Arts and Culture

Celebrating a dreamlike cult British take on the American road movie… with German influences We begin in a flat in London. We end on a train to nowhere somewhere in the south west. In between times, a man half-heartedly investigates his brother’s suicide, listens to some very good music, takes a detour with a nice […]

WILL SELF on the V&A’s new show: Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser The front of my face felt heavy and swollen while a screed hovered in the mid-distance. “Grab a hedgehog and aim it towards one of the hoops.” It read: “Don’t throw the hedgehog, just open your hand.” I tried doing this, but the hedgehog went high. […]

This all-English Champions League final between Man City and Chelsea is no guarantee of success at the Euros Beware the siren song telling us England will rule the playing fields of Europe in the coming weeks.  It is true that the Premier League is where the money is, and that two English clubs contest the […]

Germany fared almost as badly as the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest. Perhaps it’s time to come to an arrangement… Ooops, they did it again. Zero points… To us. And no, three pity points from the Austrian and Romanian juries don’t make our shame any less complete. But still, Vielen Dank, Britain, for saving us from the bottom […]

New exhibition 2 Tone: Lives & Legacies features incredible photos of fans of the Coventry music phenomenon In early 1980, The Specials were still basking in the glory of putting Too Much Too Young, and the sound of their 2 Tone label, at No. 1. Along with other ska-revival bands The Beat, The Bodysnatchers, The […]

For the last century, Turkey’s culture war has been played out in its music. And it’s not over yet Standing at the crossroads of continents, and the former capital of an empire stretching from North Africa to Eastern Europe, it is no surprise that Istanbul’s musical culture is a rich one. Turkish music encompasses multiple […]

The life of Rosa Bonheur, often considered the most famous female painter of the 19th century Rosa Bonheur might have been one of the greatest artists of the 19th century but you probably wouldn’t have wanted her living next door. Having moved from Bordeaux to Paris in the late 1820s when she was six years old, […]

King of TV commercials, Roy Andersson is also the auteur behind a series of bizarre, playful full-length masterpieces.  There are a good many film directors who got their start making commercials. Which would be fine if most of them didn’t make it so blindingly obvious, with their flashy-yet-vacuous imagery and pointlessly fast cutting.  Let’s not […]

The artist’s recent artwork for London Underground didn’t seem to quite hit the mark. But a new exhibition and book shows his energy and love for life remain undimmed Air travel stopped, and so did the hum of traffic: as humanity fell silent last year, the natural world took centre stage in an exuberant display of […]

TIM WALKER remembers a meeting with a particularly pensive Rowan Atkinson I met Rowan Atkinson on an autumn day in 1988 that, he informed me, was the 10th anniversary of the start of his career in show business. Up until that point, his credits included the ground-breaking satirical television series Not the Nine 0’Cock News, Blackadder and its […]

The FA Cup holds an almost mystical appeal in south-east Asia. Now a Thai family have rewritten its history, as well as the destiny of unfashionable Leicester City If you ever spent time in South East Asia in the month of May you would know that there was one match that had almost mystical appeal. […]

Why did Britain fall out of love with speedway, and how did Poland take over as the sport’s new spiritual home? Not so long ago, the start of the British speedway season would have been big news. That wasn’t the case this week, when the first of this year’s Covid-delayed league fixtures took place. Speedway was, at one […]

Restrictions might be easing and art galleries opening their doors again, but are virtual visits now here to stay?  So here I am in the National Gallery relishing the pulsating drama of Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast. By my side, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, director of the gallery, no less, is enthusing about the “huge emotional punch” of the painting which […]

Transport for London has retired its fleet of classic Routemaster buses, which has been running on the number 15 route, the capital’s last running heritage service. So, farewell then to the Routemaster bus – and while I fully appreciate that those of my readers who live elsewhere than the corporate death star formerly known as […]

The song contest is just first of a series of events that highlight the tension between a desire to open up societies and the need to remain vigilant against the virus Never far from scandal, one of the greatest controversy’s surrounding this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is the fact that it is being held at […]

‘Really weird and properly frightening’. That was the tone of the horror film script Mark E Smith, iconoclast leader of The Fall, set out to write in 2007. Fourteen years later, The Otherwise is finally being published Friday February 16th 2007. I’m waiting in the reception at the BBC building on Oxford Road Manchester. I’m […]

Chris West, an historian of the contest, chronicles its greatest ever controversies After a year’s hiatus caused by the pandemic the Eurovision Song Contest returns this week, in Rotterdam. As ever, the event has been accompanied by a palaver about some of the entries. The main focus this year has been on Belarus, which has form for doing […]

A new book about the Anglo-Saxons demolishes faddish myths that aspects of their culture live on today, and instead tells their own story in gripping style We are blessed to live in the golden age of straight-talking history. ‘Straight-talking’ rather than ‘popular’, because the people filling the windows of Waterstones are scholars of unimpeachable renown, often with […]

An extraordinary photographic exhibition focuses on Britain’s most peculiar local folklore rituals. But how are these events still managing to survive changing times and attitudes while attempting to remain true to their traditional roots? How about this to get the health and safety bods hot under the collar? A procession of extroverts in fancy dress […]

Danny Huston’s grandfather, his dad and his sister all won Oscars, creating a Hollywood dynasty. No pressure, then.  Movie night when Danny Huston was a kid probably sounds a little different to the ones we’ve all held with our families in lockdown. “There was always a big palaver about getting the projector out,” he says […]

The music of the Danish capital, like the city itself, is characterised by an extraordinary imagination and by flights of fantasy Despite being practically-minded enough to have made Denmark one of the countries with the highest quality of life in the world, the Danes also understand the power of imagination. Their most famous son and master of […]

Luis Ocaña was a lion of a cyclist, yet his was a life seemingly cursed by fate They say that in sport, as in life, you make your own luck. One man who might disagree with that statement, and with some vehemence, is Luis Ocaña. Despite being one of the greatest cyclists Europe ever produced, […]

Forty years on, the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Pope John Paul II remain as murky as ever. Roger Domeneghetti assesses the so-called ‘Bulgarian Connection’ Just before 5pm on the afternoon of May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II stepped into his open-topped ‘Popemobile’ ready to take a short, but slow journey around St Peter’s Square. The sun-drenched […]

TIM WALKER on his run-ins with Michael Winner, a thin-skinned character whose reputation has come under fresh scrutiny in the #MeToo era The late Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster loved to have a flutter. When I worked as his deputy around the turn of the millennium, he’d be watching the racing on television most afternoons. On […]

As Portugal tops the list of ‘green’ destinations for UK tourists, Will Self looks back on trips there and ahead to the future of tourism after the Covid-19 pandemic So, the list of ‘green’ destinations has been published and holiday bookings have already soared. The Great British Jet-Off – a major component of our national […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY has high praise for author Rónán Hession, a unique talent able to tell gently-paced tales of gentle characters Rónán Hession is a tonic for our times. In fact, you know what, he might even be the tonic for our times. I don’t say this lightly. When I read the Dubliner’s debut novel Leonard and […]

José Mourinho is a busted flush… so why does he keep getting plum managerial jobs? We really should stop doubting José Mourinho when he tells us he is “a special one… .not one out of the bottle.”  A linguist, a persuader, a winner in Portugal, England, Italy, and Spain. But when the trophies stopped and […]

On the eve of an American poet’s 80th birthday, the places and people over here broadened his horizons When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’, Bob Dylan – who will celebrate his 80th birthday on 24th May – was clear […]

Why communication may have been the least of the problems when the Vikings invaded The Great Heathen Army of the Danes invaded eastern England in 865. Large-scale Viking settlements followed throughout the 9th century and on into the 10th. Many eastern and northern areas of our island came to have a heavily Scandinavian or Scandinavianised […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on what might have happened if the attempt on Pope John Paul II’s life had been successful The two bullets fired by his would-be assassin perforated Pope John Paul II’s colon and small intestine, and he lost nearly three-quarters of his blood as he was rushed to hospital. Yet, they narrowly missed his mesenteric artery and […]

How the archipelago’s dialect hung on for centuries, but is now disappearing The Channel Islands lie between 70 and 85 nautical miles off the south coast of England. They are very much closer to the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy in France, which is only about 12 nautical miles away. The islands are not part of the […]

Megan Nolan reviews Real Housewives of New York, a show built on an addictive desire to feel superior and perhaps even pity for America’s super-rich This week season 13 of the reality show Real Housewives of New York began. I am badly addicted to this particular iteration of the franchise (there are Real Housewives in Atlanta, […]