Arts and Culture

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life of Iolanda Balaș, an extraordinary athlete who dominated her sport, despite the petty interferences of her country’s communist authorities. It rained in Rome on September 8, 1960, a light, persistent afternoon drizzle that drenched the crowd at a packed Stadio Olimpico and saw athletes and officials alike drifting ethereally around the […]

With galleries badly affected by Covid restrictions, street art has come to the fore to chronicle coronavirus. It’s a year or so now since the first lockdown. While many of us have been stranded indoors during this time artists and visual activists for whom the streets are both canvas and in part medium have managed to […]

Fifty years ago, Michael Caine strode onto screens as the eponymous hero of Get Carter. In a navy-blue three-piece suit, with shotgun in hand he not only dragged British cinema into the 1970s but captured a great city on the cusp of change. By Roger Domeneghetti As the thrumming sound of the train segues into Roy Budd’s classic funk […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the astonishing film CV of Max von Sydow. In the summer of 1959 Max von Sydow was attending the Cannes Film Festival. Two years earlier The Seventh Seal, his first high-profile starring role and arguably the best of his collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman, had picked up the Cannes jury’s Special Prize […]

TIM WALKER on his friend, the director Michael Grandage. The first time I remember talking to Michael Grandage was as he was standing anxiously in the foyer of the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden. It was the first night of Frost/Nixon. “I’ve been looking forward to this one,” I said. He replied: “I’m terrified.”  The […]

One of the world’s richest cultural inheritances and a recent history unrivalled in its trauma, Baghdad’s music has drawn on both.  Music has always measured the rhythm of Iraqi life, whether in celebration or mourning. These sounds are ancient. Iraq was a cradle of civilisation, with Baghdad itself situated between the Tigris and the Euphrates in […]

Long sceptical about whether such a phenomenon existed, CHARLE CONNELLY starts to wonder if there might be something in it after all. I sat down to write this piece about writer’s block at eight o’clock this morning. It’s now 11.20am and I’m only just putting words onto the blank document that’s been sitting here open and […]

WILL SELF on what to do when confronted by racism. “You know,” said Annette, a woman from Cote d’Ivoire with whom I’ve struck up an acquaintance while queuing for the post office, “some people say Hitler had the right idea.” I shook my head, as if to dispel this meshegas, while nevertheless continuing the conversation: “What makes you […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why the term for spring has not sprung from where you thought. The English word spring has many different meanings. It can refer to a place where water comes up out of the ground – a source or wellspring. It can signify an energetic forward or upward movement – a leap or jump. It […]

Had enough of lockdown winter and are longing for the spring? RICHARD LUCK selects 10 films that reflect the optimism of the changing seasons. Movies – is there anything they can’t do? I mean, most of us have already had a gutful of winter and yet, with the season not officially over until the end […]

The news you might have missed from around Europe, selected by Steve Anglesey. Cyprus’ Eurovision entry is at the centre of protests over its supposedly sacrilegious lyrics. El Diablo by Elena Tsagrinou has scandalised some in the island nation, dominated by the Greek Orthodox church, with lines like: “I gave my heart to El Diablo” […]

Barcelona pioneered a fusion of finance and football. Others are now playing the same game while the Catalan club itself is embroiled in a crisis. The jailing, even for one night, of the former president of Futbol Club Barcelona is not the first, and will not be the last, time it has happened in this club’s […]

Jackie Chan is too often dismissed as a mere action star and overlooked for his largely forgettable Hollywood films. But a re-release of one of his finest early works gives an opportunity to appreciate his amazing artistry.  You don’t hear too much about Jackie Chan these days. Indeed, it’s possible that name will mean nothing to […]

FLORENCE HALLETT reports on a new exhibition with a remarkably topical theme – the totemic importance of touch in art and the human condition. From the wall of the Cueva de Las Manos – a cave in Santa Cruz, southern Argentina – handprints reach out to us across the millennia. At 9,000-13,000 years old, they are by no means the oldest […]

JASON SOLOMONS on a new Netflix documentary which places the footballer’s rise amid his country’s oppressive regime. Talk about finding a new angle. I’ve seen that Carlos Alberto goal, the fourth for Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Final against Italy, over a hundred times. Maybe we all have – but never from Alberto’s point of […]

Few scandals have provided as vivid a cast of characters as Watergate. Yet the story often overlooks the one man without whom it would simply never have been detected. Washington DC, 2.30am, June 17, 1972, and security guard Frank Wills is doing his rounds at the Watergate Building Complex. It’s been a quiet night. In […]

In music, as in much else, the New Zealand city is a place apart.  Faced with coronavirus, New Zealanders have proven one thing about themselves: they plough their own furrow. When a single family of three from Auckland tested positive last week, prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced an immediate three-day lockdown for the city. Total […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles Marguerite Duras, an author whose career was profoundly influenced by a fleeting glance at a stranger. In 1924 a new regional governor arrived at Vinh Long, a small city in the Mekong River delta in what is now Vietnam but was then part of French Indochina. He came from a previous posting in Laos […]

ED WEST on the fantasy of the ‘free-born Englishman’. Guffawing and thigh-slapping his way through the 1938 version of Robin Hood, Errol Flynn stops at one point to tell the audience he is fighting as a “free-born Englishman” and fighting for a “free England”. This obviously wasn’t really about attitudes in 12th century England and no one […]

As he is knocked off his bike for a third time, WILL SELF wonders what effect the pandemic has had on the reaction of passersby. The first time it happened, it was some young Trustafarian driving his dad’s Jag, and I lost my rag completely: ranting how he should learn to look in his bloody wing […]

Peter Trudgill on the dubious master of multilingualism. There are many things to be said about Ján Ludvik Hoch, many of them very bad, even though he was a war hero. But this column is interested in his linguistic prowess: he was a remarkable polyglot. Better known as Robert Maxwell, Hoch did not learn English […]

The case of Manchester United’s talented young winger Amad Diallo highlights awkward questions for football about the way it procures young players from abroad, says ROB HUGHES. Bill Shankly, the sage of Liverpool FC, once corrected a misconception of mine. “Listen son, coaches do not make good players,” he said in that familiar rasping Scottish pitch. […]

TIM WALKER on the director John Schlesinger, a man with just the right sense of perspective. John Schlesinger resided in one of those vast Christmas cake mansions in Kensington that signal to all the world its owner has achieved his wildest dreams. He couldn’t exactly claim to be a self-made man – dad had been a […]

Yoko Ono was always a disruptor, a transgressor, an interloper. And we should all be thankful for that. Looking back now, I never thought that John Lennon would grow to be old. But I always knew that Yoko Ono would make it. The Beatles had been manufactured to give off a care-free air, a boyishness that […]

A new book by writer and broadcaster David Baddiel gets right to the heart of anti-Semitism, and why it has taken such a hold on the left. Smear. Bundled up in that single syllable are years of pain and anger felt by Jewish people who have failed to persuade the putative anti-racist movement that we know […]

A new book by Peter Oborne chronicles Boris Johnson’s history of deceit and how his time in Downing Street has poisoned British political culture.  In an interview with the American television network CBS earlier this month Boris Johnson sought to reassure president Joe Biden that he would do nothing to harm the Good Friday agreement. Johnson tried […]

A brilliant new novel shows how the city’s traumatic past still has a powerful hold on Europe, three decades on. A few years ago I emerged from the mouth of a tunnel onto scrubby ground next to a house just outside Sarajevo airport. The sunshine after the darkness had me screwing up my eyes, my big […]

Following the announcement that the Pompidou Centre is to close from 2023 until 2027, BENJAMIN IVRY explores the history of the controversial building and its complex place at the heart of French culture and identity. Often referred to in French as Beaubourg, after the area in central Paris where it is located, the Pompidou Centre – with […]