Arts and Culture

Like many of you, I’ve made some new discoveries over the course of this virus-beset year. I read, both on social and ‘regular’ media, of people finding new hobbies, new TV shows to box-binge, new podcasts to follow, new books to read. I myself have stumbled upon something rather wonderful, something I perhaps didn’t realise […]

It seems an age since I was bemoaning the presence of FriendsFest – a static exhibition and performance event celebrating the quondam sitcom – in my local park. That was over a year ago, but the delving and diggings in the hallowed turf remain. Obviously the pandemic put paid to the punters kicking up divots […]

I must confess that I do not normally read the angling section of my local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, but from time to time I do catch sight in its columns of the name wrasse. As many readers will know better than me, this word refers to a particular species of marine fish, some […]

Hounds chase foxes not out of any personal antipathy, but because it’s what their lords and masters train them to do. It was once a bit like this between Hugh Grant and me. The stand the actor has taken on media intrusion into people’s lives – including his own – meant he was considered to […]

Melburnians have a long history of outspokenness. The 1854 Eureka Rebellion of miners which led to an expansion of the electorate, the 1856 stonemasons’ march on parliament which resulted in the eight-hour day, and even the last stand of Ned Kelly, symbolic of defiance of the colonial authorities, are foundational events of the city’s history. […]

Glimpses inside the so-called ‘hermit state’ of North Korea are rare, choreographed encounters designed to give the impression of an immaculately-run society in which citizens function as contented cogs in a well-regulated machine. In TV footage, the capital city of Pyongyang appears a grey, monotonous expanse, a joyless backdrop against which lives are lived in […]

A light wind blew in off the water and combed the open grassland covering the hills rolling along above the lake. We’d visited the ruined monastery at Hayravank, wandering around the main body of the building – an octagonal drum surmounted by a conical dome – then exploring the overgrown outbuildings, poking into the shrubbery […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a sometimes maligned city, and the intense star who still casts his huge shadow over it Viewed from the other side of the North Sea, Belgium is neither one thing nor the other. Both French and Dutch, it’s sometimes seen as no man’s land between France and the Netherlands and accused of lacking […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the fascinating origins of Fahrenheit and Celsius – and how different things might have been. Many Americans endure a reputation for an apparent lack of regard for the rest of the world. Regardless of whether it is deserved or not, it remains the fact that the USA is the only nation on […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an atmospheric new book  – written before the pandemic – which perfectly captures the current national mood. This is, we’re told, the year of the staycation. Thanks to the coronavirus it’s been a word in common usage this year as those usually in a position to holiday abroad have their wings clipped […]

From his childhood during the Chinese Civil War to his experiences in the Second World War, Mervyn Peake’s influences are hauntingly evident in his work, much of which has just been acquired by the British Library. RICHARD HOLLEDGE reports. Step into the shadows of “time-eaten buttresses, of broke and lofty turrets”. Meet Lord Sepulchrave, trapped […]

France’s is bailing out its wine industry, which has been hit hard by the pandemic. But, says JASON WALSH, long-standing social trends in the country could be even more troubling for the sector. The scene outside Le Ballon Vert in the trendy 11th arrondissement of Paris: forced outdoors by post-coronavirus regulations and unseasonal autumn weather, […]

Music photographer KEVIN CUMMINS took many of Britpop’s era-defining images and knew all its key players. So, as his new book about the period is published, why does he feel conflicted about the musical movement that sparked Blur v Oasis and Cool Britannia? In the mid-1990s anything and everything British was cool. Celebrity mockney chefs: […]

Among the many abiding images from Britain in 2020 some of the most memorable are of the packed summer crowds on the beach at Durdle Door in Dorset. Scorching temperatures combined with the cancellation of holidays abroad to have people throwing social distancing to the breeze and flocking in their thousands to the coast. The […]

They made a curious trio, sitting around a table in the Chez Carrere nightclub just off the Champs Elysées sipping champagne and making smalltalk. There was the young woman, barely a month after her 22nd birthday, in a blue evening dress, white pearl necklace and white fur cape alongside her husband of six months, a […]

“I am not trying to boast, but I have to admit that for an uneducated son of an immigrant I could have done far worse,” said Charles Aznavour. Those born without privilege tend to appreciate success more than those on whom privilege is bestowed. Raised without a safety net they are also conscious of how […]

PETER TRUDGILL on knowing your Baker from your Butcher. The origins of many occupational surnames are really rather obvious. If your family name is Shepherd, this is because one of your male ancestors herded sheep. If his given name was John, this term describing his occupation would have been used as a byname – a subsidiary […]

50 years ago, Black Sabbath released two albums that created a brand new sound. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. It was music with cinematic ambition. First torrential rain, then a tolling bell, thunder, and a dissonant, sinister guitar riff which would have been wholly appropriate as the announcement of the entrance of the devil himself.When Ozzy Osbourne intoned lugubriously “What […]

In the mid-1990s I wrote a dystopic novel, Great Apes, in which I imagined an alternative world in which chimpanzees rather than humans had been the most evolutionarily successful primate species. Everything at the macro level remained the same – which enabled me to make execrable puns about Lloyd Grosschimp presenting a TV programme called […]

BILL BORROWS talks to Mathieu Kassovitz, star of the hit French drama The Bureau, in which he plays a very modern secret agent, balancing undercover work with a complicated private life. Mathieu Kassovitz still has trouble with the police but just not on a day-to-day basis. “They don’t stop my car because I am rich […]

“Dio mio, you Americans are crazy. Fly six, eight thousand miles. Talk to Magnani. Why? I cannot win Academy Award. Is impossible.” It was the early spring of 1956 and Anna Magnani had just set Hollywood alight with her performance as Serafina Delle Rose in a screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on three books about pilgrimage, both secular and religious… an activity which has been curbed by the pandemic. With plague afoot in the land and a populace kept subdued by and in thrall to a privileged elite, there is something distinctly medieval about Britain at the dawn of the 2020s. We might not get […]

It was at the Chichester Festival Theatre just over a year ago that I last saw Dame Diana Rigg. Not on stage, but sitting directly in front of me as her daughter Rachael Stirling starred in a revival of Sir David Hare’s play Plenty. She glowed with maternal pride. The fine actress’s death earlier this […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a Colombian city characterised by great riches, then vast bloodshed, and a culture that has endured through both. Barranquilla was once a byword for success. From the 16th century, the Colombian city’s position at the mouth of the Magdalena River and by the Caribbean Sea made it a crucial trading post, connecting […]

Thirty years on, RICHARD LUCK looks back at a Downing Street summit to revive British cinema, and the curious films that followed. It’s one of those nights everyone remembers – that summer’s evening when Noel Gallagher, Kevin Spacey, Eddie Izzard and Ross Kemp rocked up at Number 10 for drinks and nibbles with Tony and […]

One thing you find doing interviews is that everyone has something they don’t want to talk about. I’d known there was something about Richard Chamberlain ever since I’d been a kid in the 1970s. My family were then close to the owners of the Bear hotel at Woodstock. Kenneth More knew them, too, and was […]

I remember having lunch with Terence Conran – who died last week, aged 88 – at his Bibendum restaurant on the Old Brompton Road sometime in the early 2000s. It was a bizarre experience: sitting on a banquette in an interior curated – if not exactly designed – by my companion, who was wearing a […]

The winter of 1909 came early to Russia. One morning, in the house on her family estate at Neskuchnoye in what is now Kharkiv, Ukraine, Zinaida Serebriakova looked out of the window at the snowy landscape then sat down at her dressing table. Bare-shouldered, she was grateful for the fire burning in the hearth. When […]