Arts and Culture

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an unidentified woman whose death has captivated for more than a century, and a new book which tries to tell her story. The chances are you’ve already seen her face. Nobody knows her name, she’s been dead for well over a century, but the chances are you’ve seen her face. L’Inconnue de […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles the Austrian singer Falco, a man never able to quite escape his demons. Ilse Kraus might have been 75 years old but there was no way she was missing the funeral. She joined thousands of others in solemn procession to Vienna’s vast, sprawling Zentralfriedhof to follow the coffin, carried to its final […]

With awards season upon us, Richard Luck lists those deserving causes who were most cruelly overlooked. If it’s January that means someone somewhere is handing out trophies. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the likes of BAFTA and the Motion Picture Academy Of Arts And Sciences will be getting dressed up to distribute gongs. […]

The composer’s actual association with the Hungarian capital was relatively fleeting. Yet the city has long laid a claim on him, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Formed from the separate locales of Buda, Óbuda, and Pest in 1873, Budapest is a city with an enduring commitment to music. Historic venues like the Pesti Vigadó concert hall, built […]

The influence on English of the Old Norse language of the Vikings is still up for debate, says PETER TRUDGILL. When people are learning English as a foreign language, it is generally very useful for them to learn three main forms of every verb: the present tense, the past tense, and the past participle. Past participles occur […]

WILL SELF on the mundanity of tech. Sympathetic magic is usually conducted using what the pioneering structuralist anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, termed “a symbol set”: bundles of herbs, fetish objects, dolls in the likeness of the relevant parties. Feelings are brought to a focus then beamed across space and time; remote and mystic causes create very […]

It wasn’t only the English language that spread around the globe during Britain’s age of imperial expansion, says PETER TRUDGILL.   The three major surviving indigenous languages of the island of Britain are English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. We are very familiar with the fact that, since the beginning of the 17th century, English has spread far […]

Richard Hamilton eschewed the knockabout nature of other purveyors of Pop Art, says Richard Holledge, but his work packed just as much of a punch. Pop! Whaam! Blam. Exclamation marks!!! Technicolour explosions. That’s Pop Art for you. The comic book whizz-bangs of Roy Lichtenstein and a group of post-war artists typified the 1960s for many – […]

Podcasts have been with us for a few years now. But during the pandemic something has happened with this genre – a paradigm shift. A sea-change of massive proportions. Lately, I’ve been trying  to  understand what exactly is going on. And if what is happening is a kind of paradigm shift. A sea-change of massive proportions is […]

TIM WALKER remembers a meeting with Malcolm Muggeridge, an encounter which has haunted him since revelations about the journalist and broadcaster later emerged. Malcolm Muggeridge – St Mugg, as he was known in his day – admitted to me that he had been an actor all of his life. His credits included I’m All Right Jack and Heavens […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the remarkable story of Helga Weyhe, a shopkeeper who operated in gentle defiance of both the Nazis and the communists, to satisfy her customers… unless they liked detective stories. There’s a tangible stillness hanging over Salzwedel, a small town halfway between Berlin and Hamburg. Time seems to pass more slowly there, emphasised by a […]

At the age of 13, Chaim Herszman escaped from a Nazi ghetto by killing a guard. CHARLES CLARKE, the former home secretary, says his story – published in a new book – is one that many in Britain still do not fully understand. July 28th this year will be the 70th anniversary of the signing in Geneva of the United Nations […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a writer who brings home the strange attraction that hotels have for us, and what it is exactly he is missing most about them. I had an e-mail from a friend the other day that felt like it came from another era. She had, she told me, just booked a long weekend in Bucharest […]

Salvador Dalí’s talent for self-publicity was exceeded only by his gifts as an artist, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. On the evening of Wednesday July 1, 1936, Salvador Dalí prepared to address a crowd gathered at the New Burlington Galleries in London’s Mayfair. The three-week International Surrealist Exhibition was in its final days and had already caused quite a […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how similarly-sounding words can come to have such different meanings. A word with two or more different meanings is technically a polyseme. An English example is wood, which can refer to wood as a material as well as to a tree-covered area of land. Neck is also polysemous: it refers to the part of the […]

TIM WALKER remembers a somewhat frosty encounter with Sir Anthony Quayle, who was unwilling to be drawn on his political views. All actors have areas of their lives that are off limits and it was no different with Sir Anthony Quayle. The year was 1986 and the grand old man of the stage was about […]

Manchester’s musical conveyer belt has been responsible for some outstanding acts over the years. SOPHIA DEBOICK tries to join the dots between them. “My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets.” So Morrissey – once the master of ironic kitchen sink portraits of Mancunian life – opened his memoirs, evoking the endless terraces […]

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which ended its initial run 35 years ago, is often explained as a response to the unemployment and social unrest brought about by Thatcherism. It may tell us more about Britain’s relationship with ‘Europe’ today, suggests TOM DRAPER. For a television series supposedly about the great changes forced upon Britain in the 1980s […]

When David Attenborough finally stops making shows, they will have to reinvent the wildlife genre entirely, says Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.  At a recent event on the history of wildlife documentaries, I was asked a question that has popped up regularly in my 15 years of research: “Who, do you think, will replace David Attenborough?”  Now that Sir […]

A new exhibition showcasing the works of Venetian artist Giovanni Antonio Canal, dubbed Canaletto, is set to open in Bath.  To begin when Covid restrictions permit, Canaletto: Painting Venice will run at the city’s Holburne Museum until September 5.   As Claudia Pritchard reports, such was Canaletto’s importance to our understanding and appreciation of the historic Italian city that his work is now helping assess its vulnerability […]

Ready Steady Go! was hardly one of the sixties survivors, with few traces left of the show that did so much to define the decade. But, says Garth Cartwright, a new book manages to capture the spirit of a legendary programme and its moment in time. “The weekend starts here” went the tag line to a […]

The effect of time dragging through the pandemic is another indication of how we no longer see progress as inevitable or incremental, says WILL SELF. Time, eh – it just keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, as the Steve Miller Band so percipiently observed in their 1976 chart-topping ditty, Fly Like an Eagle. […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the contradictions of the writer Anaïs Nin. Anaïs Nin was sitting in a Paris café when she saw the advertisement. “Houseboat for rent. La Belle Aurore. Quai du Pont Royal.” It was September 1936. The Spanish Civil War was underway, Hitler was tightening his iron grip on Germany, Mussolini had just increased Italian power in […]

Before and after its revolution, Cuba’s soul has been found in its music, says SOPHIA DEBOICK Despite existing in a silo for decades, Cuban music has swept the world. The long-standing post-revolution embargo has seen artists struggle to get visas to play in the all-important US, and the thaw of relations begun by the Obama […]

This is the time when I traditionally look back on the shows I’ve reviewed over the previous 12 months and select the ones I’ve most enjoyed. I have, however, a practical problem that will no doubt soon be confronting the judges of the big theatrical awards: there isn’t an awful lot to choose from. I […]

Like most British people of my age, I first encountered spaghetti in a tin, in tomato sauce. In our house it was kept in the pantry alongside the tins of baked beans, and we ate it in the same way as the beans: on toast, for breakfast. When I was a child, spaghetti on toast […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a new book telling the story of Rotwelsch, a secret language developed by the thieves, beggars and itinerants of central Europe. Back in the 1990s I spent several summers working on a travelling music festival. For four months every year a group of us would be on the road, travelling the country […]

HELEN PARKINSON on the history of the dirndl, a clothing co-opted by the Nazis but which has successfully shrugged off this association. Its feminine frills are more likely to conjure images of Oktoberfest’s beer-slinging or Julie Andrews spinning on a hillside than a catwalk. But when fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, on a visit to Austria […]