives his review of Fiddler on the Roof at Playhouse London, which is running until September 28. Familiarity can breed contempt with even the greatest shows, so it’s just as well that Sir Trevor Nunn has thought outside of the box with his revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Even the Playhouse’s large […]

A vintage year for the industry saw the most No.1s ever, as attempts to greet the new millennium with gravitas fell flat. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. The Millennium Dome summed up the pricked pomposity of the year 2000. Tony Blair called it ‘a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity’. In the […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the processes by which phrases can contract to just a shadow of their former selves. It is often the fate of words and phrases, over the millennia, to get shorter and shorter. The Latin phrase hoc die, ‘this day’, famously became so shortened in French – as hui, ‘today’ – that French […]

JASON SOLOMONS on a new film about the remarkable life of Bert Trautmann, the former German paratrooper who became a British hero. Trautmann, Bernhard. Picture: Schirner/ullstein bild via Getty Images – Credit: ullstein bild via Getty Images If you’ve heard of Bert Trautmann, it’s perhaps more as the answer to a football trivia question than […]