Arts and Culture

This year’s Venice Film Festival delivered hit after hit after hit Elisia Del Genio and Ludovica nasti in My Brilliant Friend. Photo: Eduardo Castaldo – Credit: Archant Often when reporting on a film festival, the temptation is to sift the movies for themes in a strained attempt to intuit what the world’s filmmakers are saying […]

With the Space Race very much on, 1959 reeked of the future. And one band were particularly influential, Sophia Deboick reports. One event on its own secures 1959’s position in musical history. February 3 was ‘the day the music died’, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper were killed instantly when the plane […]

Logic- and despots – might favour other systems, but, as Peter Trudgill explains, traditional units of measurements still endure. Of the approximately 80 countries in the world which drive on the left-hand side of the road, only four are European: Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, and the UK (plus the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). […]

For a few years at the height of the Sixties, the epicentre of cool was to be found between junctions 16 and 17 of the M1. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports on an unsung cultural landmark World at her feet: Sandie Shaw at the Blue Boar services on the M1. Photo: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images – Credit: Redferns/Getty […]

A timely novel which neatly skewers the still-pervasive myth of an idyllic English countryside. As the self-mutilatory repercussions of Brexit become ever clearer and we career with increasing velocity towards leaving the European Union without any kind of negotiated safety net, Leavers are being forced to draw in the boundaries of their fantasy land further […]

JASON SOLOMONS watches a new Polish romance in which the Iron Curtain plays a defining role – and hails it an instant classic. Among the great, enduring European love stories we must include Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paolo and Francesca, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr […]

For a world still recovering from the horrors of war, pop culture offered escapism and a glimpse of a brighter future. Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials. Picture: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM photo archives – Credit: Archant Theodor Adorno said ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Looking at the hits of […]

The English Renaissance took music into new directions and saw that emergence of a tune which still echoes down the ages. Sophia Deboick reports. Elizabeth I had been on the throne for more than 20 years as the 1580s dawned, and was presiding over a peaceful England. But these years were the calm before the […]

A new exhibition seeks to reclaim Lee Miller’s legacy as an artist in her own right, rather than a muse for others. It does so rather well, says CLAUDIA PRITCHARD When Britain’s first International Exhibition of Surrealism opened in London on 1936, the photographer, model and artist Lee Miller was, in true surrealist style, both […]

PETER TRUDGILL divides up the continent according to word different languages use to describe the smelly stuff The distribution of words meaning ‘cheese’ in different European languages has an interesting geographical pattern. These words fall into four rather clearly separate zones. In the northern zone, the North Germanic languages have a word for cheese which […]

Does the modern game make it even more difficult than ever for players to come out? Jason Solomons writes about a timely film that puts a sport on the spot Of the 736 players registered as team members in Russia for the recent World Cup, how many were gay? Statistically, the likelihood is quite a […]

The Doors’ frontman was supposed to go to the French capital to find inspiration, but found only disintegration. Sophia Deboick pieces together his final weeks. For three days after his death in an apartment at Number 17 Rue Beautreillis, Jim Morrison’s body remained at the property. Wrapped in plastic and packed in dry ice, it […]

​With the football match day programme facing an uncertain future, Charlie Connelly suggests how they could return to their glory days. The Manchester United review. Picture: Archant – Credit: Archant Towards the end of last month I could be found rummaging in boxes and tutting a lot. Afflicted by a sudden bout of nostalgia I’d […]

Charlie Connelly on a book that brings a new level of analysis to the divisive issue on which Ireland is about to decide. Amid the intense national debate surrounding Ireland’s imminent referendum on whether to reform the country’s near-total ban on abortion, one book has emerged to help truly humanise the argument and, perhaps, sway […]

Three decades after the death of Kim Philby, perhaps Britain’s most notorious spy, CHARLIE CONNELLY ponders the changing nature of espionage British spy John Cairncross. Photo: UGC. – Credit: UGC Thirty years ago this week a solemn procession made its way slowly through Moscow’s Kuntsevo cemetery on the banks of the Setun river. An open […]

With chilling talk of a new Cold War, CHARLIE CONNELLY remembers one upside from the last one – gripping fiction Salisbury was, on the face of it, an unlikely setting for a chill blast of stale air from the Cold War to blow through the streets but the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter […]

Although overlooked at the Oscars, 120 BPM is, JASON SOLOMONS argues, one of the best films of the year Some things are hard to explain. Quite why extraordinary French drama 120 Battements par minute (120 BPM beats per minute) wasn’t even on the long-list for an Oscar nomination for Foreign Language Film is a question […]

MARIKA TAYLOR studied at Cambridge University under Stephen Hawking. She remembers his inspirational teaching style. Like many students of my generation, Stephen Hawking had already had enormous influence on me long before we ever met. When I was hesitating about my A-level choices, it was his book A Brief History of Time that convinced me […]

The savaging that Milo Yiannopoulos’ awful book received at the hands of its editor provided joy for many. But CHARLIE CONNELLY had a very personal, and pressing, reason not to join in the ridicule Just before the turn of the year there was much merriment on social media concerning the manuscript of Milo Yiannopoulos’s memoir […]

What makes some men act inappropriately? Psychiatry professor PHILIP GRAHAM explores the science behind harassment It is a scandal which started in Hollywood and has spread around the globe, as sexual harassment allegations are made against more individuals, and concerning more institutions. The full repercussions are yet to be fully understood, but this troubling issue […]

In his most celebrated poems, Rupert Brooke gave a classic evocation of England. But, argues CHARLIE CONNELLY, his work has a very European context My copy of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 And Other Poems is a third impression of the first edition that was published in June 1915. The first run had only appeared the previous […]

Facing upheaval in Europe, modern art found a very special refuge in New York. So, says CLAUDIA PRITCHARD, a new blockbuster MoMA exhibition in Paris represents something of a homecoming When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was founded in 1929, it had no museum building, and precious little art. But it […]

Britain has never produced another hero like Dan Dare. In a landmark year for the lantern-jawed pilot, CHARLIE CONNELLY pays tribute to a figure who has shaped our art, literature, science, architecture and even musical theatre 2017 is a big year for Dan Dare. Born in 1967, he turns 50 while also marking 50 years […]

Painting Chaucer as a Little Englander, as many have done, does him a disservice. It is time to reclaim the great man from the Brexit tendency, says CHARLIE CONNELLY​ Every year on October 25, the anniversary of Chaucer’s death, I heave my copy of The Riverside Chaucer from the shelves, haul it to the sofa […]

Despite plenty of opportunities being created, when it comes to European sports books, writers are just not putting their chances away, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. If you were to name one book that pricked your interest in Europe, what would it be? Grimms’ Fairy Tales? Pinocchio? the Chalet School books? If I tell you mine, promise […]

Our culture correspondent Viv Groskop charts the many chapters in the career of a man described as the ‘most exciting new theatre writer of our time’. Florian Zeller is one of those people who, once you find out about them, you feel as if you should already have known who they were a very long […]

There is more to Alberto Giacometti than his reputation as a troubled maverick, says JOANNE CRAWFORD. The life and art of Alberto Giacometti have received plenty of attention in 2017. A major exhibition of his work was held at Tate Modern in London, and then came the release of Stanley Tucci’s biopic, Final Portrait, a […]

Plenty of books create beautiful evocations of the cities in which they are set. But far fewer succeed in elevating their locations from a backdrop into a central character. CHARLIE CONNELLY selects a few. On learning of the death of J.P. Donleavy on September 11 at the age of 91 I eschewed the most appropriate […]

Ahead of the return to London of arguably his greatest work, Glengarry Glen Ross, Charlie Connelly considers the craft of polymath and playwright David Mamet. Al Pacino on the set of Glengarry Glen Ross. Photo: New Line Cinema/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images – Credit: Corbis via Getty Images In the mid-1960s Carol Stoll would sit […]

BONNIE GREER on the performers who can reinvent themselves for an overseas audience. In ITV’s latest hit period-soap Victoria, the French actor Bruno Wolkowitch plays the role of the wily and lecherous French king Louis Philippe. From about 1997-2006, Wolkowitch was French television’s version of Al Pacino, a brooding, intense, and sexy presence in a […]

Peter Trudgill on a remarkable discovery which transformed the way we think about languages. About 230 years ago, Sir William Jones made an amazing intellectual breakthrough. Jones had been born in London of a Welsh father and an English mother, and some reports suggest that he grew up bilingual in Welsh and English, though this […]

Between them, Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves rescued a South American art form from an ignominious death – dancing first with love, then with hate – says CHRIS SULLIVAN. A new documentary tells the tortured story of the dance’s greatest-ever partnership In the early years of the last century, tango – without doubt, the […]