Arts and Culture

When I left school in 1963 at the age of 19 after 15 years of full-time education, nothing happened. Nothing at all. We just walked out of the school gates, knowing that we would not be coming back anymore, except as visitors. There were no ceremonies, no dressing up, no handing over of pieces of […]

I find it somewhat ageing to admit that I once interviewed an actress who had played the title role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles with the author himself in attendance. I have thus shaken the hand of a lady who had shaken the hand of Thomas Hardy. Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies was celebrating her 99th birthday when I […]

Chicago is the blues. While today veteran bluesman Buddy Guy’s Legends club keeps the genre alive in the city, it’s a story that began almost a century ago. The Great Depression and the ensuing Great Migration saw millions of African Americans move from the southern states to the industrialised north in search of work, and they brought […]

In 1980 there was one must-have toy. It didn’t need batteries. It didn’t speak or light up. It wasn’t a doll or action figure, nor was it linked to a film or cartoon. It was just a cube, made up of 26 smaller, coloured cubes which could be moved and interchanged. The Rubik’s Cube had […]

On June 1, 1985, the Peace Convoy, a nomadic band of New Age travellers aboard a convoy of scruffy, repurposed and salvaged coaches, ambulances and vans, attempted to set up camp near the ring of prehistoric standing stones, for what would should have been the 11th Stonehenge Festival. This was despite a court injunction prohibiting […]

I’m walking down a road on the outskirts of Nantes, minding my own business and fully engrossed in my podcast about female octopuses, when out of the corner of my eye I see a car pull up alongside me. “Eh Mademoiselle!” a man shouts. Auto-program kicks in: keep walking, don’t make eye contact, try to […]

PETER TRUDGILL on three languages that can give the country’s cricketers an edge over their opponents. During the recent Test Match between England and Pakistan at the Ageas Bowl in Southampton, cricket fans may have seen or heard Aatif Nawaz – actor, writer, comedian, and cricket commentator – presenting a very interesting discussion on the […]

TIM WALKER reviews Sleepless: A Musical Romance – and dubs it a ‘great stage comeback’. The old Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan rom-com Sleepless in Seattle tells the story of a little boy with an impossible dream, and that’s something the producers of this big, bold musical adaptation know all about. Michael Rose, Damien Sanders, Encore Productions, […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the Midlands city that helped launch the careers of many acts from elsewhere, as well as plenty of its own. English pop group Showaddywaddy with their cars outside Filbert Street stadium, home of Leicester City Football Club, Leicester, 11th March 1976. Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images – Credit: Getty Images Despite a […]

JASON SOLOMONS reports from the Venice Film Festival on an event that is critical to the industry’s recovery from the pandemic, and details the new release that will lead the fightback. Director Luca Guadagnino Dana Thomas and Roberto Cicutto at the Venice screening of Salvatore Ferragamo: Shoemaker of Dreams. Photo: Andrea Avezz – Credit: Archant […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the story of Sacajawea. The Louisiana Purchase is the name given to the 1803 deal under which the USA ‘bought’ very large tracts of North American land from France, extending American control over the continent an enormous distance westwards. The area in question covered the whole of modern Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, […]

TIM WALKER on Eileen Atkins and how she likes to disappear into a part as she feels stardom can be an encumbrance. Not long before lockdown, I went to a cheering lunch in Chelsea with Sir Ronald Harwood, the playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter. Men always love the sound of their own voices and we are […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the remarkable way that children learn their native language. The speed, accuracy and apparent ease with which small children learn their native language is a remarkable phenomenon, especially if we consider that they do this without mostly being taught the language by anybody. It is quite true, of course, that there are […]

In recent years the city’s creativity has been stifled and its musical energies diverted into protest, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Hong Kong is an economic powerhouse, global port, and one of the most densely populated places in the world. Smaller than London, this special administrative region of China on a city scale is almost a country […]

TIM WALKER recalls an interview with English film and stage actor Claire Bloom who became a star after starring opposite Charlie Chaplin. Occasionally stars give performances that are so convincing it’s hard to disentangle them from the people they really are. There are few better examples of this for me than Claire Bloom’s glacially cold […]

Historical attempts to curb Romanian culture have only aided creativity, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. José Ferrer in crisis. Picture: Submitted – Credit: Archant For a short while, Romania looked like it might become a beacon of creative freedom in the communist east. When Ceausescu became general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965 he adopted […]

TIM WALKER on how José Ferrer found out the hard way that careers can end so abruptly. Stardom is not of course a lifestyle choice, but a phase that can sometimes be cruelly and inexplicably fleeting. José Ferrer could vouch for that. The Puerto Rican actor made it big in classic films such as I […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on Lucky Dube, the South African reggae star who made his life a mission, until it was cut tragically short It was just one murder among thousands. The shooting of a 43-year-old man in a botched carjacking in a Johannesburg suburb in October 2007 was barely worthy of note given that 18,487 killings […]

TIM WALKER talks about the time the Amityville Horror star opened up about his depression In a kinder, gentler time in journalism – and in showbusiness – I used to phone up the press office of the Savoy and ask if they had anyone staying who’d make a good interview. No PR people involved, no […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many words which break the rules, If you have ever studied German, you may recall that one of the difficulties for a foreign learner of the language lies in struggling to come up with the correct plural forms of nouns. The word for ‘boy’ is Junge (you will also remember that […]

The Siberian city might appear a musical backwater, but it doesn’t sound like one, says SOPHIA DEBOICK The winter temperature plummets to 20 below zero in Novosibirsk and as the capital of Siberia it is a place easily associated with the inhumanities of Tsarist-era penal colonies and the Soviet Gulag. In fact Novosibirsk – the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the first meeting of two languages, one of which has since died out – but not without leaving some traces. The first location in which any sizeable group of native speakers of English became successfully established outside the British Isles was the Jamestown settlement, in what was to become the United States […]

TIM WALKER looks back on the life of Stewart Granger and his real thoughts about acting. In Matthew Kneale’s brilliant novel English Passengers, your opinion of the leading characters is continually evolving as you see them from the perspectives of different people. It’s a bit like that after you’ve spent a few years interviewing actors. […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the French resort that came to embody the very essence of glamour and hedonism. Juan-les-Pins had two golden eras, one in the carefree inter-war years and one in the 1960s, both decades of revolution in fashion, cinema and music and of beautiful people. Situated between Cannes and Nice, the Cap d’Antibes peninsula […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a new novel about a Stasi agent immersed in the chilling oppression of the East German state, right up until its final moments. A few years ago I was in Leipzig with a film crew. We were being taken around the city by a local fixer called Tomas, a giant of a […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes rather rude origins of surnames. Some family names, in spite of having been passed down across the generations for the last 500 years or more, still retain a form which makes it easy to see what they originally meant. In an earlier column, we already noted colour-based names like Browne […]

TIM WALKER recalls his conversation with the famed King Kong actress. The producer told Fay Wray that she was going to have ‘the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood’ and she optimistically thought it might be Cary Grant. It turned out to be a giant ape – or at least an 18-inch model of one […]

PETER TRUDGILL tackles a burning issue that has been prompting debate among readers. The word portmanteau refers to a largish travelling bag which opens up into two equal parts. The word was originally borrowed into English from French; and for that reason it was sometimes pluralised as portmanteaux rather than portmanteaus. But it first arrived […]