Arts and Culture

Keep your spirits high with The New European‘s alternative Christmas songs, specially penned for the season by columnist Mitch Benn BREXIT WONDERLAND Shop bells ring, no-one’s listening On the shelves, things are missing A worrying sight, we’re hungry tonight Starving in a Brexit Wonderland Gone away is the old deal Here to stay is the […]

Twenty five years after a court ruling relating to an obscure Belgian midfielder transformed football here, is Brexit is about to reverse some of the changes? ROGER DOMENEGHETTI reports. In an era when footballers have the freedom to force moves between clubs and demand multi-million-pound salaries, it’s easy to forget that as recently as the early 1990s they were still effectively treated […]

BONNIE GREER on the weird dislocation that 2020 has brought, and how John Lennon has brought some perspective on it. The weird thing about lockdown and isolation is that stuff starts coming into your mind that you’ve never really grasped; never thought about. And new things, too: new worlds. For example, the highlight of my last […]

Alexandra Lloyd explains how a revered figure from Germany’s traumatic past has become a controversial part of the country’s debate about coronavirus measures. A video from an anti-lockdown protest in Germany has gone viral after a demonstrator compared herself to the anti-Nazi resister Sophie Scholl. Scholl was a 21-year-old student executed in 1943 for printing and […]

Shane MacGowan is a challenging subject for a new documentary film. JASON SOLOMONS talks to its director about a hard to love character and staying the right side of romanticism With his rotten-looking mouth, pallid grey skin and slurred speech, Shane MacGowan is the alternative face of Christmas. The Pogues singer and drunken Anglo-Irish poet […]

JAMES OLIVER suggests 12 festive movies – a combination of the familiar and the less so – that best reflect the complexities of the season. Just don’t call his list a ‘best of…’ It was always unlikely, in this year like no other, that we’d have anything like a normal Christmas and so it has […]

Claudia Pritchard on a festive masterpiece which – as a result of technology and the requirements of being covid-secure – can now be viewed as never before. “A Foreign Gentleman has brought into England a picture that astonishes every person who has seen it… It is to be viewed.. from ten in the morning till […]

TIM WALKER reviews Love Letters, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, until February 7 (run currently paused). Theodore Roosevelt got it right when he said that it’s not the critic who counts, but the man who’s actually in the arena. I found myself recalling the American president’s words when I saw Bill Kenwright in his socially-distanced seat at the opening […]

Despite his establishment credentials the author John le Carré remained an outsider all his life, says CHARLIE CONNELLY, and was increasingly radicalised by Europe and Brexit.  There’s a broad perception that people become calmer politically as they grow older, the youthful firebrand activist gradually sensing the flames of radicalism dying down towards a dotage of faintly glowing […]

The Ethiopian capital has always been an ebullient, ambitious, swinging city – apart from a brief interlude of civil war and despotism. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports “If you’re here it means that things are better than where you come from.” This is how Francis Falceto, the Frenchman behind the Ethiopiques series of reissues from the golden age of […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life of Andrei Sakharov – a hero of the USSR who became one of its fiercest critics. On the day he died Andrei Sakharov had spent many hours in the Supreme Soviet, making his case with a characteristic combination of passionate enthusiasm and forensically detailed argument. While he welcomed the perestroika measures introduced by […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a cheering Christmas tradition. One of the best-loved spoof Christmas carols recorded by the Norfolk-based parody folk-duo the Kipper Family is called Arrest These Merry Gentlemen! Another song in the same vein (from their album The Ever Decreasing Circle) is the Trunch Wassail Song, a folk tune purportedly native to the North Norfolk […]

BONNIE GREER on what Grace Jones has, which Patti LaBelle doesn’t. This pandemic, the lockdown, the whole nine yards of it, can make you look at yourself. Think about things. Like the term ‘auntie’.Because I have never owned property, nor ever had what used to be called ‘a proper job’, most of the people I […]

They may be tricky to pronounce, but isthmuses – those narrow strips of land that join larger territories together – have shaped the world we live in, says Stan Abbott. Lacking the romantic allure of the island or the distinct cultural identity of the peninsula, the isthmus is a geographical feature that’s rarely celebrated, or […]

It was supposed to be the year to catch up on your reading. Don’t worry if you didn’t get through too many books. CHARLIE CONNELLY has some more to recommend… Sooo, have you read much this year? Like many people I had great ambitions of tucking in to some seriously weighty volumes once the lockdowns […]

Theatre critic TIM WALKER reviews a new production of Jack and the Beanstalk, which can be viewed at selected cinemas and online Heaven only knows what Peter Duncan’s neighbours made of what they saw going on in his garden in recent months. The former Blue Peter star got it into his head to make a Christmas panto that […]

Dub London: Bassline of a City – celebrates the best of dub music. Wondering what ‘dub’ is? Essentially, it’s a remix of a song with the vocals (and much instrumentation) stripped away while the rhythm is boosted with added reverb and sound effects. In doing so new soundscapes are created. Dub was first developed in […]

Jean-Pierre Melville’s recent work oozes sophistication and turns 50, JAMES OLIVER offers a retrospective. There were those who said Jean-Pierre Melville’s films were all style over substance. Astonishingly, they seemed to mean it as criticism. Few directors have ever controlled the presentation of their films so carefully, erasing the extraneous and obsessively refining what remained […]

Will Self on life moving online during the pandemic. “It’s absurd that they advertise televisions by emphasising their picture quality, but they’re showing you this improved picture quality on your inferior set.” When my 23-year-old said this as we were sat in front of our own inferior box the other day, I felt, simultaneously, pride – and […]

MITCH BENN on the annual controversy over Fairytale of New York. One of my favourite things about the Christmas season is the way that new Yuletide traditions are always evolving and emerging to take their place alongside the more ‘time-honoured’ ones. A recent addition to the canon of Christmas customs is the online game Whamageddon; as […]

The shows that filled in the visual blanks of the pandemic. As so often, J.G. Ballard prophesied it all. In 1978, the science fiction writer – who has become, posthumously, a sort of laureate of the pandemic and of its social impact – foresaw that television would evolve into something dizzyingly diverse: “[O]ne will have […]

Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: “Do you have anyone there who can […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY recommends a handful of books to kick off your Christmas shopping. I know the C word is a touchy subject at the moment and it still feels a wee bit early to mention it somehow even though we’re in what’s undeniably December. Given that our winter hootenanny is likely to be reduced considerably […]

The Dutch city might be better known for its art, but from its Golden Age to the present day music has been at the heart of its identity. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Despite spending his whole life in his home city of Delft, 40 miles from Amsterdam, Vermeer is as synonymous with the capital of the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles the thinker Hannah Arendt. In 1960 Hannah Arendt noticed that Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust, was due to stand trial in Israel the following year. A decade earlier Arendt had published her groundbreaking book Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she examined the roots in anti-Semitism and 19th […]

The paintings of JMW Turner tell the fast-paced story of the modern age bursting into being. Claudia Pritchard reports on a new exhibition which recounts this gripping tale. At first glance, the silvery mound of fresh-caught fish in the foreground looks ready for pan and the plate, but the pilchards in Joseph Mallord William Turner’s […]

TIM WALKER on how Brexit helped turn actor Frances Barber from an enemy to a friend. It was a young man named Tyler who first acquainted me with Frances Barber. Six years ago, she boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Los Angeles and he’d been seated beside her. The crew made a big fuss […]

Jonathan Sale on the centenary of a courtroom drama centred on Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem, If, and the continuing power of the very iffy word itself. If – and it’s a big if – I’m any judge of groundbreaking literary cases, this month sees the centenary of a wonderful example of poetic justice in action:  Rudyard Kipling […]