Arts and Culture

The song contest is just first of a series of events that highlight the tension between a desire to open up societies and the need to remain vigilant against the virus Never far from scandal, one of the greatest controversy’s surrounding this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is the fact that it is being held at […]

‘Really weird and properly frightening’. That was the tone of the horror film script Mark E Smith, iconoclast leader of The Fall, set out to write in 2007. Fourteen years later, The Otherwise is finally being published Friday February 16th 2007. I’m waiting in the reception at the BBC building on Oxford Road Manchester. I’m […]

Chris West, an historian of the contest, chronicles its greatest ever controversies After a year’s hiatus caused by the pandemic the Eurovision Song Contest returns this week, in Rotterdam. As ever, the event has been accompanied by a palaver about some of the entries. The main focus this year has been on Belarus, which has form for doing […]

A new book about the Anglo-Saxons demolishes faddish myths that aspects of their culture live on today, and instead tells their own story in gripping style We are blessed to live in the golden age of straight-talking history. ‘Straight-talking’ rather than ‘popular’, because the people filling the windows of Waterstones are scholars of unimpeachable renown, often with […]

An extraordinary photographic exhibition focuses on Britain’s most peculiar local folklore rituals. But how are these events still managing to survive changing times and attitudes while attempting to remain true to their traditional roots? How about this to get the health and safety bods hot under the collar? A procession of extroverts in fancy dress […]

Danny Huston’s grandfather, his dad and his sister all won Oscars, creating a Hollywood dynasty. No pressure, then.  Movie night when Danny Huston was a kid probably sounds a little different to the ones we’ve all held with our families in lockdown. “There was always a big palaver about getting the projector out,” he says […]

The music of the Danish capital, like the city itself, is characterised by an extraordinary imagination and by flights of fantasy Despite being practically-minded enough to have made Denmark one of the countries with the highest quality of life in the world, the Danes also understand the power of imagination. Their most famous son and master of […]

Luis Ocaña was a lion of a cyclist, yet his was a life seemingly cursed by fate They say that in sport, as in life, you make your own luck. One man who might disagree with that statement, and with some vehemence, is Luis Ocaña. Despite being one of the greatest cyclists Europe ever produced, […]

Forty years on, the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Pope John Paul II remain as murky as ever. Roger Domeneghetti assesses the so-called ‘Bulgarian Connection’ Just before 5pm on the afternoon of May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II stepped into his open-topped ‘Popemobile’ ready to take a short, but slow journey around St Peter’s Square. The sun-drenched […]

TIM WALKER on his run-ins with Michael Winner, a thin-skinned character whose reputation has come under fresh scrutiny in the #MeToo era The late Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster loved to have a flutter. When I worked as his deputy around the turn of the millennium, he’d be watching the racing on television most afternoons. On […]

As Portugal tops the list of ‘green’ destinations for UK tourists, Will Self looks back on trips there and ahead to the future of tourism after the Covid-19 pandemic So, the list of ‘green’ destinations has been published and holiday bookings have already soared. The Great British Jet-Off – a major component of our national […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY has high praise for author Rónán Hession, a unique talent able to tell gently-paced tales of gentle characters Rónán Hession is a tonic for our times. In fact, you know what, he might even be the tonic for our times. I don’t say this lightly. When I read the Dubliner’s debut novel Leonard and […]

José Mourinho is a busted flush… so why does he keep getting plum managerial jobs? We really should stop doubting José Mourinho when he tells us he is “a special one… .not one out of the bottle.”  A linguist, a persuader, a winner in Portugal, England, Italy, and Spain. But when the trophies stopped and […]

On the eve of an American poet’s 80th birthday, the places and people over here broadened his horizons When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’, Bob Dylan – who will celebrate his 80th birthday on 24th May – was clear […]

Why communication may have been the least of the problems when the Vikings invaded The Great Heathen Army of the Danes invaded eastern England in 865. Large-scale Viking settlements followed throughout the 9th century and on into the 10th. Many eastern and northern areas of our island came to have a heavily Scandinavian or Scandinavianised […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on what might have happened if the attempt on Pope John Paul II’s life had been successful The two bullets fired by his would-be assassin perforated Pope John Paul II’s colon and small intestine, and he lost nearly three-quarters of his blood as he was rushed to hospital. Yet, they narrowly missed his mesenteric artery and […]

How the archipelago’s dialect hung on for centuries, but is now disappearing The Channel Islands lie between 70 and 85 nautical miles off the south coast of England. They are very much closer to the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy in France, which is only about 12 nautical miles away. The islands are not part of the […]

Megan Nolan reviews Real Housewives of New York, a show built on an addictive desire to feel superior and perhaps even pity for America’s super-rich This week season 13 of the reality show Real Housewives of New York began. I am badly addicted to this particular iteration of the franchise (there are Real Housewives in Atlanta, […]

Bonnie Greer on the impact of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, one of the greatest albums of all time, 50 years after its release Growing up African American and a sheltered Catholic schoolgirl on the South Side of Chicago, Marvin Gaye was the “ooh baby, baby man”. He was the troubadour of our clandestine basement […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the music of Johannesburg and its undisputed queen, Mama Africa Johannesburg was a city built on gold, springing up rapidly after precious metals were discovered there in the 1880s, but it became a byword for impoverishment. Soweto in particular, originally a mine workers’ encampment and later one of the places black Jo’burgians from […]

How Seve Ballesteros hauled golf from its safe, gin-soaked, cliquey complacency into a thrillingly glamorous spectacle There aren’t many golfers who have played a shot so brilliant, so miraculous even, that a commemorative plaque is installed on the spot, but then there haven’t been many golfers like Seve Ballesteros. Even at his best it would have been […]

The publishing industry has remained remarkably robust through the pandemic, but the coronavirus has exacerbated some alarming trends for the UK’s literary scene. I only realised this the other day while I was actually doing it, but of all the things I’ve missed during the pandemic – popping out for a pint, going to the […]

TIM WALKER on Dame Maggie Smith, an actress able to make people laugh, on and off screen. When I went to see Dame Maggie Smith appearing in A German Life at the Bridge Theatre in London, I was invited backstage to see her after the curtain went down. It was a hot night in 2019 and the […]

How the best rugby union players from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland come together to bring unity. It really shouldn’t work. Every four years, the best rugby union players from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are brought together for a couple of months to take on one of the sport’s southern hemisphere giants. New Zealand, […]

English football supporters are deluding themselves over fan power and the idea that the Bundesliga is more even than the Premier League. What do you imagine upset the Glazer Brothers more – their football team across the pond being prevented from playing on Sunday, or the Monday morning hit to the Manchester United share price […]

Does what we know about its creators’ mental health overshadow the brilliance of The Goon Show? Can the all-too-familiar concept of the sad clown spoil the enduring charms of one of British comedy’s enduring monuments? It is a question worth asking this month, on the 70th anniversary of the first UK broadcast of radio comedy The Goon […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how English, having spread one way around the world, suddenly reversed direction During the 1600s and 1700s, the English language spread westwards from Britain across the Atlantic to Canada, the USA, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Central America. Then, suddenly, at the very end of the 18th century, it started spreading back […]

France has always prided itself on its great thinkers. But the current crop are embarrassing and increasingly irrelevant. What happened? There must be some lesson to be drawn from the fact that today’s woke crowd insults France and the French while name-dropping French totems from a great height. As the country is repeatedly condemned, Merleau-Ponty, […]