Opinion

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 […]

The Age of Gaslighting is upon us. The dictionary definition is this: ‘Gaslighting is a form of manipulation whose purpose is to cause the victim to doubt their own perception, memory and sanity; to destabilise.’ The term comes from the 1938 play, Gas Light, by that master of English pre-war melodrama, Patrick Hamilton. The plot: […]

BONNIE GREER on the late Sir Peter Hall, a man who revolutionised English-speaking theatre Peter Hall called his memoir Making An Exhibition Of Myself, a phrase his mother would hurl at him from time to time. An only child, and the grandson of Queen Victoria’s ratcatcher, he was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, a […]

There is a way to understand how much the nation has changed since the EU referendum vote. In place of a kind of hard-headedness, that famed ‘British common sense’ that we immigrants find a hallmark of life on this island, there has emerged a kind of dream state. This Britain, woolly and dreamy, is like […]

Full disclosure: I’ve never drunk a glass of beer before in my life. Until this summer in Scotland. Before that, beer was the stuff in cans that my Dad and his cronies drank while watching the Chicago Cubs lose another baseball game. It was the drink guys guzzled while drifting in canoes down the Great […]

BONNIE GREER on the conviction that you can have your cake and eat it Like all questions that history deems to have ultimately been about a nation’s identity, its very soul, Brexit has quickly become a measure of more than itself. The pro-EU march on Westminster last weekend turned out Middle England, that bellwether of […]

Right, so where are we now then? When last we spoke, Keir Starmer had give us perhaps the first hint that Labour might be starting to back away from at least a ‘Hard’ Brexit, if not (yet) Brexit altogether. Nothing much else (at time of writing) seems to have happened on that front; Labour appear […]

Spare a thought for the good people of Staines-upon-Thames. They have revealed recently, in a newspaper profile of the town, that they are restless and impatient for Brexit. Some expected it to come as an early Christmas present, shortly after the referendum, wrapped in a bow and ready for celebration. Others waited for an immediate […]

Long before the internet was invented, the troll held our imaginations and encompassed our fears. Here is one tale: A poor miller, in an attempt to make himself look big, lies to the king by telling him that his rather boring daughter can spin straw into gold. The king loves the idea and shuts her […]

As I think I’ve mentioned before, my wife Clara (who is in the process of becoming my ex-wife although we remain best of friends – a neat trick if you can pull it off and thus far we seem to be doing OK) grew up in Berlin both before and after the reunification of Germany. […]

It’s not who you are underneath it’s what you do that defines you When a character has been around as long as Batman (78 years, Batfact fans) it’s interesting to examine the differences, both broad and subtle, between the various iterations – both in print and especially, on screen – of the Caped Crusader’s adventures. […]

August is known as the silly season. It should come as no surprise that the term came into being in reference to the Conservative Party. Not quite the Tory Party we know today, but its beginnings in the tumultuous time of Queen Victoria’s reign in the 1850s and 1860s. This was the era of the […]

Fashion can be considered frivolous and in some ways it is. Fashion can be considered frivolous and in some ways it is. It is ephemeral, lasting for a season, gone. Real people wear clothes, always have, but fashion is the art of the self. Of course Vogue Magazine is part of the Big Business of […]

I don’t blame the Scots if Brexit leads them to want another shot at independence I have a bit of a confession to make; I very nearly didn’t get this article in on time. I’d like to pretend that this was because I was engaged on urgent business; swept away on some vital errand of […]

Manufactured nostalgia always has a political end. Its aim is to create new foot soldiers for The New Vision. Nostalgia. If you stand as close to the summit of the Acropolis as you can, you may be able to understand the deep meaning of this word. Its etymology is murky and ancient, but the root […]

I’m banging the drum for the people being allowed to make an informed choice One can scarcely even begin to wonder at the thoughts which passed through the mind of young Lieutenant Commander John McCain during his long years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam, but I’m going to go out on a limb here […]

An idea for a movie that once upon a time no one would buy – because it was too improbable. The Pitch: imagine that the President of the United States, the most powerful person on earth, relies on a breakfast television show for his news and opinions. He interacts with it, sending out into the […]

The democratic principle merely holds that the wishes of the majority should, where practicable, be upheld. It says absolutely NOTHING about whether the majority is RIGHT You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I began my column by making the declaration that Julia Hartley-Brewer is a nice person (just one who believes, and […]

‘The Will Of The People … Once upon a time, I would have thought the phrase absurdly un-British’ In a brilliant essay entitled The Reichstag Fire Next Time, the Russian American writer, Masha Gessen, argues that totalitarianism has already arrived in the United States. It merely takes an event – one real or created – […]

I find I’m just as uncomfortable with sneering schadenfreude when it’s our ‘side’ doing it as when it comes from the opposition. Young Christian Americans sometimes wear a bracelet around one wrist inscribed with the letters ‘WWJD?’ This of course stands for ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ and is intended to help them clarify their thoughts […]

Robert Miller, the Brexiteer who keeps writing to us without being published finally gets his say in The New European A selection of the many emails received by The New European from Robert Miller – Credit: Archant THE NEW EUROPEAN: Who is Robert Miller? ROBERT MILLER: Well, I’m 49 and am currently in Liverpool. And […]

That the entire Brexit Project may now lie in the domain of Elmer Fudd would be what Bugs would make us question. The Trump administration is being compared to a Bugs Bunny movie; a Cheech and Chong film, or a ‘dumb-ass comedy’ (Robert de Niro). As with Star Wars, I got the point of Cheech […]

The zealots who allow the Brexit fiasco to happen are diminishing the UK inch by inch, day by day. More than twenty years ago, when I became a citizen, there was no citizenship test. That means that there was no official notion of what being ‘British’ was. Not in the sense of what being American […]

Really Theresa May? Consensus? With the ‘saboteurs’, the ‘enemies of the people’? Say what you like about George Orwell, but the man was even-handed in his scorn for political thuggery: having been shot in the throat while fighting as a volunteer against Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War, he then came home and wrote […]

Prime Minister Theresa May has become a much diminished figure on the world stage Whether you care for Theresa May or not, the sight right now of the PM of Great Britain on the world stage should give none of us pleasure. She has become a diminished figure. Next to the Queen she represents the […]

Both will be as bad as the other. Julia Hartley-Brewer is a nice person. There, I said it. No, really; I’ve worked with her a few times over the years on various radio things (although last time we actually conversed on Twitter she insisted she had no idea who I was, which is entirely possible) […]

Everyone is buying Europe just when Britain is selling La construction européenne est ‘fragilisée par la prolifération bureaucratique’ et ‘le scepticisme croissant qui en découle’. The European construction is ‘weakened by bureaucratic proliferation’ and ‘the growing scepticism that ensues’, Emmanuel Macron announced at his gathering of legislators at Versailles. Summoning what could only be described […]

A poignant review of artist Khadija Saye who was among the victims of the Grenfell tragedy Khadija Saye, Sothiou 2017 – Credit: Archant The photographic prints of Khadija Saye have what can best be described as a kind of powerfully transgressive, tumultuous quiet. This is mixed with something spiritual, almost ritualistic. The Crowned explores the […]