Arts and Culture

Jason Solomons has known Noel Clarke for 15 years and admired his refusal to be denied by the British film industry. But that was before the allegations that have left his career, and BAFTA’s reputation, in tatters… Whichever way you look at it, the Noel Clarke allegations are disastrous for British cinema.  It’s a story […]

Sergei Krikalev went into space as a citizen of the USSR. While he was away, his country ceased to exist and he was left stranded in orbit. On its 30th anniversary, MICK O’HARE tells the astonishing story of his flight. On 19 August 1991 Boris Yeltsin, newly elected president of the Russian Soviet Republic, stood […]

When it comes to people who try to police our grammar, Winston Churchill (apparently) knew how to deal with them There is a grammar joke about Winston Churchill which is well known, even if it probably isn’t true. When a draft of an upcoming speech of his was circulated to aides, one of them, a […]

An intriguing new exhibition allows the public to view paintings from the Golden Age of Dutch art while experiencing the smells associated with them.  A painting is a painting is a painting. You look at it. It might mesmerise you; Jackson Pollock. Make you smile ironically; Rene Magritte. Lift your soul to the heavens; Tiepolo or, a Damien […]

If a picture is worth a thousand words – and if you need that picture to assuage the feeling that football is being sold to the devil – study this photograph. The scene is Wembley Stadium last Sunday evening. Moments after the final whistle of this season’s first cup final, Tottenham’s defeated Son Heung-min is […]

TANIT KOCH on how the quest for equality is having an impact on the German language. Some of us have put lockdown to great use and improved our language skills at home. Some, like editor-at-large Alastair Campbell, have even chosen German, despite the lasting damage done to its reputation by Mark Twain (The Awful German Language), Hollywood (“Achtung! Schnell, […]

A new exhibition brings together the works of four artists who, in their very different ways, emerged at a time when female roles in British society were about to change forever.  They were among the most innovative and, at times, sought-after artists of their day, a quartet of painters who are celebrated together in an […]

The European football super league is not dead – and you can bank on that The Super League, which rightly shocked and angered so many, came as no surprise to me. It was always hovering in the wings, waiting to burst on to the stage of world football like a 1,000-lb gorilla. There was no […]

Thirty years after his death, a new biography of Steve Marriott, of the Small Faces, paints a bleak picture of rock excess. The 30th anniversary of Steve Marriott’s death at the age of 44 – he died in a house fire on April 21 1991 caused by his falling asleep with a lit cigarette – finds the […]

From beach bums to hippies, hair metal rockers to gangster rappers, LA’s musical story has more twists than most. LA is a city of extremes. It’s a place where you either make it big or hit rock bottom, with a huge gulf between the mansions of Bel Air and the tents and shacks of Skid Row, […]

Mexican Coke is now on sale in the UK, but will it ever replace the real thing, with its iconic glass Coca-Cola bottles? My uncle used to buttonhole the sommeliers in expensive restaurants and ask for “a bottle of American Beaujolais”. A so-called ‘Mad Man’ – or Madison Avenue advertising copywriter – he knew the […]

Best known as Grouty in Porridge, Peter Vaughan was an actor who seemed to get better with age The Seven Ages of Man speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It amounts to a career trajectory for all serious actors. The best and luckiest manage to grow old with their audiences, going from playing “the whining schoolboy, with […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on Dalida, the French superstar singer who endured a catalogue of personal catastrophes They made an unlikely couple arriving at the Sanremo Music Festival in January 1967, the young protest singer some called the Italian Bob Dylan and the elegant, older chanteuse from Paris with a glittering decade of mainstream chart success behind […]

In both war and peace, a love of reading made Napoleon history’s biggest bibliophile.  When you’re an enthusiastically expansionist autocrat and visionary military leader building an empire that will cover almost an entire continent your work doesn’t, it’s fair to say, leave much time for hobbies. Julius Caesar produced no macramé of note; Alexander the […]

For a man with a celebrated line of fragrances, it’s no surprise that Pierre Cardin comes out of a new documentary smelling of roses. “We kept digging for dirt,” concedes one of the film’s directors, Todd Hughes. “But we kept striking gold.” So, adorned by celebs including Dionne Warwick, Naomi Campbell and Sharon Stone, House […]

Napoleon’s role in shaping the continent we know today makes him a subject of fascination across Europe. So, on the bicentenary of the emperor’s death, why does he not occupy a central place in the French psyche?  A Frenchman must necessarily be arrogant.  For he can be nothing other than the heir of Napoleon Bonaparte. His commitment to […]

TIM WALKER remembers a tense meeting where the Spanish singer was anxious to save face. I got to meet the old crooner Julio Iglesias in the late1980s and it’s his vanity that made the encounter so memorable. In those days, I used to work with Jane Bown, a photographer so grand that she numbered the […]

A fascinating new book focuses on the works of artists who died under the age of 30. Some are households name, but many more are those who would have been if only their lives had not been cut so tragically short The heavy thump of another coffee table art tome being delivered by the postie can evoke groans – and not […]

The Seychelles are a place where musical cultures from every part of the world – African, Indian, Polynesian, Arabic, Far Eastern and European – truly harmonise “The real richness of these islands is our cultural heritage,” Seychellois musical legend Patrick Victor has said. That is a cultural heritage that ranges far beyond the island of Mahé, smaller […]

The adventures of seafarer Jean Bart read like the chapters of a buccaneering novel When the British finally caught Jean Bart in 1689 it was quite a coup. A Dunkirk-based privateer sailing on behalf of Louis XIV, Bart had wrought havoc up and down the English Channel for 15 years by the time two 50-gun […]

Jason Solomons looks at how Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman helped take The Father from French fringe play to the Oscars It started life as a one-set play in a fringe theatre in Paris. Nine years later, The Father is now, as they say, a major motion picture and a very strong contender for this […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why we shorten some syllables and not others, such as in privacy and private. It is an interesting fact about the English language that we pronounce the word nature with a long ‘a’ whereas we say natural with a short ‘a’. Similarly, while we say grateful with a long ‘a’, gratitude has a short […]

WILL SELF on an art exhibition that prompts thoughts beyond the gallery To Peckham for my first art exhibition since lockdown has lifted. In truth, I wouldn’t have gone if the show weren’t being curated by a friend – but then I sometimes wonder if this applies to all gallery-goers: they’re so very convivial, the […]

The football genius’ nomadic decline after Manchester United is a tale well told. But his brief stint in apartheid South Africa is less familiar. As NATHAN O’HAGAN reports, his spell there set the tone for all that followed He was one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a football pitch. His natural ability and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a superb new novel which creates a horrifyingly plausible near-future for Margate. There’s a different kind of sky over the Isle of Thanet, a vast canopy, bigger even somehow than that over the flatlands of the Fens. And the light, the light is different there, and when the sun sets over the sea in […]

As Gregory’s Girl turns 40, Richard Luck chronicles his decades-long love affair with Bill Forsyth’s masterpiece  It was made for next to nothing, it starred nobody famous and it was written and directed by a man whose only previous film had been seen by next to nobody south of the border. Still, no sooner had […]

The New European editor-in-chief and Liverpool fan MATT KELLY on the pain and confusion caused by his club’s actions My wife doesn’t understand me.  The events of this week threw me into a deep funk from which I have yet to recover. The unprecedented headaches I began to suffer on Monday can’t have been just a coincidence. […]

The Super League farce may be over, but the conflicting interests of owners and fans mean more trouble ahead. Not even Niccolò Machiavelli, the grandmaster of deception, could have foreseen the manner in which English, Spanish and Italian clubs attempted to carve up European football. “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo,” Machiavelli wrote […]