Arts and Culture

The American right’s culture battles are creating empty shelves in Republican states. Could Britain join in with this madness?

A new exhibition explores whether Ancient Greece's labyrinth existed or was a confection of the imagination cultivated over the centuries

Nightmares were the business of Hans Ruedi Giger, who drew on his own to create surrealist art – and the creature at the heart of Alien

The recent Ed Sheeran plagiarism court case revives the old question of where music really comes from

Many TV comedy actors come a cropper when they turn to serious stage roles, but the League of Gentlemen star captures Sir John magnificently

Forget the headlines. Children's reading comprehension is on the decline, and their books are to blame

The German was behind some of the greatest war images ever taken by some of the best news photographers ever to wield a Leica

The English spoken by lesser-known white West Indians shows significant linguistic differences from that spoken by black West Indians

Taramas is a glorious dip, reliant only on cod’s roe, old bread, oil, garlic, lemon juice and the like. I’m not convinced anything tastes more Mediterranean

One of the greatest Impressionists, Berthe Morisot’s work offered perceptive, unusual glimpses of domestic life

A new book eschews cosy nostalgia to explore the fractures that Europe’s picture postcard tourist traps keep hidden

The Targa Florio road race pitted drivers against every imaginable danger.. including stray dogs

A new play about Sidney Poitier is a fitting allegory for our immoral times

This wonderfully fresh springtime dish is a fitting way to hail the new season

The Americans call it zee, but it is not the only letter pronounced differently in certain parts of the English- speaking world

A revelatory collection of Mediterranean antiquities makes for a quietly subversive exhibition in Cambridge

Two new novels evoke the eeriness thrumming through small coastal towns, where lives wash up like the debris on the beach

The Japanese composer’s work was imbued with a healthy disregard for musical and national boundaries

When Maria Callas met Pier Paolo Pasolini in the late 1960s, the results were predictably explosive

I’ve decided to take up the challenge that this babel of boroughs represents, and over the next few months I intend to visit the most diverse regions of the capital

In the early 70s, the band decamped to the rural Netherlands to make a ‘comeback’ album that nearly finished them

Why do we have words that sound the same but are spelt differently? Because, in Old English, they sounded different too

The Red Baron shot down a total of 80 allied aircraft in a flying career that made his name immortal both in aerial combat and the history of aviation itself

We are entering asparagus season. I love it, earthy and nutty as it is

How an unstarry, violent story of crime and redemption with echoes of the classic policiers cleaned up at France’s Oscars

Painstakingly plotted, the Swedish author’s bestselling debut Collected Works weighs in at 733 pages – over a quarter of a million words

A new show at the National Gallery maps startling changes in pre-first world war European art

After a brutal clampdown on their freedom, Iranian photographers have had to find new ways to express themselves

The Brexit architect follows in a long line of stage heroes who are morally questionable or downright loathsome

Noel Coward's play is funny now in a way that is tragic

The genius of a mysterious and overlooked painter is revealed at a new exhibition in The Hague

The Breton language of northern France does not derive from Gaulish – it has its roots in migration from Devon and Cornwall