Arts and Culture

Our new football correspondent ROB HUGHES on the symbiotic relationship between Barcelona and Lionel Messi, its mainstay, that must one day come to an end. No player has better displayed the joy of football more sustainably than Lionel Messi. I first saw him at La Masia, Barcelona’s academy, when he was 13, and still feel […]

The promotion of languages is a key way of keeping the disparate Swiss nation together, says PETER TRUDGILL. There is much Britain could learn from its example. If our government truly believed in the United Kingdom as a “sacred union”, they would do well to study the example of another union, the united republic of […]

ROB HUGHES on Captain Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford, two Englishmen united in their service. Captain Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford are two of a kind. Separated by three quarters of a century – and last week by death – they epitomise salt of the earth Englishmen, inspiration to the rest of us throughout the hardest of […]

NATHAN O’HAGAN on a cinematic near-miss that would have resulted in one of Hollywood’s weirdest productions. At this point in 2020, it sometimes feels like every other film released over the past decade is an adaptation of a comic book superhero. The all-conquering Marvel Cinematic Universe films have so far grossed over $22 billion worldwide, […]

The Chinese state has had an overbearing, stultifying effect on the country’s musical expression. Yet there have been acts who have pushed back. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Confucius said “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without”, and as Chinese New Year is celebrated this week, the singing of songs associated with the occasion […]

WILL SELF advances a satirical suggestion to solve some of the country’s problems. In the 1990s – as I’ve often had cause to relate – a profound change occurred in British culture. Up until that point British cuisine was pretty dreadful: over-cooked, urine-smelling veg; overcooked, leathery meat, together with piss-poor trimmings – that was our […]

He is best known as Commandant Eric Lassard in the Police Academy films, but, as CHARLIE CONNELLY reports, actor George Gaynes had an incredibly cosmopolitan childhood in Europe, and an eventful Second World War career. Celebrity came late to George Gaynes. Arguably best known for his role as the amiable simpleton Commandant Eric Lassard in the […]

Director’s cuts often seem overindulgent and overlong. But as Francis Ford Coppola takes a fresh whack at The Godfather Part III, Richard Luck celebrates 10 occasions where the reprise outdid the original. Truth be told, The Godfather Part III was a pretty decent movie from the outset. Admittedly it had a hard time living up to episodes […]

Lockdown has left much of the arts in limbo, but director Stephen Unwin has been characteristically bustling, says TIM WALKER. Theatres are much like any other places of work and the best directors – like all bosses – create environments in which everyone feels they can succeed. It’s all very well to scream at actors and […]

Fifty years ago Britain underwent an overnight switch to decimal currency. Roger Domeneghetti reports on how it came about, and why its effects still echo in British and European relations.

CHARLIE CONNELLY on legendary literary character from France now enjoying some new exposure thanks to Netflix. Paris, June 1929. A man calls at the Rue Saint Placide apartment of wealthy widow Madame Casanova, who is well-known in the city as a collector of gems and jewellery. He is handsome, about 30 years old and wearing an impeccably […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why Australians haven’t developed regional accents… yet. Reader David Handley recent wrote to The New European in response to my column about the origins of Australian English (TNE #225), commenting on its regional uniformity. How, he asked, has Australian English failed to develop distinct regional accents? He is quite right to point to the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a writer who helped shape Italy, and whose fate still consumes the country. Does anything burn more fiercely in a human being than a sense of injustice? We can all think of times we’ve been wronged or a verdict has gone unfairly against us, trivial or ruinous, that can still have us […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the French star Simone Simon, whose Hollywood career was overshadowed by a court case. Sitting in the courtroom during the summer of 1938 Simone Simon looked anything but the glamorous transatlantic film star. In a simple coat and hat and flat shoes she watched the proceedings with an increasing sense of mortified […]

El Clásico might get all the attention, but the greatest clash in Spanish football is between Seville’s two sides, says EMMA LUCK. It is no coincidence that La Liga chose El Gran Derbi to kickstart the league competition after its coronavirus lockdown last season. The showdown between local rivals Sevilla and Real Betis was given pride […]

The hunting of truffles in the foothills of northern Italy remains one of the world’s most clandestine activities. JASON SOLOMONS reports on a charming new film which attempts to lift the lid on the secret society responsible for bringing this most expensive ingredient of all to the dinner table. This time of year, film critics are […]

Remembering the group of Conservative MPs that their own leader dubbed the ‘Glamour Boys’ and threatened with deselection. In the 1920s and 1930s of buttoned-up Britain, homosexuality was an illicit act, and would remain that way until 1967 when the law changed in England and Wales. Even though gay culture was vibrant, it existed mostly underground, its […]

WILL SELF on Canada, and the relative his family shipped off there. “What’s the difference between Canada and yoghurt?” is a joke first told me in the 1970s – to which the answer was: “Yoghurt is a live culture.” A half-century on the same sort of snide attitude towards all things Canadian can be easily evinced from […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the astonishing musical heritage of the crossroads country, heard in the work of Kate Bush, Hollywood films and political campaigns. Georgia has had many invaders – first the Mongols, then the Ottomans and Iranians and finally the Russians – eager to exploit its position as a crossroads between Europe and Asia. But in its […]

For years ROB HUGHES wrote one of Europe’s best-read and most influential sports columns – the now-defunct International Herald Tribute’s Global Soccer. Today it is born again in the pages of The New European. This week we look at an unedifying clash between two of football’s most forceful players. Researchers at the University of Salzburg last […]

TIM WALKER remembers his old friend Ronald Harwood, a writer who left judgement to others. Ronald Harwood was fascinated by how individuals responded to stark moral dilemmas. He never, however, judged, and preferred to etch out his characters in shades of grey – rather than blacks and whites – and that’s what made his plays and […]

BILL BORROWS on a new book about the men at the centre of the Swinging Sixties. There was a knock at the door of 24 Chapel Street, Belgravia, an elegant four-storey Georgian house a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace and, less than three months earlier, the venue for the launch of The Beatles’ eighth […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an unidentified woman whose death has captivated for more than a century, and a new book which tries to tell her story. The chances are you’ve already seen her face. Nobody knows her name, she’s been dead for well over a century, but the chances are you’ve seen her face. L’Inconnue de […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles the Austrian singer Falco, a man never able to quite escape his demons. Ilse Kraus might have been 75 years old but there was no way she was missing the funeral. She joined thousands of others in solemn procession to Vienna’s vast, sprawling Zentralfriedhof to follow the coffin, carried to its final […]

With awards season upon us, Richard Luck lists those deserving causes who were most cruelly overlooked. If it’s January that means someone somewhere is handing out trophies. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the likes of BAFTA and the Motion Picture Academy Of Arts And Sciences will be getting dressed up to distribute gongs. […]

The composer’s actual association with the Hungarian capital was relatively fleeting. Yet the city has long laid a claim on him, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Formed from the separate locales of Buda, Óbuda, and Pest in 1873, Budapest is a city with an enduring commitment to music. Historic venues like the Pesti Vigadó concert hall, built […]

The influence on English of the Old Norse language of the Vikings is still up for debate, says PETER TRUDGILL. When people are learning English as a foreign language, it is generally very useful for them to learn three main forms of every verb: the present tense, the past tense, and the past participle. Past participles occur […]

WILL SELF on the mundanity of tech. Sympathetic magic is usually conducted using what the pioneering structuralist anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, termed “a symbol set”: bundles of herbs, fetish objects, dolls in the likeness of the relevant parties. Feelings are brought to a focus then beamed across space and time; remote and mystic causes create very […]

It wasn’t only the English language that spread around the globe during Britain’s age of imperial expansion, says PETER TRUDGILL.   The three major surviving indigenous languages of the island of Britain are English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. We are very familiar with the fact that, since the beginning of the 17th century, English has spread far […]

Richard Hamilton eschewed the knockabout nature of other purveyors of Pop Art, says Richard Holledge, but his work packed just as much of a punch. Pop! Whaam! Blam. Exclamation marks!!! Technicolour explosions. That’s Pop Art for you. The comic book whizz-bangs of Roy Lichtenstein and a group of post-war artists typified the 1960s for many – […]

Podcasts have been with us for a few years now. But during the pandemic something has happened with this genre – a paradigm shift. A sea-change of massive proportions. Lately, I’ve been trying  to  understand what exactly is going on. And if what is happening is a kind of paradigm shift. A sea-change of massive proportions is […]

TIM WALKER remembers a meeting with Malcolm Muggeridge, an encounter which has haunted him since revelations about the journalist and broadcaster later emerged. Malcolm Muggeridge – St Mugg, as he was known in his day – admitted to me that he had been an actor all of his life. His credits included I’m All Right Jack and Heavens […]