Arts and Culture

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s cinema, theatre and books

Received Pronunciation was the epicentre of how you had to talk in British plays. Then a play called Look Back in Anger by John Osborne arrived

The Scottish writer infuses quiet moments with beauty and profundity. Her new book is so good it’s almost impossible to let it go

The election might be dull, but the street art it’s inspired is anything but. And its message is: get out and vote

A new movie role shows there is much more to Sofie Gråbøl than that chunky jumper she wore as Sarah Lund in the classic Scandi noir drama

The late French actor’s enigmatic beauty came to symbolise bohemian style and feminism across Europe

Why shouldn’t hundreds of gay people gather in the woods at night to witness nude oiled wrestling between dykes?

The geographical spread of Romansh in Switzerland is shrinking as speakers start to use the German of their near neighbours

The German-American science writer had an ability to straddle effortlessly the worlds of advanced engineering and mass popular culture

Ahead of July 4, why not read about far more thrilling polls courtesy of Dickens, Wodehouse, Trollope… and even Jeffrey Archer?

Early Soviet avant-garde art… and how it was crushed

The internet is wilfully and demonstrably fickle. What then for restaurants reliant on influencers?

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s television and books

A person considered to be a kind of sexual demon vis-a-vis his actors male and female can also make beautiful, great films

The remarkable legacy of the late singer, who epitomised both French cool and French angst

Iain Softley’s cult 1994 directorial debut chronicles the Beatles’ wild early days in Hamburg’s red-light district

The iconic French singer has died after a long battle against cancer

My great-great-grandfather’s behaviour transcends the stuffy confines of respectable churchmen in the 1880s

Its origin is uncertain, but the term ‘muggins’ is one of the very few alternative first-person pronouns to ‘I’ and ‘me’ in the English language

Ingrid Bergman said the German possessed more charm in his little finger than most men had in their whole body

How tragedy turned photojournalist Ernst Scheidegger into a recorder of Dalí, Giacometti and more

A choice of reading for the Euros includes the man who prescribed a cure for English football’s problems, a generation early

Continental players brought skill and intelligence to an isolationist British game. Could our politicians learn from that?

Three out of the top five restaurants in the world were Spanish this year. Why?

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s television and books

Hepburn had come to know early on that delicate thread between life and death. And that she had survived

At 75 years old, Emlyn Williams’ Accolade is all too relevant today

The story of my great-great-grandfather and a killer cat

Ligeti’s rigorous antipathy to ideology was maintained throughout his life and extended way beyond his music

Most people in Haiti speak Kreyòl, while their eastern neighbours speak Spanish

A new book tells the story of a German film-maker who tried to break with the country’s past

Brexit and streaming are killing off the tradition of British musicians touring Europe in a van. One who did it says that’s a tragedy