Arts and Culture

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, […]

Bonnie Greer on the impact of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, one of the greatest albums of all time, 50 years after its release Growing up African American and a sheltered Catholic schoolgirl on the South Side of Chicago, Marvin Gaye was the “ooh baby, baby man”. He was the troubadour of our clandestine basement […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the music of Johannesburg and its undisputed queen, Mama Africa Johannesburg was a city built on gold, springing up rapidly after precious metals were discovered there in the 1880s, but it became a byword for impoverishment. Soweto in particular, originally a mine workers’ encampment and later one of the places black Jo’burgians from […]

How Seve Ballesteros hauled golf from its safe, gin-soaked, cliquey complacency into a thrillingly glamorous spectacle There aren’t many golfers who have played a shot so brilliant, so miraculous even, that a commemorative plaque is installed on the spot, but then there haven’t been many golfers like Seve Ballesteros. Even at his best it would have been […]

The publishing industry has remained remarkably robust through the pandemic, but the coronavirus has exacerbated some alarming trends for the UK’s literary scene. I only realised this the other day while I was actually doing it, but of all the things I’ve missed during the pandemic – popping out for a pint, going to the […]

TIM WALKER on Dame Maggie Smith, an actress able to make people laugh, on and off screen. When I went to see Dame Maggie Smith appearing in A German Life at the Bridge Theatre in London, I was invited backstage to see her after the curtain went down. It was a hot night in 2019 and the […]

How the best rugby union players from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland come together to bring unity. It really shouldn’t work. Every four years, the best rugby union players from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are brought together for a couple of months to take on one of the sport’s southern hemisphere giants. New Zealand, […]

English football supporters are deluding themselves over fan power and the idea that the Bundesliga is more even than the Premier League. What do you imagine upset the Glazer Brothers more – their football team across the pond being prevented from playing on Sunday, or the Monday morning hit to the Manchester United share price […]

Does what we know about its creators’ mental health overshadow the brilliance of The Goon Show? Can the all-too-familiar concept of the sad clown spoil the enduring charms of one of British comedy’s enduring monuments? It is a question worth asking this month, on the 70th anniversary of the first UK broadcast of radio comedy The Goon […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how English, having spread one way around the world, suddenly reversed direction During the 1600s and 1700s, the English language spread westwards from Britain across the Atlantic to Canada, the USA, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Central America. Then, suddenly, at the very end of the 18th century, it started spreading back […]

France has always prided itself on its great thinkers. But the current crop are embarrassing and increasingly irrelevant. What happened? There must be some lesson to be drawn from the fact that today’s woke crowd insults France and the French while name-dropping French totems from a great height. As the country is repeatedly condemned, Merleau-Ponty, […]

Jason Solomons has known Noel Clarke for 15 years and admired his refusal to be denied by the British film industry. But that was before the allegations that have left his career, and BAFTA’s reputation, in tatters… Whichever way you look at it, the Noel Clarke allegations are disastrous for British cinema.  It’s a story […]

Sergei Krikalev went into space as a citizen of the USSR. While he was away, his country ceased to exist and he was left stranded in orbit. On its 30th anniversary, MICK O’HARE tells the astonishing story of his flight. On 19 August 1991 Boris Yeltsin, newly elected president of the Russian Soviet Republic, stood […]

When it comes to people who try to police our grammar, Winston Churchill (apparently) knew how to deal with them There is a grammar joke about Winston Churchill which is well known, even if it probably isn’t true. When a draft of an upcoming speech of his was circulated to aides, one of them, a […]

An intriguing new exhibition allows the public to view paintings from the Golden Age of Dutch art while experiencing the smells associated with them.  A painting is a painting is a painting. You look at it. It might mesmerise you; Jackson Pollock. Make you smile ironically; Rene Magritte. Lift your soul to the heavens; Tiepolo or, a Damien […]

If a picture is worth a thousand words – and if you need that picture to assuage the feeling that football is being sold to the devil – study this photograph. The scene is Wembley Stadium last Sunday evening. Moments after the final whistle of this season’s first cup final, Tottenham’s defeated Son Heung-min is […]

TANIT KOCH on how the quest for equality is having an impact on the German language. Some of us have put lockdown to great use and improved our language skills at home. Some, like editor-at-large Alastair Campbell, have even chosen German, despite the lasting damage done to its reputation by Mark Twain (The Awful German Language), Hollywood (“Achtung! Schnell, […]

A new exhibition brings together the works of four artists who, in their very different ways, emerged at a time when female roles in British society were about to change forever.  They were among the most innovative and, at times, sought-after artists of their day, a quartet of painters who are celebrated together in an […]

The European football super league is not dead – and you can bank on that The Super League, which rightly shocked and angered so many, came as no surprise to me. It was always hovering in the wings, waiting to burst on to the stage of world football like a 1,000-lb gorilla. There was no […]

Thirty years after his death, a new biography of Steve Marriott, of the Small Faces, paints a bleak picture of rock excess. The 30th anniversary of Steve Marriott’s death at the age of 44 – he died in a house fire on April 21 1991 caused by his falling asleep with a lit cigarette – finds the […]

From beach bums to hippies, hair metal rockers to gangster rappers, LA’s musical story has more twists than most. LA is a city of extremes. It’s a place where you either make it big or hit rock bottom, with a huge gulf between the mansions of Bel Air and the tents and shacks of Skid Row, […]

Mexican Coke is now on sale in the UK, but will it ever replace the real thing, with its iconic glass Coca-Cola bottles? My uncle used to buttonhole the sommeliers in expensive restaurants and ask for “a bottle of American Beaujolais”. A so-called ‘Mad Man’ – or Madison Avenue advertising copywriter – he knew the […]

Best known as Grouty in Porridge, Peter Vaughan was an actor who seemed to get better with age The Seven Ages of Man speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It amounts to a career trajectory for all serious actors. The best and luckiest manage to grow old with their audiences, going from playing “the whining schoolboy, with […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on Dalida, the French superstar singer who endured a catalogue of personal catastrophes They made an unlikely couple arriving at the Sanremo Music Festival in January 1967, the young protest singer some called the Italian Bob Dylan and the elegant, older chanteuse from Paris with a glittering decade of mainstream chart success behind […]

In both war and peace, a love of reading made Napoleon history’s biggest bibliophile.  When you’re an enthusiastically expansionist autocrat and visionary military leader building an empire that will cover almost an entire continent your work doesn’t, it’s fair to say, leave much time for hobbies. Julius Caesar produced no macramé of note; Alexander the […]