Arts and Culture

Marseille’s music is as self-assured as the city itself, says SOPHIA DEBOICK  Marseille is a proud and ambitious city. Founded by the Greeks around 600BC, France’s second city’s ancient origins have been no bar to striving for the modern, and it is known for its ground-breaking 20th and 21st century architecture. Le Corbusier’s revolutionary La […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an award for translated fiction that is gradually growing in stature, and its very worthy winner While most of the annual book award talk is naturally focused on the Booker Prize for Fiction there are other gongs whose gentler tones occasionally penetrate the literary din. The Women’s Prize for Fiction grows in […]

Birger Ruud helped to change his sport for good, before serving his country against its Nazi occupiers It’s hard to imagine a sport more exhilarating for the competitor than ski jumping. The jumper hauls themself onto the in-run, skis perfectly parallel, crouching as low as possible as they hurtle down a slope as steep as 38 […]

Tim Walker reviews After Life at the National Theatre – and only awards it one star. The National Theatre re-opened its doors last week with a show called, appropriately enough, After Life. The venue has itself been hovering between life and death for a very long time, like the characters in Jack Thorne’s play, and even its […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the pacifist campaigner Bertha von Suttner, a woman not intimidated by anyone she met, even the most powerful men in the world

PETER TRUDGILL on how bottlers became butlers There are about 45,000 people in Britain who bear the surname Butler. In comparison, there are a quarter of million Browns and half a million Smiths. But 45,000 still seems to be rather a high number if we assume that all of our contemporary Butlers are descended from men who […]

The medical protocols that helped saved Denmark’s Christian Eriksen are partly down to the work of one man, football doctor Michel d’Hooghe It was a Swedish writer, Erik Niva, who observed last Saturday: “Denmark lost but life won”. He reported on the collapse, the apparent death, and then the resuscitation that saved the Danish playmaker […]

He infuriated Hitler, won over Churchill and de Gaulle and inspired one of the central characters in Casablanca. So why do we know so little about pan-European visionary Count Coudenhove-Kalergi? The story of uniting Europe goes back a long way before 1950 and the Schuman Declaration. But there is a piece of that history after the […]

The Kominsky Method is surprisingly thoughtful in the way it grapples with the fundamental fragility of friendship and getting old – if you can ignore the unnecessary swipes against the young When I first watched The Kominsky Method I did so with the full expectation that it would melt into the indistinguishable coterie of bland, almost […]

A marketing invention of the publishing industry or a genuine opportunity to broaden horizons? CHARLIE CONNELLY on the phenomenon of beach books Now that the sun’s been out for longer than 20 minutes it won’t be long before we’re bombarded with recommendations for this year’s holiday reading. As ever these will take two forms: a […]

WILL SELF on a painstakingly assembled scale model of a long-gone Teesside neighbourhood Top hats and cloth caps off for Steve Waller, who has spent the past nine years working fulltime on a scale model of the historic St Hilda’s neighbourhood of Middlesbrough. Waller, 61, began working on the model after he slipped a disc […]

St. Louis has as strong a claim as anywhere to be the city where the sound was first heard Rock ‘n’ roll was born at 3137 Whittier Street, St. Louis. Chuck Berry’s debut single Maybellene had it all – teenage heartbreak, fast cars and a driving guitar break – and was written during Berry’s eight-year […]

Victory for France in the Euros would give Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante the kind of trophy cabinet that even Messi and Ronaldo would envy Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are on opposite sides of the world preparing to lead their countries in tournaments that represent their last chance to win major honours. No-one of sound mind […]

The story of two places, and two women, linked by fate and separated by a body of water. Calais has always had a special place in British culture. We owned it from 1347 until 1558 after all, even if now it’s mainly known for booze cruises, Channel swims and the first trip abroad for so […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the language of the Isle of Man, and its rearguard action against the linguistic homogenisation of the British Isles If you have ever been to Ellan Vannin – the Isle of Man – you will know that from the shores of that beautiful island it is possible to see Ireland, Scotland, England and, […]

Lupin, Call My Agent and Money Heist are among the familiar names in our list of the best Europan TV series to stream, but there are hidden gems too

Twenty five years after a massive IRA bomb destroyed the centre of Manchester, LUKE BAINBRIDGE reports on how the city was reborn from the rubble Dennis Walker was the first black player to play for Manchester United, back in 1963. After retiring from football, the fluent Farsi and Arabic speaker became operations manager at the Arndale […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks back at one of the most improbable games of football’s long history, when a team of Durham miners took on a side of Eton schoolboys In the aftermath of the tawdry European Super League saga I found myself rummaging online for reassurance that football was once the game of the people. On […]

Tim Walker gives three stars to Walden at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London until June 12 To say that Stella and Cassie are sisters who have grown apart is an under-statement. Cassie (Lydia Wilson) is a celebrated astronaut who’s just returned from a year on the moon. Stella (Gemma Arterton) has, in the meantime, […]

A new exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood serves as a useful opportunity to focus on its female associates, be they muses, mistresses or much more When Stephanie Marrian became the first Page Three girl in the Sun newspaper in 1970 it is possible she was channelling the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Or maybe not. But she was undoubtedly, to use the […]

The Benin Bronzes have a special status in the debate over cultural artefacts taken during the colonial era. Author Barnaby Phillips explains why, and why the British Museum’s approach to the debate is unsustainable At the end of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee summer, in September 1897, the British Museum hosted an unusual exhibition. It was something of a […]

Remembering the moment when the world’s most famous sportsman was bundled out of his hotel by rebel gunmen Sport and politics have always mixed, but they have never collided quite so spectacularly as they did in the lobby of Havana’s Hotel Lincoln on February 23, 1958. That day, as five-time Formula 1 champion and possibly the […]

George Sand is no longer widely read, but once eclipsed many of the greatest names in 19th century European literature, writes CHARLIE CONNELLY

A history of the radical, revolutionary, rowdy roots of the newspaper industry make for a rip-roaring read “We are afsured from good authority that the First Consul of France – has been swallowed by a Whale!” Give or take the odd “f” instead of “s”, this could have come on the Sunday Sport archive, next to […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a truly epic novel which pays fitting tribute to the female pioneers of aviation One of my favourite historic photographs was taken 99 years ago. It’s of a young woman, wrapped up in a heavy coat and headscarf against a cold wind coming in off the sea, standing alone in a field […]

TIM WALKER on one of the few pieces of ‘serious theatre’ to get going after lockdown Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me Kiln Theatre, London ***** Don’t let anyone kid you that theatre is coming back in leaps and bounds. We’re talking at best about small, hesitant, faltering steps. There’s the occasional costly stumble, too, as […]

The country's historical and recent anguish provides a strong undercurrent to its music

From The Ladykillers to The Elephant Man, Jason Solomons celebrates some of the best movies set in London When the pandemic stopped cinema in their tracks and the flow of new movies became an online trickle, many film fans took the time to look back and catch up on classics. In the UK, one of […]