Arts and Culture

TIM WALKER recalls working with the creative polymath Sir Peter Ustinov. If ever there was a model European, it was Sir Peter Ustinov. It was working for the first European newspaper – the one launched by Robert Maxwell in the 1990s – that I got to know him. Maxwell may have thought of Ustinov as […]

The Floridian city has a prolific record of producing boisterous, exuberant music. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Miami is the party city without rival, and its music has rarely deviated from pure aural sunshine. But for all idyllic associations, its geographical location has meant it has faced directly into geo-political strife. In the 15 years after the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious confusions that can arise from the double meaning of quite. Several decades ago, when I first took my American girlfriend home to meet my parents, she was shown some of my father’s paintings – he was a rather well-known local artist. She said that she thought the pictures were ‘quite […]

TIM WALKER examines the life of the actress who finally found contentment. When I interviewed Susannah York in the late 1980s, she was nudging 50 and going through a tough time. She had lately lost her elder sister Carolyn to alcoholism. She was making films like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and guest-starring in […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some expansionist chapters in the island’s history It is not usual to think of the Irish as being colonialists. On the contrary, we know a great deal about how the island of Ireland has suffered from the effects of colonialism on the part of the Vikings, the English, the Scots, and the […]

Academy Award nominated Sarah Miles gave TIM WALKER a shock when the topic of the EU referendum came up mid-interview. Sarah Miles and I should really be friends. We established a great rapport four years ago when I journeyed to her 11th century manor house in the Sussex countryside. Interviewing film stars is normally a […]

Once a stop-off on the hippy trail, the Nepalese capital has a distinct musical culture – complete with its own version of hip hop – which must carefully navigate the country’s sensitive politics. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports Kathmandu is the gateway to Everest and to dreams. Here, the final outpost of urbanity before the 13,000 feet […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the ultimate origins of ‘English’. During the late 300s and early 400s AD, boat-loads of Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. Some arrivals had probably come well before that: since the second century AD, the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in their garrisons in […]

TIM WALKER writes about his very special link with an actress from the golden age of cinema It’s almost 10 years since the last of the Mawby Triplets died, aged 90, at her home in Poole in Dorset. With her sisters, Claudette and Angella, Claudine had made 24 films in Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties […]

Many of its greatest musical talents may have left the city behind, but the success they enjoyed is built on their experiences there, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Although it began at the periphery, as a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall in 122 AD, Newcastle spent many subsequent centuries at the centre of the world. It was […]

SOPHIE DEBOICK on how a city’s legacy of musical manufacturing and industry has been repurposed in the pop era A city of lakes and mountains at the foot of the Alps and 20 miles from the shores of Lake Garda, Brescia has an affinity with the finer things in life. The plains around the city […]

It might seem like a modern complaint, but, says PETER TRUDGILL, this practice has been going on since the Ancient Greeks The sound represented by our Latin-alphabet letter H has had a sorry history in the languages of Europe over the last 2,000 years or so. Perhaps the decline started in Greek. The Ancient Greek […]

TIM WALKER on Kirk Douglas, the Hollywood legend in no mood to talk When Kirk Douglas died earlier this year at the age of 103, there was quite properly a great fuss made about him. The man who had dared to stand up to the McCarthyite right in America by insisting that the blacklisted Dalton […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a city where music has been shaped by a traumatic history, but often transcends it. Derry has been a byword for the Troubles, its disputed name a symbol of the divide between nationalists and unionists. After a history of sectarian tension dating back to the 17th century, the Troubles began in earnest […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how a chapter from its past has left the South American country swimming against a global tide One of the most appallingly bloody wars ever fought was the War of the Triple Alliance (in Spanish La Guerra de la Triple Alianza, Portuguese A Guerra da Tríplice Aliança). Also called the Paraguayan War, […]

TIM WALKER writes of the esteemed actor and comedian Ronnie Corbett, a man full of life and enthusiasm. This is going to take a bit of explaining, but it was The Winslow Boy that introduced me to Ronnie Corbett. The late, great actor and comedian never appeared in the play, but his old friend Edward […]

CLAUDIA PRITCHARD on a captivating new book in which artist David Hockney and critic Martin Gayford discuss the history of one of humanity’s oldest impulses, to create pictures Photo: Provided – Credit: Archant As a boy, laughing in the cinema at the antics of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the artist David Hockney was entertained […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on two cities divided by a river but united by style and sounds. Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a former Belgian colony – faces Brazzaville – capital of the much smaller, previously French-held, Republic of the Congo – just across the river for which both countries are named. […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on how the great author ended up at his final resting place, far from where he had hoped to be. ‘Charles Dickens, the great American romancer, died yesterday of apoplexy. He was the Walter Scott of America.’ As bad takes go, that report of the demise of the great novelist that appeared in […]

TIM WALKER remembers his 1986 meeting with the distinguished star of stage and screen. When Richard Burton uttered the immortal words ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy’ on his transmitter in the film Where Eagles Dare, it was Michael Hordern who picked up at the other end. For a distinguished stage actor whose career spanned more than […]

PETER TRUDGILL boldly goes on about one of the most controversial grammatical issues of all. English forms like to sleep, to run, and to read are technically called infinitives. In the sentence ‘I want to go’, to go is an infinitive. When we want to talk about a particular English verb, we normally cite the […]

Although nobody is coming just yet, Ireland is preparing itself for a flood of new fans who have become obsessed with the Emerald Isle through watching global television hit Normal People during lockdown. Tourism Ireland has been frantically working on producing a video and an official map of the show’s locations following thousands of inquiries […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the gradual spread of a language, the echoes of which are still heard in English today. Four and a half thousand years ago there was no such language as English. There would be no such language for another 3,000 years. But a language did exist which eventually became English, though you would […]

TIM WALKER recounts meeting Dame Vera Lynn, the singer of we’ll meet again. When it was said how wonderfully the Queen had uttered the words ‘we’ll meet again’ in her recent address to the nation, one woman would have had every reason to take umbrage. Dame Vera Lynn made them her own in innumerable concerts […]

Elvis Presley did much to promote Hawaii’s musical culture, but its native sons have far more to offer themselves. SOPHIE DEBOICK reports. Honolulu is more than 2,000 miles from the West Coast of the US, but is a place deeply embedded in American mythology. As a tourist playground focussed on Waikiki – once the home […]

TIM WALKER reflects on an interview with American actor and political activist Charlton Heston. Charlton Heston was appearing on the London stage in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. He was a big guy in a wig whose views on everything from gun control to gay rights had made him politically incorrect before the term had even […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a remarkable language made up equally from two others From time to time we hear about ‘mixed languages’. Maltese, for example, is sometimes said to be a mixture of the European language, Italian, and the North African variety of Arabic. But it isn’t really. Its grammatical structures show that it is basically […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a fading linguistic practice for describing numbers For the first twenty or so years of my life, when I was telling the time I always said five-and-twenty past two rather than twenty-five past two, and I continued to use that type of formulation on at least some occasions for many years after […]