Arts and Culture

WILL SELF on a neighbourhood mystery that has been troubling him. What links Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda and James Joyce? They’re all ranged along Shakespeare and opposite Evelyn Grace. But who is or was Evelyn Grace? I don’t know – I phoned her eponymous Academy and the receptionist said: “Isn’t that something you’d research on […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on Cardiff’s considerable musical credentials. “Singing is in my people as sight is in the eye,” says the protagonist of How Green Was My Valley (1941), John Ford’s sentimental cinematic portrait of life in a 19th century Welsh village. The South Wales valleys have indeed rung with “the sound of many voices”, as […]

A new film about three giants of football, who not only revolutionised their clubs, but galvanised communities, defined cities and shaped modern Britain. Footballing dynasties feel like a thing of the past. Certainly these days, when football itself plays out in empty stadia around most of Europe, vast bowls echoing to the sound of bellowing […]

Greta Scacchi reveals her thoughts about Hollywood and how she retained her self-respect at all times. You could be forgiven for thinking that before the Me Too movement began to get traction three years ago, men in Hollywood had behaved impeccably towards women. That of course is arrant nonsense and Greta Scacchi was one of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the lost links that gave us surnames like Nelson, Hobson, Hodgson and Dodgson. There are not too many men about nowadays who are called Peter, but those of us who do still bear this name are quite liable to get called Pete, especially by family and friends.  In the same way, women […]

William Hogarth exposed the chaos, hypocrisy, corruption and pollution of the world around him. A new exhibition showcases his work and that of contemporary artists performing similar tasks in their own society. The first image to greet the visitor to the exhibition, Hogarth: London Voices , London Lives is a photograph of a block of […]

The two films – and a TV show – that helped make conspiracy theories mainstream. So let’s recap. This virus that you’re all so scared of isn’t actually real, just a flammed-up cold that’s been exaggerated to enslave the easily-led. But if it is real, then it was cooked up in a government laboratory either […]

Sainsbury’s devotee WILL SELF on the chain’s travails and what they reveal about a doomed attempt to make everyone in Britain middle class.  Last week Sainsbury’s announced it will be losing 3,500 jobs due to the closure of its in-store meat, fish and deli counters, and of its 420 standalone Argos outlets. The latter will […]

For both Brahms and the Beatles, Hamburg provided a hothouse to develop their talent and character, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. “I cling to my native city as to a mother” wrote Johannes Brahms in 1862. The devastating emotion of his German Requiem, inspired by his mother’s death three years later, proved this comparison was no small statement. […]

Robert Louis Stevenson might be known for his gripping tales of adventure, but CHARLIE CONNELLY finds comfort in the gently flowing narrative of one of his lesser known works “We made a great stir in Antwerp docks,” would be a great opening line to any book, but it happens to be the first line of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the likeliest roots of perhaps the world’s most used word. OK is one of the most successful English words of all time. It is a relatively new word – the first recorded usage dates from the mid-1800s – but it has now spread to all varieties of English around the world, and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the poet responsible for a tragically slim collection of some of the finest verse in the English language. One hundred years ago this week a slim hardback volume of poetry was published in London by Chatto & Windus. Six shillings bought you a collection of 23 poems and a portrait of their […]

Tim Walker on how online is not what theatre should ever be about. The great theatre impresario Bill Kenwright used to get cross with critics who, having requested two tickets for an opening night, showed up on their tod. On such occasions, he took empty seats as an insult and understandably so. I thought about […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the Minnesotan city and its most famous musical son. Minneapolis has always taken its own path. When Bob Dylan arrived in the city in 1959 from Duluth, 150 miles further north, he discovered that Minneapolis – the ‘City of Lakes’ – and its twin city Saint Paul were “rock and roll towns” […]

As cinema enters dark times, the 60th anniversary of À bout de souffle offers a much-needed reminder of film’s ability to revive itself, says JAMES OLIVER. The irony is almost too bitter. This is the 60th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, as it was translated, as it shall be hereafter), one […]

The Tate Modern and three US galleries have postponed a major exhibition of Philip Guston’s work, alarmed at his depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Claudia Pritchard reports on a raging art controversy. In November 1970, the American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman went to see his artist friend Philip Guston’s new exhibition at the Marlborough […]

Globalisation might now be a dirty word for many, while U2 sometimes seem as disliked by an equal number. But, says IAN WALKER, at their finest the band capture a sense of optimism about the connected world. Commercially, U2 are as successful as any band could be. Over the last decade, they made more money […]

John Kampfner, author of the much discussed Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country and a regular contributor to The New European, has written in the New Statesman that “monolingualism is one of the enduring motifs of British mediocrity”.  It is hard to query the basic accuracy of his observation, but we should probably […]

The brilliant neurologist-cum-writer Oliver Sacks wrote a book called Musicophilia in which he explored his own great passion for music through the lens of scientific detachment. The work is full of delights – not least Sacks’s unpicking of the troubling phenomenon of the ‘earworm’, or tune we cannot purge from our brains. The explanation? Invariably […]

Charlie Connelly looks at the life of Henry Dunant. In 1859 Henry Dunant was in a state of excitement. A decade earlier the 31-year-old Swiss had completed his education with modest results and joined a bank, apparently destined for an unspectacular career in currency exchange before an 1853 business trip to North Africa opened up […]

Peter Trudgill on Antarctica, and its most famous story. Antarctica has been called “the continent without language”. True languages are spoken only by human beings, and although there are many visiting scientists and support workers in Antarctica these days, this is a modern situation: the continent has never had indigenous languages because it has never had […]

Charlie Connelly on the perils and pitfalls of a much-missed fixture of the literary scene… the book signing. Last week something happened that felt like a communication from a different age: I was asked to appear at a literary festival. It’s not until next year and “obviously a lot of the details are TBC depending on […]

In the age of the coronavirus, it’s perhaps as well not to dwell too much on six degrees of separation, the idea that all people on average are six – or fewer – social connections away from each other. Still, I was struck by how true this was just over a decade ago when I […]

Sophia Deboick on a modern music phenomenon and his creative hometown. Maastricht is a name that looms large in the history of the European Union. As the place of the EU’s birth with the 1992 Treaty it is forever associated with grey diplomacy and has been a four-letter word in the mouths of Eurosceptics. But […]

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled was a box office bomb on its release, Richard Luck says this is definitely the right moment for a reappraisal. In the wake of his long-overdue Oscar win for the BlacKkKlansman screenplay and the success of his recent Netflix outing Da 5 Bloods, it’s easy to forget that Spike Lee hasn’t always […]

Sophia Deboick on the fascinating story of the star’s often self-destructive obsession with the US, 50 years after the release of the foreboding album which marked its beginning. David Jones was hardly the only baby boomer to adore all things American. The schoolboy was one of millions who had come through austerity Britain to find rock ‘n’ […]

Nathan O’Hagan asks whether the film is toxic in 2020. When it was published in 1996, Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club wasn’t a huge commercial success, despite a largely enthusiastic critical response, but it instantly developed a strong cult following, resonating particularly with disaffected young men who, up until that point, didn’t see their experience […]

So, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in Guy’s Hospital recently, accompanying my brother-in-law who’s terminally ill with cancer to his consultations and treatments. It’s a hospital I know well – having already seen birth and death there, as well as being diagnosed with – and receiving ongoing treatment for – a myeloid […]

It was a cold evening in Paris on February 12, 1926, when the cream of city society made their way to the Salle des Agriculteurs on Rue d’Athènes, all cloche hats, fox furs, buttonhole carnations and clouded breath. When the doors had closed and everyone was seated, the lights dimmed and applause drowned out the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a new book covering 2,000 years of English history at breakneck speed, right up to a gloomy ending in the present day…but with some cause for cautious optimism. English politicians have always displayed a particular interest in history. Maybe it’s a narcissistic thing, feeling that by stepping up to public office they […]

The nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are located in Caucasia, the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, no more than 350 miles across at its narrowest point, which is mostly taken up topographically by the Caucasus mountain range. These three countries are widely, but by no means universally, considered to be […]

I miss the days when I’d think nothing of looking at my diary and seeing I had a lunch with someone like Eartha Kitt. The reputation of the West End stage meant that the greatest performers from all over the world were continually converging upon it. I realise now how I took that for granted, […]