Arts and Culture

In his work, and in his life, Joseph Roth chronicles the old order that was swept away in the first half of the 20th century According to Joseph Roth his earliest memory was of watching his mother give away his cradle to a woman he’d never seen before. She “holds it to her chest, as though […]

Such is Liverpool’s immense musical heritage that the city is not overshadowed by its most famous sons Liverpool makes its own mythology. In February 1967, the Beatles released the double A-side Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields Forever, not only creating a new paradigm for Britishness in pop on one side and all but single-handedly creating psychedelia on […]

Gender bias means that the history of art has been written by men, about men. But there are some signs that the tide is finally beginning to turn It’s been 50 years since the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin posed the provocative question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ – a ground-breaking […]

How the friendship of tragic poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, forged over long, cocktail-soaked lunches, paved the way for the rest of us In 1950s America, white, middle-class women were not supposed to be ambitious. In fact, women were respected for not pursuing their own careers and instead focusing their attentions on the home […]

Theatre reviewer TIM WALKER sees an old favourite returning to the stage after lockdown The Mousetrap St Martin’s Theatre, London ***** There was a lot of talk of a new kind of theatre emerging after the lockdowns – edgier, more relevant and representative – but maybe, after a traumatic experience, there’s something to be said […]

Was 18th century Scotland visited by people from the frozen north? RICHARD LUCK picks over the accounts of the men who might have made it all the way from Greenland. History is filled with tantalising theories of human endurance and exploration. Could the Vikings have crossed the Atlantic, for instance? Could Polynesia have been populated by migrants who crossed the […]

Netflix series Master of None has successfully negotiated a change of focus after its creator was caught up in a #MeToo scandal The first two seasons of Master of None sound awful when described – “an actor bops about New York dating beautiful women and eating at nice restaurants” – and sometimes they are. Aziz Ansari stars as Dev, […]

As club football’s strangest season comes to an end, photographer Stuart Roy Clarke shares images of fans taken during the pandemic I started The Homes of Football photography series more than 30 years ago as a love letter to this country, yet I knew that the Germans and Scandinavians and latterly the Americans revere our […]

The spread of English as a narrative language now includes the Asian island nation. Singapore, the large island off the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, is separated from the mainland by the Johor strait which is less than a nautical mile wide at its narrowest point. A number of fascinatingly different mother tongues have […]

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 […]