Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i The Critic

THE PRESIDENCY OF EMMANUEL Macron, which was supposed to bring about a much-needed renewal of French politics, has instead led to a political impasse from which it’s hard to see how France escapes. Macron’s supremely irresponsible decision to call for snap elections without any need to do so resulted in a parliament that is all but certain to ensure political deadlock. Not only does no party have a majority, but since members of parliament are divided in three blocs of roughly equal size that face strong political incentives against compromising, no government has a plausible path towards lasting until even the next presidential election — still less ruling effectively. This is happening just as the country is facing a major fiscal crisis — with revenue woefully overestimated, what was a 4.4…

From: Morgan McSweeney Subject: Desk Hi Sue, hope you’re enjoying your regional tour. You left in such a hurry that you didn’t have time to clear your desk. There’s O’Neill’s Music Of Ireland and The Good Pub Guide 1987. Where shall I send them? I’ve completely lost track of where your desk is these days. From: The Office of Liam Conlon MP mum since you got your new job none of the other mps are replying to my messages any more also I cant find my blue trousers do you think someone stole them? From: Morgan McSweeney Subject: Re: Meeting with Keir? Ah Sue, I’m afraid that’s going to be a bit tricky this month. Lot of post-Budget stuff, you know how it is. From: FDA Mailbox Subject: Re: Constructive…

BY THE BANKS OF THE RIVER LAGAN, not far from the centre of Belfast, stands a modernist structure that looks from some angles like the hull of a massive ship. Opened in 2012, the Titanic Experience is one of Northern Ireland’s biggest tourist attractions; a museum dedicated to the story of the world’s most infamous passenger liner. Inside, visitors mill around the cavernous galleries, peering at mock-ups of the doomed ship’s lavish interior, CGI films of the sinking and maquettes of the shipyard that built the mighty vessel. On a patch of quayside just beyond are the remains of the slipway where the construction work was done. The so-called Titanic Quarter was once a bustling shipyard owned by the company that built her, Harland & Wolff. The province’s biggest industrial…

THE DATE FOR THE PUBLICATION OF MICHEL Houellebecq’s sixth novel was 7 January 2015. The book’s title was Soumission (Submission), and rarely had pre-publication reviews for a book been so vitriolic. The French literary scene loathed the novel, which was set against the backdrop of the 2022 presidential election in which Marine Le Pen was forecast to triumph before centrist parties formed a coalition with an Islamist party, resulting in France’s first Muslim head of state. President Mohammed Ben Abbes immediately set about transforming the French Republic into an Islamic one. Libération described Soumission as “Islamophobic”, and a “low-budget political-fiction novel” that legitimised the far right. A literary review magazine called Houellebecq “irresponsible” and “opportunistic” and said it was hard to take the novel seriously. The most contemptuous review…

KEIR STARMER’S GOVERNment has something to be said in its favour: it will be in office for only one term. At this year’s general election the Labour Party may have secured 411 members of Parliament, but its vote share was an unconvincing 33.7 per cent. The Conservatives’ support slumped from 43.6 per cent in 2019 to 23.7 per cent in 2024, and they have much ground to recover. But it is clear — only a few months into its existence — that the present Labour government is much worse, in almost every respect, than its predecessor. This raises an alarming question: “What will the British economy be like in June 2029 when the Conservatives or a Conservative-dominated coalition takes over?”. Two subsidiary questions are implied. Will taxes be higher —…

THE DEBATE ABOUT WINSTON CHURCHILL and his legacy has resurfaced in recent weeks, following an interview Tucker Carlson held with a podcaster named Darryl Cooper. Cooper attempted to present a revisionist account of the origins and continuance of the Second World War, arguing that Churchill was “the chief villain” of the conflict and employing the passive voice to explain the millions “who ended up dead” in the East as a consequence of a lack of logistic foresight by the Nazis. This was not a serious work of Churchill revisionism, and Cooper must have recognised the inadequacy of his position when he refused to publicly debate with a genuine historian, Andrew Roberts, who is one of Churchill’s most convincing modern defenders. Contributions from the most ignorant of revisionists (Cooper describes a…

Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity John Ma (Princeton University Press, £42) OF ALL THE SPECTACULAR REMAINS OF the ancient world, few have so fired the modern imagination as Palmyra. Perched on an oasis in the Syrian steppe, this was not an obvious spot for one of the great cities of the ancient world. Under the rule of the Roman Empire, however, its enterprising citizens played a major role in financing and organising commerce between east and west. They poured their profits into monumental buildings and the patronage of the arts; the results survive in quantity, even after the best efforts of ISIS to destroy them. It is the extraordinary architectural remains for which Palmyra is justly famous,…

You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms Keith E. (Polity, £45) BEFORE READING YOU CAN’T TEACH THAT! I would have agreed with its author that the free speech of academics and students needs to be protected against the whims of pugnacious politicians and censorious legislators. Keith Whittington brings his prestigious legacy in legal scholarship to bear upon the ongoing academic freedom crisis in American universities. He defends the social value of the often “self-indulgent” academic in his “being able to tell people what they need to know and not necessarily what they want to hear”. The sentiment of “Don’t shoot the messenger” is one with which I tend to agree — more often than not because if there is a gun being levelled, it is being levelled at me.…

Our Evenings Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £22) The Proof of My Innocence Jonathan Coe (Viking, £20) Barrowbeck Andrew Michael Hurley (John Murray, £16.99) IN THE PANTHEON OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, few releases are as high status or as eagerly awaited as a new Alan Hollinghurst. They don’t come along that often, after all: there have been just six novels since his groundbreaking debut The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988. That book was remarkable not just for bringing explicit gay sex into the polite drawing room of English literary fiction, but for its elegant, rarefied prose. Four decades later Hollinghurst has rarely put a foot wrong: his 1998 novel The Spell is his only overall dud, while works of brilliance such as The Folding Star (1994) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) have been overshadowed by…

A CUTE LITTLE VIDEO POPS UP on Instagram. What you see is a little boy (below), maybe three years old, sitting in the conductor’s seat in an Italian opera house and waving a baton as long as himself at a background recording of a Beethoven symphony. “Adorable!” cried Classic FM. Up to a point. The boy’s father is Francesco Ivan Ciampa, conductor at the Carlo Felice Theatre in Genoa. His intention, we may assume, was to imply that maestro talent runs in the genes. That supposition seems to be growing more widespread. Barely had I shut the Insta link than news popped up of regime change in Mainz, a town in western Germany. This is personal to me. My grandfather left Mainz in 1885 and, while none of us has…

THE SHAHNAMEH, THE “BOOK OF Kings”, is to Iran what the Iliad or the Aeneid are to Western civilisation. It is a verse epic comprising 50,000 couplets, composed between AD 977 and 1010 by the poet Ferdowsi, who was said to have been paid a gold coin for every couplet — which perhaps helps to explain its length. The Shahnameh mixes myth and history from the deep Persian past and contains dynastic succession, picaresque stories, moral lessons, religious instruction and heroes. IN AN EXTRAORDINARY ACT OF VANDALISM, THE BOOK WAS DISMEMBERED AND THE ILLUSTRATIONS SOLD The most beautiful illustrated version of the poem was created for Shah Tahmasp, who ruled from 1524 to 1576. The pictures — of the utmost magnificence, rich with gold and lapis — were painted by…

EARLY IN THE MORNING OF 7 October 2023, as Hamas terrorists started to slaughter hundreds of young people at the Nova dance festival, three escaped by car. They drove to the entrance of nearby Kibbutz Be’eri, seeking sanctuary. But they arrived at the same time as the first Hamas gunmen. CCTV footage shows what happened next. A terrorist casually sprays the car with bullets. The vehicle slows, veers leftward and stops, its passengers now dead. Another gunman shoots into a house, the groans of his victim audible. In One Day in October Dan Reed, an award-winning director, cuts between the killers’ own headset footage, the kibbutz’s CCTV system which captured so much of the slaughter, interviews with survivors and the heart-rending last messages of those about to die to their…

IN THE DAYS WHEN I WAS A postgraduate, most art historians went to study at the Courtauld Institute which in those days was housed in the opulent, Robert Adam-designed Home House on the north side of Portman Square with its beautiful and ostentatious, domed staircase hall, down which Sir Anthony Blunt would occasionally descend. The alternative was the Warburg Institute in a building which replaced a large eighteenth-century terrace house on the west side of Woburn Square and which had been designed in a style of institutionalised austerity by Charles Holden, architect of many London underground stations. Anthony Blunt refused to allow the Courtauld Institute to move into an adjacent building as had been originally planned, following the model of the Fogg Art Museum in Harvard, even though he had…

THE ONLY TIME I’VE EVER HAD some idea of what it’s like to be an oil sheikh was on holiday in southern Italy with my girlfriend in 2004 when there were two euros to the pound. We flew into Rome, took the train to Naples and Salerno and explored the Amalfi coast by boat. Everywhere we went, we ordered the finest wines made from grapes that were new to me such as Falanghina, Greco and Fiano which we ate with fritto misto. Best of all was Taurasi, a sturdy red known as the “Barolo of the South”. In the kind of restaurants we ate at this was usually the most expensive wine on the list, though that rarely meant more than €40 — £20 — a bottle. Ah! halcyon days!…

THERE IS ALMOST, I’M PRETTY sure, no form of exhaustion quite as heavy as the state you find yourself washed up in when you finish writing a book. I was grinding through final edits until 4 a.m. on Sunday and that night I set my alarm for 4.30 a.m. to get it all wrapped up by Monday lunchtime. I often say that you only really know what a book you’ve written is about when readers start telling you. “You’ve created,” a veteran London publisher said to me yesterday, “an extraordinary picture of how the modern English countryside actually works.” I’ll take his word for it. What I found particularly interesting, though (in writing what is ostensibly a book about how we engage with the land, as well as about accessibility)…

HECTOR RETURNED FROM school today, asking what “a PJ” was. Assuming he meant pyjamas, I began hastily searching the Boden app for new nightwear, his question having alerted me to the fact that he’s currently sleeping in foul Minecraft onesies on rotation, but is due to attend a sleepover at Claridge’s next week. I know! He protested that PJ couldn’t possibly mean pyjamas, given the way his “friend” Alessandro used it. This kid is one of the turbo brats in Hector’s class, whose dad is some kind of tech mogul and whose mother is a former Victoria’s Secret model. Asked Hector for the context, now frantically scrolling Jack Wills, and was told that Alessandro had said that they were meant to spend half term in Florida, but that his mother…

IN 2020, BABY NR WAS BORN WITH significant disabilities, including a brain malformation. His doctors thought his prospects were so poor that they applied to the High Court, first to withhold CPR if his heart stopped, then for a declaration that it would be in his best interests to remove him from his ventilator and let him die. The parents are devoted Orthodox Christians who opposed the applications. The Children’s Guardian supported the NHS Trust. Mr Justice Poole visited Baby NR in hospital, took evidence, and on both occasions made the orders. He also offered his utmost sympathies to the parents. So far, this is a familiar story, repeated many times each year in the Family Division. But in September, five months after the judge allowed his doctors to cease…

“YOU MUST,” PEOPLE SAY to me, “miss the Tories. They were so much easier to sketch.” Behind my back, they are blunter. “When is Hutton going to get a fix on Starmer?” someone asked the editor. It’s a fair enough question. As a sketchwriter, charged with mocking the government, I used to wake each morning confident the Conservatives would have done something daft by lunchtime. Indeed there were moments when we wondered if we should move to two sketches a day, just to get it all in. Since July, it has been harder work. It would be unfair to blame ministers for this. They are, as in so many areas, trying to deliver for us, but hampered by their inexperience: they just can’t yet do chaos like the Tories could.…

ON 9 JUNE 2024, EMMANUEL MACRON ANnounced the dissolution of the National Assembly. Parliamentary elections in France are held in two rounds and, the day after the second round, on 8 July, the country woke to an Assembly divided into three parties of roughly equal weight, none of which seemed willing to ally with either of the two. In France, unlike in the United States, the government must have the support of a majority in the Assembly to be able to carry out its duties — or at least it must not have against it a majority of MPs ready to overthrow it by voting a motion of censure. In the new Assembly, this condition seems impossible to meet. France risks returning to the situation of chronic governmental instability…

“I DON’T BELIEVE IN HISTORY AS PROGRESS, I do not believe in purity, I do not believe in the ‘good’ society. I believe that man is a failed species.” Philosopher, writer and campaigner for the right of Kurds, Ukrainians and Israelis to live without threat from a belligerent neighbour or fanatically-inclined zealots, Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) is more than a public intellectual in a French TV studio. He has faced harm on several battlefronts. His reporting presents the facts of war as directly as they can be from a non-combatant point of view. All this in his emblematic chemise blanche déboutonnée and costume noir. Who is he? Lévy was born in Béni Saf, a coastal town in Algeria, in 1948. His parents were of Sephardic origin and pieds-noirs, which is to…

“WHAT DOES HISTORY DO? You read about human beings making decisions under constraints of time and opportunity,” says Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford until 2022 and now chairman of the Pharos Foundation. “Would I have acted differently?” is the practical test he has for his encounters with the past as a professional ethicist. Encountering Biggar, as eirenic an Anglican priest as Scotland has yet to offer the rest of the country, is to meet a studious, thoughtful and engaged presence. Alternatively, he’s the monster of a 2017 letter that denounced him for his Ethics and Empire seminar, “signed”, as one of his admirers puts it, “by every postdoc in Oxford”. We, the undersigned, issue this statement to register our surprise and concern … As…

ON A RECENT HOLIDAY TO YORKSHIRE, I had the pleasure of passing the remains of Jervaulx Abbey. Established by the Cistercians in 1156, standing proudly in the Wensleydale valley, the abbey owned half of the area at its peak, developing a reputation not only for the quality of its horse-breeding, but for the valley’s eponymous cheese. Aside from a monk murdering an abbot in 1279, it was a happy house. That all changed in 1537. Adam Sedbergh, the abbot, had the temerity to send meat and drink to the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular revolt against Henry VIII’s break with Rome and closure of the monasteries. Henry did not take this act of charity well. He had Jervaulx forfeited to the Crown. The abbot was hung, drawn and…

Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War Kit Kowol (Oxford University Press, £30) ON THE EDGE OF MY DESK IS A MUG that’s been through my dishwasher too many times. Wrapped around its face are four Warholic images of a svelte Boris Johnson aw-shucksing his hand through his hair, with the words “Conservative Future” printed alongside. Like everything in the Cameron years, there is something not quite right about it. Somewhere between old mugs, Boris Johnson, and conservative futurism my eyes wander back to Kit Kowol’s brilliant book on wartime conservatism. Specifically to the Cleveland housewife who attributed all the evils of the world to Adolf Hitler’s failure to get his end away: “Why doesn’t Hitler marry and settle down?” she wrote to her MP in…

Naples 1944: And The Making of Post-War Italy Keith Lowe (William Collins, £25) KEITH LOWE HAS TAKEN ON QUITE A challenge. The legacy of the wartime memoir written by the late, great travel writer Norman Lewis, is certainly a hard act to follow. Sergeant Lewis, who entered the city for the first time in September 1944, served with the British Army Intelligence Corps. In 1978 he published a vivid memoir of all he witnessed, good, bad and terrible during the allied occupation of the southern Italian city. Naples ’44 sits easily alongside the finest wartime publications, certainly as page-turning as my own favourite, From the City, From the Plough, Alexander Baron’s poignant novel based on his own service during the D-Day Landings. Lowe’s history of these times succeeds on many…

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin Sue Prideaux (Faber & Faber, £30) “WHO IS GAUGUIN?” ASKED Augustus Strindberg in 1895. It was a good question. Then in his late forties, Gauguin was not an artist who lent himself to categorisation. Plenty of names had been bandied around over the years. Impressionist. Post-Impressionist. Even Synthesist-Symbolist. But for Strindberg, there was only one way to describe him — “the savage”. Strindberg wasn’t the first. As far back as 1887 — when Gauguin was just starting out — the anarchist Félix Fénéon had praised him for “his barbarism, irascibility, and the force of his brushstrokes”. Nor was he the last. Soon enough, another critic, Eugène Tardieu, matter-of-factly described him as “the wildest of all the innovators” — gaily breaking with every “civilised” norm…

IN MOMENTS OF LETHARGY, thoughts turn to those hot muse babes gallivanting on the slopes of Mount Helicon, splashing about in the river Permessos, jiving round Jove’s altar — killing time till the SOS comes in from some poor blocked poet or painter, and off flies Calliope or Erato like an International Rescue squad member with an emergency package of aesthetic caustic soda and useful tips. And nice for those poets, etc, with a named muse to whistle up when the going gets tough. My question is, what about practitioners of sarcastic journalism? Who the hell are we supposed to call? Euterpe and Thalia aren’t picking up messages, that’s for sure. There is another theory about inspiration, to wit, that it emerges from somewhere much nearer than Attic hillsides. Lorenzo…

OEDIPUS AS KEIR STARMER? HOLD that thought. Robert Icke’s retelling of the Greek saga of a family that turns out to be rather too close turns Oedipus Rex from tragic victim of bizarre circumstances, first recorded around 420 BC, into a hungry if bland Westminster politician, looking nervously to a victory on election night, until the fates arrive to prove the exit polls wrong. In the Wyndham’s Theatre’s new production, Mark Strong in the central role and Lesley Manville as Jocasta, his wife (and more), are a top-notch duo. Frankly, that is just as well given the serious suspension of disbelief we are going to have to accept to project the twisting story of Oedipus onto a modern setting — a rented apartment of the kind Lord Alli might have…

MYSTERIES MAKE THE WORLD GO round, and brighten our lives. Why are so many tourists keen to get into Madame Tussaud’s? Who gave Angela “carrick-ter-chaw” Rayner elocution lessons? Why is Prue Leith in the papers every week? And now, the biggest puzzle of all: what is Radio 3 for? The answer ought to be: “it is a station that brings classical music and intelligent discussion to broad-minded listeners”. Some things, its guardians should never be shy of proclaiming, have greater value than others, and it is our pleasure to remind listeners that the views from the peaks are usually grander than those in the valleys. Which brings us to the centenary “celebration” of the BBC Singers, broadcast from the Barbican Centre, because it summed up everything that has gone wrong.…

FRACTIONAL OWNERSHIP HAS been around as long as the art trade has existed. A work of art would be purchased by a principal and shares in that work (or works) would be owned by others: i.e. part-ownership, rather like owning a racehorse’s leg. But what has become a hot topic over the last decade is the sense that art can be tokenised and traded as fractions of a larger whole by nonspecialist or retail investors. Several companies, such as Maecenas, Feral Horses, Look Lateral, and Masterworks were part of this new generation of art investment/fractional ownership, building on the enthusiasm for transacting in cryptocurrencies. Feral Horses even sought investment from Dragons’ Den, and were savaged. Their mission, apparently, was to reshape “art investments, making it accessible to everybody and satisfying…

WHAT IS THE POINT OF SUMMER? CRICKET, I grant you. But other than that it’s essentially just months without football and jump racing. Life comes alive again in October when the football season has started to take shape and you can start properly anticipating the return of proper National Hunt racing. It’s a wonderful thought that there are now only four months until Cheltenham. Critics argue it deforms the whole season because even Grade 1 races such as the King George on Boxing Day are viewed in the context of what race the winner will run in at the festival. I’ve always thought that a bizarre criticism, like saying that athletics is deformed by having the Olympics. It’s a trite cliché that the Cheltenham Festival is racing’s Olympics, but the…

FOUR A.M. IN THE STEAM ROOM OF an African night. The heat hanging low and sultry, plucking sweat through a man’s pores and making it bloom on his skin. Four a.m. and there are 80,000 people here, terraced in the darkness, intent on the square of light dead centre in the stadium. Even by the surreal standards of boxing’s travelling circus, this is the last outpost. A country whose people are dirt poor but whose president encourages everyone to steal. And why not? No-one steals as much as he does: Mobutu Sese Seko with his leopardskin toque and pink marble palace, Mobutu Sese Seko who charters Concorde for shopping trips to Paris and is pictured descending god-like through clouds every evening at the start of the news. A century ago…

Gisèle Pelicot suffered grave harm: she caught four STDs and the sleeping pills caused such confusion she feared she had a brain tumour THE TESTIMONY OF THE DOZENS OF MEN accused of raping Frenchwoman Gisèle Pelicot is almost impossible to comprehend. Her husband Dominique has pleaded guilty to inviting men he found on coco.gg, a since-closed website where users could remain anonymous, to have sex with her after he had rendered her unconscious with Temesta, a prescription sleeping drug. Most of his co-defendants have denied the charges, some claiming they believed they were participating in a sex game pre-arranged by the Pelicots, others that they thought her husband’s permission was enough. Ms Pelicot suffered grave physical harm as a result of these supposed sex games: she tested positive for four STDs,…

THE HOUSE OF LORDS — just as it faces a hostile government which has fixed menacing eyes on the membership of the upper house — has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to prove its worth in the constitution and to do this by saving the country from an irreversible, strategic error. Let’s start with the error: the almost-incomprehensible decision to surrender British sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory, handing the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius (a state with no historic links to the islands beyond having been jointly administered before Mauritius received independence in 1968). We have negotiated a 99-year lease on one of the islands, Diego Garcia, in order to allow a military base to continue operating there for the United States. We have agreed to pay Mauritius an unnamed…

THERE SEEMS TO BE A PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN AFOOT to try to persuade the public that the architectural style known as BRUTALISM has been other than an aesthetic, social and urban disaster. It is as if the National Association of Thugs were trying to persuade the public that being robbed in the street at knifepoint were a life-enhancing experience. Recently I noticed a headline in The Herald (formerly the Glasgow Herald). Announcing an exhibition, it read, “A monstrous design: The beauty of Glasgow’s Brutalist buildings”, Accompanying the article were pictures of such buildings, one of them with a glass frontage not blacked, but pinked out, with the words “PEOPLE MAKE GLASGOW” in huge lettering inscribed on the vast pink space. Needless to say, the buildings themselves could have been anywhere from…

A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to The Shard Simon Jenkins (Penguin Viking, £26.99) IT WAS ONLY WHEN I READ THE ACKNOWLedgements of Simon Jenkins’s A Short History of British Architecture that I realised why he has devoted so much of his life to writing about architecture alongside his better known work as a commentator, journalist and, although relatively briefly, editor of the Evening Standard in the mid-1970s and of The Times in the early 1990s. When he left Oxford in 1965, his first job as a young tyro was working for Country Life. Then, after a short spell at the Times Educational Supplement, he wrote about planning for the Evening Standard and, encouraged by John Betjeman, developed a detestation of what was happening to English towns and…

Kaput: The End of the German Miracle Wolfgang Münchau (Swift, £20) FEW CATCHPHRASES HAVE ENJOYED AS long a shelf-life as the “German economic miracle”. Even though Wirtschaftswunder sounds better in German, the connotations of the miraculous were disliked by Ludwig Erhard, the hard-headed economics minister who masterminded the post-war West German recovery. Though he used it on the cover of his 1954 book Germany’s Comeback in the World Market, Erhard preferred his own term: “social market economy”. In his 1958 book Prosperity through Competition, Erhard insisted: “I do not believe that the idea of ‘a German miracle’ should be allowed to establish itself.” The German example merely proved “to the world at large the blessings of both personal and economic freedom”. Nevertheless, “German economic miracle” is still widely used to…

Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market 1945-2000 James Stourton (Head of Zeus £30) ACCESSIBLE, WIDE-RANGING AND CONtinually fascinating, Stourton’s story of the art trade in London focuses on the period from the Goldschmidt collection Impressionist sale at Sotheby’s in 1958 to the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997. The cast of auctioneers, dealers, collectors and sellers is international and stretches from barrow boys to dukes. It is a story of modern Britain, of the successes and crises of its latter-day globalisation, and a moral tale, of venality, hubris, and fraud, but also of connoisseurship, care and enterprise. The pen portraits are arresting, both those quoted by Stourton (“we were maybe barking up the same tree and pissing on both sides of it at…

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SINGER Kirsty MacColl’s sixty-fifth birthday last month. Instead, it’s now almost 24 years since her awful, untimely death. While diving with her sons in Cozumel, Mexico, a speedboat ploughed into their party: MacColl was killed pushing her sons to safety. This would have been devastating under any circumstances, but in MacColl’s case it seems particularly cruel, because it seemed as though, at 41, she still had so much more music to make. On the Latin-influenced album Tropical Brainstorm in 2000, she sounded happy, relaxed — joyful, even. After a stop-start career, finally she had found her groove. She’d had to work harder than most to get there. Stage fright and label issues had taken a toll on her over the years — though she started…

SOMETIMES A LESSER BOOK CAN make a greater film. Robert Harris’s 2016 novel Conclave was a gripping beach read, but a slight work compared to his best. Brought to the screen it is a perfect two-hour thriller. The pope is dead, and Cardinal Lawrence is in charge of organising the election of his successor. Played by Ralph Fiennes, he is a man of doubts, about his own vocation and the future of the church. He had wanted to resign, but the dying pope refused him permission. Was it because he wanted him to do this final job? As ever with Harris, there are puzzles to be solved. What happened in the last pope’s final hours? Who is the man who has just arrived, claiming to be a secret cardinal? And…

MARIANNA SPRING IS TRYING to be fair. The BBC’s prolific “Disinformation & Social Media Correspondent” clearly wants to be balanced in Why Do You Hate Me? USA. She investigates the conspiracy theories of the left as well as the right, and she tries to understand her subjects on a human level as she explores American division in another torrid election year. It would be unfair not to appreciate the effort. Spring makes some observations that are evidently true. Social media can encourage polarisation, which, in turn, can fuel bitterness and paranoia. People who come to the internet for human connection can end up being more isolated than they were before. SPRING ALSO TELLS SOME INTERESTING stories as she travels across America, investigating mistrust and misinformation. The tale of a high…

THE RUINS OF XANADU, KUBLAI’S CAPITAL AND inspiration for Coleridge’s dream poem, may lie many miles to the east of Kazakhstan, but the land that bore witness to the great ruler’s armies and its legion of followers and which was once the dominion of the Ulug Ulus, now plays host to pleasure palaces truly fit for a Khan. For more than a millennium, the khanates that comprise contemporary Kazakhstan were the plains across which civilisations swept. Alexander marched his Macedonians over them weeping, wrote Plutarch, when he saw the breadth of his domain. Genghis Khan led his horsemen westward, cutting a swathe across the Steppe unto the very gates of Europe. And in both directions there trekked the merchants of the caravanserais, travelling from inn to inn along the great…

LAST MONTH, I LAMENTED THE tenacity with which fashion’s motley assembly of borecores are drably lingering on. Post September’s catwalks, there’s been some talk about a vibe shift into more fascinating fields. By June, a palate-cleansing tastelessness may abound in the form of ruffled bralettes, python-print knickers, transparency and micro minis. However, for now, a general lack of flourish prevails, featuring the same, dullsville uniform that has been around for — like — ever. Viz: jeans; an oversized jacket or trench coat; trainers or loafers; typically sported with a cap, all played out in shades of sludge. Even that colossus of innovation, Miuccia Prada, has offered more of the same, only with the model hunched, as in Miu Miu’s current ad campaign. For who among us is not hunched in…