Eurofile

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

For a man with a celebrated line of fragrances, it’s no surprise that Pierre Cardin comes out of a new documentary smelling of roses. “We kept digging for dirt,” concedes one of the film’s directors, Todd Hughes. “But we kept striking gold.” So, adorned by celebs including Dionne Warwick, Naomi Campbell and Sharon Stone, House […]

The Seychelles are a place where musical cultures from every part of the world – African, Indian, Polynesian, Arabic, Far Eastern and European – truly harmonise “The real richness of these islands is our cultural heritage,” Seychellois musical legend Patrick Victor has said. That is a cultural heritage that ranges far beyond the island of Mahé, smaller […]

Jason Solomons looks at how Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman helped take The Father from French fringe play to the Oscars It started life as a one-set play in a fringe theatre in Paris. Nine years later, The Father is now, as they say, a major motion picture and a very strong contender for this […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why we shorten some syllables and not others, such as in privacy and private. It is an interesting fact about the English language that we pronounce the word nature with a long ‘a’ whereas we say natural with a short ‘a’. Similarly, while we say grateful with a long ‘a’, gratitude has a short […]

The Super League farce may be over, but the conflicting interests of owners and fans mean more trouble ahead. Not even Niccolò Machiavelli, the grandmaster of deception, could have foreseen the manner in which English, Spanish and Italian clubs attempted to carve up European football. “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo,” Machiavelli wrote […]

Journalist Rob Hughes was ignored when he claimed a link between heading footballs and dementia nearly 50 years ago – and the authorities are still to act properly Pardon the cynicism, but when the UK parliament in February finally set aside time to listen to doctors and former professional footballers about dementia in our national […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious process by which neutral phrases for ‘smell’ tend to turn bad. It is rather well known to keen crossword solvers that the English words aroma, odour, scent, smell and stink all have five letters. Crossword clues indicating a five-letter olfactory answer can therefore not be readily resolved without further work and thought. A good question […]

Britain needs its theatres back because Britain IS theatre – a country obsessed with role-playing When I stumbled on the English National Opera’s rendition of Handel’s Messiah recently and watched it for a while, I suddenly burst into tears. There, in the empty London Coliseum where the ENO were performing amidst the shadows of the empty […]

Bill Kenwright’s Love Letters and the National’s After Life have announced opening dates – but a full return for the London stage seems as far away as ever As a theatre critic, I am sometimes asked when am I going to start reviewing theatre again. It is not an unreasonable question, especially now that there appear […]

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD on an artwork, an exhibition and a book which all demonstrate the way that artists have been inspired by trees. In our new, more outdoor life, trees have been a consolation, ever-changing but constant, by turn prickling with promise, brimming with plenty, stripping down for winter, and bubbling into life again. As the […]

Our football correspondent hails the departing Manchester City striker, the Premier League’s highest non-British scorer. In the Netherlands, club legends leave with a garland of flowers. At Manchester City, they are stacking up the statues. Three are on commission right now because in successive seasons Vincent Kompany, David Silva and now Sergio Agüero have retired […]

PETER TRUDGILL on death, and recent revival, of Cornish. After the first arrival of the Germanic Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons in the southwestern peninsula of England, British Celts began migrating across the Channel to Brittany to escape Germanic domination, thus reducing the Celtic population base of the area. By about 800 AD, the Saxons had taken […]

He always set out to shock, but is Serge Gainsbourg now just too creepy for modern sensibilities? When Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, Francois Mitterrand, then president of France, declared “he was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”. Parisians took to the streets for candlelit vigils and recitations of Gainsbourg lyrics. It was an unofficial day of national mourning. For the […]

A recent decision to remake The King and I musical is a striking one, given the production’s politically incorrect undertones and unpopularity in Thailand. Just in time for the 70th anniversary of the Broadway premiere of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I later this month, Paramount Pictures revealed it had purchased the rights to create a […]

Technology may be closing in on making instant, in-ear translation services a reality. But it's still a galaxy away from truly replicating human communication.

Rob Hughes on the financial calculations that mean the ball must keep rolling during a pandemic... if only to keep the money rolling in.

PETER TRUDGILL on whether Scots should be considered a language or not. My column of a few weeks ago, about how the Swiss are encouraged to learn their country’s various languages – and how something similar here might benefit the UK – annoyed reader Bill Cooper, who wrote to The New European to say so. His letter was published […]

The world is on its knees in a pandemic that is close now to killing three million people. Yet the games go on, albeit as a ghostly, ghastly version of sport in stadiums without spectators. For a year, club football has soldiered on while communities have closed around them. In Europe we have the scarcely […]

The Arts and Crafts movement provided a bridge from tradition and nostalgia to the modernism that was to follow. Few of its leading lights display this shift as sumptuously as Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo.  Between the Arts and Crafts pioneering work of William Morris and the lean soaring lines with floral motifs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a third and influential “M” helped define the look […]