Arts and Culture

WILL SELF on an art exhibition that prompts thoughts beyond the gallery To Peckham for my first art exhibition since lockdown has lifted. In truth, I wouldn’t have gone if the show weren’t being curated by a friend – but then I sometimes wonder if this applies to all gallery-goers: they’re so very convivial, the […]

The football genius’ nomadic decline after Manchester United is a tale well told. But his brief stint in apartheid South Africa is less familiar. As NATHAN O’HAGAN reports, his spell there set the tone for all that followed He was one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a football pitch. His natural ability and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a superb new novel which creates a horrifyingly plausible near-future for Margate. There’s a different kind of sky over the Isle of Thanet, a vast canopy, bigger even somehow than that over the flatlands of the Fens. And the light, the light is different there, and when the sun sets over the sea in […]

As Gregory’s Girl turns 40, Richard Luck chronicles his decades-long love affair with Bill Forsyth’s masterpiece  It was made for next to nothing, it starred nobody famous and it was written and directed by a man whose only previous film had been seen by next to nobody south of the border. Still, no sooner had […]

The New European editor-in-chief and Liverpool fan MATT KELLY on the pain and confusion caused by his club’s actions My wife doesn’t understand me.  The events of this week threw me into a deep funk from which I have yet to recover. The unprecedented headaches I began to suffer on Monday can’t have been just a coincidence. […]

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 […]

TANIT KOCH on the traumas of moving house in Germany, the country where everybody rents. I’ve moved house. One of the more humiliating experiences, I find, is walking through an empty, well-kept flat alongside a facility manager who inspects it and points to three minor spots in a corner behind the door, condescendingly asking you […]

The tiny football club of Eibar has defied gravity by staying in the top flight for six years. But its luck looks like finally running out. Never mind the ongoing travails of FC Barcelona, another, sadder, story of downfall in Spanish football is being played out, as the end of the La Liga season nears. […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an actress whose later years have fascinated every bit as much as her relatively brief screen career. They always called her a recluse but that wasn’t strictly true. Greta Garbo lived not out of sight but in the heart of Manhattan where it’s impossible to disappear. She was a regular attendee at […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the music of the Mexico capital. Some places are so alive with their own internal mythology that their music speaks of little else. Chilangos, the contested term for the denizens of Mexico City, have played out a love affair with their city in popular song over the last half century, but music […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on two new European novels which highlight the underappreciated artistry of translators The job of a literary translator can be a thankless one. It’s a multiskilled calling with two main demands: fluency in at least one other language that isn’t your own and an exceptional talent for writing. It’s a role requiring immense artistic […]

TIM WALKER on meeting Billy Graham. As a venerable democracy, Great Britain used to take a somewhat condescending view of America and the way she liked to wave her flag and loudly profess her faith in God. It wasn’t that we were by and large unpatriotic or ungodly, but we just felt that we’d reached […]

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 […]

Will Self looks at the differences between the mourning for Princess Diana and Prince Philip – and the Vanuatu tribe who worshipped the Duke of Edinburgh To Buck House, to check out how the collective hysteria was manifesting itself in the wake of Phil the Greek’s demise. There were cut flowers lined up along barriers […]

The German giant caught in one of industry's biggest-ever scandals, 'Dieselgate', is now making its play to dominate the world of electric cars

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 […]

Not even the Albanian regime’s determination to seal itself off from the rest of the world could stop the sounds of the country’s capital. Music thrives off cross-pollination. How, then, do musicians survive – let alone create – in an isolationist country where only a meagre diet of state-approved culture is on offer? Albania, and […]

Amid the moralising and propaganda, the Soviet Hollywood also produced dark fantasy movies that were a world away from Disney’s saccharine output – and created a troubled relationship with the communist authorities.  In the grand scheme of things, there are worse things about dictatorships than them telling audiences what they were allowed to watch, but […]

Born 200 years ago this month, Charles Baudelaire continues to inspire memes, musicians and even Monty Burns in The Simpsons. CHARLIE CONNELLY explains his remarkable relevance. The most famous image of Charles Baudelaire is a portrait taken in or around 1863 by the Parisian photographer Etienne Carjat. It was part of a series called Galerie Contemporaine, in […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life of photographer Robert Doisneau, a man who portrayed Paris to the world and captured one of its most famous and romantic images. When a teenage Robert Doisneau first took a camera onto the streets of Paris he was so cripplingly shy that all he came back with were pictures of cobblestones. Gradually he […]

For Ian Lavender, who played Private Pike in Dad’s Army, the magic of the series came from the way it was written to suit the actors’ personalities. By TIM WALKER. There have been 10 prime ministers since the first episode of Dad’s Army was broadcast, but the Guardian has suggested that the show resonates now more than ever because of […]

Sacha Jafri’s The Journey of Humanity – the world’s largest painting on canvas, which sold for $62m – is a prodigal waste of paint. Whatever else we may wish to say about The Journey of Humanity – the world’s largest existent painting on canvas, which sold at auction last week for $62m – one thing’s […]

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 […]

Beltrán Alfonso Osorio broke or fractured 107 bones in seven attempts at trying to finish the Grand National at Aintree For whichever jockey wins Saturday’s Grand National, it is likely to be a career-defining moment. One day you’re in the sports pages, the next you’re on the front pages. Yet, one of Aintree’s most celebrated […]

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 […]

FLORENCE HALLETT on two new books that offer a corrective to the much mythologised early biography of Francis Bacon, and place him at the heart of the European artistic tradition. At some point in 1944, Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery and chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, walked into Francis Bacon’s South Kensington studio. The […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a brilliant writer whose recently rediscovered story of a Jew forced to become a fugitive of the Nazis has echoes of his own itinerant, tragic life. When 27-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz leaned on the deck rail and watched the sun set over the Atlantic on October 29, 1942, he felt his wanderings […]

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 […]

A tale familiar to generations of schoolchildren, the savage killing of Thomas Becket, and its depiction in a Canterbury Cathedral window is now the focus of a new British Museum exhibition. For several hours after his assassination the body of Thomas Becket was left where it had fallen on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral choir, his […]