Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i The Critic

THE LAST TIME THIS MAGAZINE CALLED on a Tory leader to go was in July 2022 [“THE FAILURES OF BORIS”]. “The country deserves better,” we said. It didn’t get it, but we were right to say that time was up for Mr Johnson. He announced his resignation on 7 July, though we’re suitably modest about the role of The Critic in making that happen. No such Cassandra-like gifts attach themselves to our saying that Kemi Badenoch has failed as Tory leader, is failing, and shall go on failing until she leads her party to a defeat every bit as wretched as the one to which Rishi Sunak took the Conservatives. And the simple truth is that she likely won’t go. In part Mrs Badenoch will probably stay in place because…

‘‘FIVE GONE TO THE DOGS,” TIMES IN THE LAST 2,000 years the church has to all appearances said G.K. Chesterton. “In each case it was the dogs that died!” I have bad news for dogs: the church is making a surprise comeback. At least, there’s a sporting chance it is. I have bad news for the Church of England: we’re lagging behind. We’re missing the boat. We might be the dinosaurs, left mournfully on terra firma while Noah sets sail in the Ark. So what’s happened? You might have picked up news of a big YouGov poll for the Bible Society, tracking attitudes to religion in England. They do this every half decade or so, and the last time round the news was unremittingly grim. Churchgoing was down across all…

IN A THEORY OF JUSTICE, JOHN RAWLS argues that we must imagine the social contract as if we do not know what role in society we would have. This, claims Rawls, ensures that “the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain”. Alas, Nick, 30, knows his place all too well — and he isn’t sure how he got here. Social contract theory is a subtle, complex field of thought, full of nuanced attempts to reconcile liberty and equality — but for Nick it is painfully simple. Nick lives in London. On paper, he is in his prime. He’s a white collar worker earning more than most of his peers, living in a dynamic global capital in one of the wealthiest societies in history. But all…

With a self-satisfaction that makes Mr Pecksniff seem almost as self-doubting as Hamlet, Aviva — once known as the Norwich Union — tells us, under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion, that “we are committed to ensuring our people are a reflection of the customers and communities we serve.”It goes on to say that it is a signatory of Women in Finance Charter, the 30% Club, and the Race at Work Charter. It “works with” Diversity Practice, which asks us to “IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE WE ALL TRULY CONNECT AND SEAMLESSLY CROSS THE BORDERS OF DIFFERENCE THAT ALL TOO OFTEN SEPARATE US” — from, for example, North Korean prison guards. Aviva has recently published a UK Pay Gap Report, indulges in “Diversity data gathering”, and is “working in partnership…

I HADN’T BEEN EXPECTING THE TEARS. IT WAS more than one member of the congregation. It had all started with an idle daydream of mine that had got out of hand. What would it have been like, I had wondered to myself one day, to worship in our parish church in the Middle Ages? Before I knew it, I was helping to organise a pre-Reformation-style service of Vespers. My normal churchwardenly duties of paperwork and fixing the boiler went neglected as I hunted for incense, copes, and clergy who could sing Latin plainsong. The real challenge was working out the liturgy. Before the Reformation, our church would likely have followed the Sarum Rite, a pattern of worship developed at Salisbury Cathedral from the eleventh century onwards. But to someone brought…

IN 1941, THE PUBLISHER COLLINS LAUNCHED what Owen Hatherley calls a “paroxysm of island backslapping”. This was Britain in Pictures, a government-backed series of morale-boosting books with volumes on ships, clocks, cricket and statesmen. Though many well-known writers contributed, it was “at every level except for the texts an entirely Central European endeavour”. This is just a tiny example of how Britain was “transformed” by the artists, architects, publishers, planners, designers and filmmakers who fled Central and Eastern Europe during the 1930s. They introduced and developed elements of what can loosely be described as “Weimar culture”, illuminated fresh parts of the national landscape and challenged many cherished myths. For example, there had been few examples of the International Style in Britain until, claims Hatherley, émigrés such as Ernó Goldfinger and Berthold…

THE WOMEN OF THE MUSIC HALL LAdies’ Guild were accustomed to taking all manner of dramas in their stride, but there were certainly some furrowed brows at their weekly committee meeting on 2 February, 1910. Guild treasurer Belle Elmore (right) always attended these gatherings at the charity’s office in London but on this particular Wednesday she didn’t show up. Instead, she wrote two letters to explain that a relative’s illness meant she had to return to America urgently. She was therefore resigning as treasurer, and urged the committee to elect a new one that very day. Her friends were bewildered. Belle, a bright, vivacious former singer, was a very popular committee member, much admired for her energetic fundraising. This resignation was most unlike her. Was it also a little odd…

BEN MARKOVITS IS SOMETHING OF ANenigma — to me, at least. The British-American novelist has been productive if not downright prolific, publishing 11 novels since his debut 21 years ago, and in 2013 was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Yet I rarely see his name on prize shortlists and have never had anyone press his books on me. He must be doing something right, though, to attract the continued support of a prestigious house like Faber — and I notice he has been rebranded with this novel, having previously been published as Benjamin. (What he gains in brevity he loses in rhythm.) Markovits’s twelfth novel, The Rest of Our Lives, shows what a treat I’ve been missing. It is a book that has everything — a clear…

TWICE IN THE LAST CENTURY, Russia stood on the brink of world dominance. Specifically in music, but in other fields as well. Here’s roughly what happened. In 1914, with German tonality broken and Italian opera exhausted, Russia stood to inherit the earth. It had the world’s most popular composer in Sergei Rachmaninoff and the two busiest radicals in Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The best violinists were pumped out by Leopold Auer’s St Petersburg studio: Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sasha. Ballet was rejuvenated by Serge Diaghilev. Then came war and revolution, and these assets were dispersed. Under Soviet tyranny the composer Dmitri Shostakovich contrived a calculated ambiguity to stay alive but the pressure to conform inhibited most creative minds. Some, like Galina Ustvolskaya, turned inward and never left home. Others took their cue…

THERE ARE FEW MAJOR NEWS stories that begin as tragedy and end as farce, but the saga of Raoul Moat defied tradition. In the summer of 2010, Moat, a former nightclub bouncer, was released from HMP Durham, where he had served a short sentence for assaulting a child, and set out on an aimless mission of revenge. Within a few days, he had critically injured his former girlfriend, killed her new partner, blinded a police officer and somehow evaded the largest manhunt of modern times for nearly a week. It was a gripping, terrifying saga. And then Paul Gascoigne turned up, bearing fishing rods and a chicken, and demanding to see “My mate, Moaty”. Robert Icke’s new play, which is premiering at the Royal Court before a near-certain West End…

ANDY PEEBLES WAS BEST KNOWN as the last person to interview John Lennon, two days before the songwriter was slain outside his Manhattan apartment in December 1980. It was the first thing people brought up when the disc jockey died recently at the age of 76. By one of those quirks beloved of obituarists he lived in Blackburn, the mill town Lennon referred to in “A Day in the Life” — “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”, words prompted by a newspaper headline. A Londoner by birth, Peebles adapted easily to life in the County Palatine, and spent many happy summers covering red rose cricket for local radio. At the heart of his professional life was a 14-year association with Radio 1, a station which had more significance in 1978,…

I FOLLOWED THE RECENT COMPETItion to choose an architect to reinvent the British Museum’s Western Range (the run of galleries to the west of the Great Court) with the utmost interest because the range represents by far the most significant part of the museum, housing many of its greatest treasures. It includes one of Sydney Smirke’s grand neoclassical galleries. Beyond are further galleries designed by Smirke, originally to house the Elgin Marbles. In the 1930s, Lord Duveen paid for John Russell Pope, an American Beaux-Arts architect, to design a monumental, if sepulchral, new gallery to show off the Elgin Marbles as works of art. Meanwhile, the original galleries were filled in with a set of confusing galleries to house the Greek and Roman collections, which have not been comprehensively…

ALL REGULAR ATTENDEES OF wine tastings will have their own shorthand, even if it’s just a system of ticks or stars. I have various abbreviations that come in useful, such as NW (natural wine), TP (touch pooey — very useful for assessing natural wines), and GWR (good with rillettes). One I use frequently is MOD, short for modern. The difficulty is that the word means exactly the opposite of what it meant 25 years ago. When I got into wine in the late 1990s, “modern” meant the sort of opulent wines coming out of St Emilion, Pomerol, and Napa. They were built for the American market and the palate of Robert Parker Jr., the world’s most influential critic. Like Benny Hill in The Italian Job, he likes ’em big. To…

IN THE PRETTY TOWN OF Stamford there is a pub halfway up a hill called the Bull and Swan. It is quite unremarkable in many ways — of all the pubs in the town it might be the least interesting, but nailed to the wall behind greasy glass there is a letter that I think about often. It is dated March 1908, and it was sent by the then publican to Lord Cecil, whose descendants still own Burghley House, about a mile south of the town. “My Lord,” the letter runs, “may I take the pleasure of fishing in your lake this Sunday? I should most earnestly like the occasion.” I was told once, by a local land agent, that there used to be a reply, stuck up underneath, written…

BREAKING NEWS ON THE London school scene: Alleyn’s is staging a coup. Yup, poor old North Bridge House is finally being eaten by the unstoppable force that is the Dulwich day school beloved by Wandsworth London hedge funders, celebrity nepo babies and worse. As of 2026, the North Bridge House sites in Regent’s Park and Hampstead will be colonised by Alleyn’s and shall thereafter be known as Alleyn’s Regent’s Park (prep only) and Alleyn’s Hampstead. The latter will go all the way from age two to 18 — for all those mothers who are panicking that their nine-month-old may not make it through eight-plus, eleven-plus or common entrance. I do not judge these women. If I could have organised Hector’s entire education while he was under a year old, I…

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SHOULD POLITICIANS criticise judges? In February, both Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch attacked Upper Tribunal Judge Norton-Taylor’s decision to allow a Palestinian family to settle in Britain on Convention grounds, notwithstanding the fact that Parliament had not provided a specific pathway for their application. The Lady Chief Justice, who now dual-hats as the judiciary’s shop steward, said she was “deeply troubled” by the remarks, which is the technical legal term for “incandescently furious”. Then, in March, shadow lord chancellor Robert Jenrick called for William Davis LJ to be sacked as chairman of the Sentencing Council over the “two-tier” guideline which favoured ethnic minorities. This time, it was the Attorney-General, Lord Hermer KC, who had a fit, calling such remarks “entirely unacceptable” and creating “a huge threat to the rule…

IT WAS IN WORTHING THAT I FIRST heard of the Skeleton Army. Could it really be true that there were organised mobs beating up temperance activists in Victorian Britain? It seemed too good to be true. Yet true it was. The Salvation Army invited trouble from the start. Founded in 1878 by the self-styled “General” William Booth, they would pitch up in town, find themselves a “barracks” to live in and march through the streets saving drunks for Jesus. Most of the drunks did not want to be saved. They mostly just wanted to drink. And even those who did not drink disapproved of a bunch of do-gooders with military pretensions parading around with a brass band. The Skeleton Army, formed in Exeter in October 1881, was only the latest…

THE ENGLISH ARE IRREPRESSIBLE AND INcompetent imperialists. In the twelfth century, they acquired a dynastic empire, which they lost in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth century they conquered another and lost it in the fifteenth. The empire they seized in continental North America in the seventeenth century collapsed in the eighteenth. In the nineteenth, with Scots and Irish help, they built up worldwide power, which they lost in the twentieth. God knows what they will do next. Until the Second World War, dismantlement of the British Empire went well — except in Ireland. Dignified dominions and parliamentary regimes clustered around the mother-country’s apronstrings. Then violence, partition and rejection of the British legacy rent Palestine and the Raj. Even so, it was possible to be optimistic about a future in which…

THE THEME OF ROLAND MAYER’S INFORmative and attractive volume is bound to evoke Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay’s 1953 classic in which the notion of “ruin-mindedness” is explored from ancient times to the 20th century. Macaulay expressed the enduring fascination felt for architectural remains across centuries, examining how aesthetic and emotional responses to ruins reflect deeper contemplations of mortality, time and the sublime. Mayer selects a smaller topographical canvas, that of Rome, and gives a broad and thorough account of that most long-lived and insistent focus of reflection on ruins. His starting point is that an enthusiasm for ruins is far from universal. He cites the research of Salvatore Settis, which shows that few cultures set store by the idea of ruined buildings (the over-citation of secondary sources in some…

DESPITE THE NUMBER OF HOLOCAUST related titles that now appear in the book trade, there is usually (in my experience as a publisher of history titles) one specific book that becomes a beacon, or flagship for the genre. The Prosecutor could very well be seen as that in the years to come. I tip my hat to historian and award-winning writer Jack Fairweather for focusing on the life of the gay, socialist, Jewish lawyer Fritz Bauer, a toxic combination for living in Nazi Germany. But Bauer’s life is a remarkable story. We are fully conversant with the appalling genocidal crimes of the Nazis before and during the Second World War: the systematic persecution and subsequent destruction of the Jewish population throughout Europe which would result in the deaths of millions in…

ATSUNAMI OF DYSTOPIAN HEADLINES and predictions foretell that artificial intelligence (AI) will put us all out of jobs and one day rule over humanity. I have been tracking AI since the 1980s, taking as my guide the pioneer and Bletchley Park code-breaker Professor Donald Michie (1923–2007) who told me in a 1985 interview: “AI is not a race of super-clever Daleks, unfathomable to man, that will eventually dominate the globe. In fact, what AI is about is exactly the opposite: making machines more fathomable and more under the control of human beings, not less.” The struggle to make AI more fathomable is a task undertaken anew in law futurologist Richard Susskind’s latest book. Here he lays out several philosophical arguments about AI’s future, with the caveat that we also have…

IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT A SPECIALIST trade magazine manages to exemplify the various crises which the industry it represents is undergoing in a single issue. So hats off to the Bookseller of 21 February 2025 for, albeit unwittingly, exposing practically everything that is currently going wrong in the British book trade. The collapse of the mainstream; the tide of rubbish; the gender imbalance; the desperate search for green shoots; the subservience to social media — it’s all there, and made worse by being cunningly disguised as a series of challenges and searches for opportunity. Forty years ago, when the Secret Author first began to read it, the Bookseller was a staid but reliably amusing periodical, full of venerable columnists and host to a fruity old gentleman disguised by the pseudonym…

THE NOTION THAT THE CONSUMPtion (aka “appreciation”) of art makes you a better person is bandied about pretty freely, but is surely among the most obviously false of all the shibboleths on which our doomed civilisation totters along. Surely the only people who might believe it are the sort of lower-middlebrow dimmos who frequent the theatre. Meanwhile, everyone else in the world knows that over-indulgence in such pursuits has a markedly negative effect on the moral character — as duly noted by Hollywood, with a list of etiolated-aesthete villains from Lex Luthor to Cruella de Vil, Indiana Jones’s nemesis Belloq, the bad gallery dude in Beverley Hills Cop and the rest. Those who favour the art-ennobles-you shtick certainly have some tricky questions to answer regarding their fellow Parnassians. Stalin,…

“MY LIFE WOULD HAVE BEEN EASIER if I’d died at the peak of my career,” Leni Riefenstahl is shown observing in Riefenstahl, a new documentary. As it was, the film director most closely associated with the Nazis would live until 2003, meaning that she spent close to 60 years defending actions taken over the course of a single decade. And what a decade it must have seemed at the time. Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels saw in Riefenstahl both a physical and a creative ideal. She was asked to document the Nuremberg rallies of 1933 and 1934, and the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Her films expressed the Nazi view of themselves and the world. This was fully reciprocated: decades after her first meeting with the Führer, after his nature had…

BRITAIN NEEDS BOLD IDEAS FOR A better future and this reviewer has one: ban podcasts in which a vaguely counterintuitive pair of political commentators talk about a random assortment of world events. Yes, it might be a niche suggestion — not as bold as Net Zero or Levelling Up, say — but at least it will do unquestionable good. This format has been more overused than the colour red in the Soviet Union. The latest example is Alas Vine & Hitchens from the Daily Mail. I didn’t want to dislike it. Peter Hitchens is a great writer and a great man and Sarah Vine is … a human being. But listening to their podcast is more depressing than listening to a pensioner describe his haemorrhoids. Why does the podcast exist?…

John Newson was an early Victorian success story, the kind of man of whom Samuel Smiles would have approved. Emigrating to the capital from Suffolk in the 1840s, he began his career as a road sweeping contractor, before branching out into the manufacture of maidservants’ trunks. A poignant product; neat, portable containers for young women’s lives, to be lugged down steep area steps or up into the servants’ eyries beneath the glistening stucco of freshly-fashionable Belgravia, an individual world encapsulated in an everyday object. Mr Newson moved on from luggage to construction, leaving his name to Newson’s Yard, a former lumber warehouse repurposed as a chi-chi Pimlico mini-mall, where Wildflowers opened last autumn. A COLLABORATION BETWEEN CHEF Aaron Potter (formerly of the superlative Elystan Street), and designer Laura Hart (right),…

FOR MOST OF HISTORY, collecting art has been a very personal activity. In recent years, with the squeeze on profits at auction houses and the concomitant rise in the value of some contemporary and modern art beloved by a small cadre of financiers, there has been a tendency to perceive the art market as an investment-grade arena. Judging by the prices asked by some art dealers, it is no surprise that some private collectors wanted in on the same profit margins. Yet, for most participants, buying and collecting art is not about investment. It is about emotion and personality. It is also about fashion, but mostly it is about personal conviction and passion for the object, and the sense of connection the purchaser feels for it. As an art advisor…

LAST WEEK I FILLED OUT AN ONLINE FORM FROM my GP for a repeat prescription of some pills I have to take. After I had pressed submit, a new page popped up. Did I gamble? it asked me. If I did, could I have a problem? I was tempted to send them my last fortnight’s betting slips with the covering note, “Two weeks of betting and barely a penny back — if that’s not a problem, what is?” But I resisted because, well, by “problem” they didn’t mean “can’t back a winner”. The pathologising of gambling is the untold story of the past few years’ attacks on betting and those who bet. As I have detailed in previous columns, the moral panic about the spread of gambling addiction has grown…

IS THERE ANY MORE UNBECOMING WAY FOR AN adult to respond to a telling-off than “it’s not fair”? That was the main reaction of the University of Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, to the record fine of £585,000 levied on her institution by the Office for Students for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom. Sussex was just one university among many “navigating contested issues”, Roseneil said, but was “explicitly and deliberately being made an example to other universities”. She might as well have added a stamp of her foot and a wail of “everyone else was doing it too”. The fine was the culmination of a years’-long investigation by the OfS into campus culture at Sussex in response to the treatment of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who…

Defying a pervert COMING THROUGH ZURICH AIRPORT, I WAS flashed in the ladies’ loo by a man in a skin-tight beige bodysuit and a dodgy Chelsea facelift. It was emphatically not a unisex bathroom, but at first I wasn’t too bothered to see a bloke dressed as a woman in there. I actually felt a bit sorry when he asked me in a chummy voice which of two lipsticks suited him best (note to aspirant women, we don’t actually go up to random strangers by the sinks and come on all 12-year-olds’ sleepover), and merely resigned when he asked me if his bra was showing. But then he took his penis out. “Oh love,” I thought, “You’ve really, really picked the wrong day.” Call me intolerant, but when returning from…

I’M LOOKING AT AN AI-GENERATED IMAGE IN which Concorde soars through a pure blue sky over a landscape of rolling English meadows with a city of towering skyscrapers shimmering in the distance. I’ve seen it shared online many times. It’s the nation Anglofuturists want to see. Retro-futurism, using bits of the past to imagine the future, is a trusty artistic device, creating the visual language of steampunk, movies such as Brazil, and TV shows like Severance. Now it’s being applied to political marketing. But what is “Anglofuturism”? Here the problems begin. We love to define things in the hope that the definition becomes an explanation. But any definition of Anglofuturism is elusive, because it evolves every day in a kind of collaborative game played out on social media. It can be…

SOME PEOPLE ARE MOTIVATED BY MONEY. Others are driven by fame, a need to be liked or an urge to be remembered as a great individual in the annals of history. Donald Trump seems to want all of the above, plus the self-assurance that he can, in fact, solve those unending, sticky international problems no man or woman before him could adequately tackle. Trump is also obsessed with making deals — or at least being perceived as someone who can. “Deals are my art form,” he tweeted on 29 December 2014, long before he was considered a serious political force in America. “Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Fast-forward to this February, and he was pretty…

NOT MANY NEWSPAPERS BOTHERED to review Jungle Run, a second volume of memoirs by Cheryl Espinoza, the one-time glamour model famous for having downed a half-pint of maggots on live TV, but those that did were pleasantly surprised.“It is rare that a writer not known for their ability to handle a pen manages to improve their style from one book to the next,” wrote the Daily Mail’s critic, “but somehow Ms Espinoza has managed it.” Reading this encomium at her kitchen table in Chiswick, Miriam Spector felt a little le glow of satisfaction, for the real author of the book — at this point ranked seventh in the Sunday Times best-seller list — was herself. What drove Miriam into the fraught, murky yet agreeably lucrative world of celebrity ghostwriting? As…

‘‘YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT WON IT FOR Milei?” says the manager of an upmarket polo estancia an hour outside Buenos Aires. “Our kids voted for him. We told them not to be crazy — he didn’t have a party. We voted for the centre-right candidate, Bullrich, who came third. Then in the desempate [runoff], of course we voted for Milei rather than the Peronista, Massa. But he’s done a lot better than we expected. The kids were right.” “I don’t like Milei but he gives me hope,” adds another member of staff, who, like most Argentinians we met, clearly detests all other politicians more. Having gained fame as a TV economist who only entered politics in 2021, Javier Milei (right) became Argentina’s president with 14 million votes (56 per cent)…

REEM ALSALEM, THE UNITED NATIONS special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, is unlikely to convince the Taliban to allow girls to go to school. Nor will she end honour killings, domestic abuse or the sex industry. But she is determined to use her six years in the unpaid but demanding post to give it a damn good try. “For me, this role is not just about producing reports on safe topics. And if the Human Rights Council wanted academic papers, they could commission them from scholars,” she says. Rather, her role is to consider complex issues, highlight overlooked challenges and analyse them from a human rights perspective. “I do not claim I hold the absolute truth, but to approach issues independently and impartially as I am bound by…

CIRCLING AROUND A GLOUCESTERshire valley on a spring afternoon I recently came face to face with a tall stone pillar on the horizon. From across the ridge, it appeared at the highest point on the landscape, standing proud over the River Severn. It was a monument dedicated to William Tyndale — the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer who first translated the Bible into English. Tyndale was, understandably, given a memorial of such proportions to mark the paramount contribution he made to his country: he brought scripture into the hands of the people, inspiring congregations and renewing the nation’s faith. But what made Tyndale especially remarkable was his rendering of the Bible into a distinct, poetic vernacular. It is thanks to him that we have such idioms as “the apple of my eye”…

THE PUBLICATION OF ONE BOOK IN Britain in the early eighteenth century scandalised and outraged the nation. It was a work which posed awkward questions, challenged assumptions about the nature of good and evil, and even that of mankind itself. In the minds of many, it threatened to undermine and destabilise the very moral order of the day. The book in question, The Fable of the Bees, was the handiwork of the Dutch émigré, doctor and pamphleteer Bernard Mandeville. Consisting of a long satirical poem followed by a series of prose remarks, reflections and essays, it imagined a hive of greedy and licentious bees who grow discontented with their lot. It’s not that their lives are marked by want. Like Mandeville’s adopted country, the hive functions well, being “happily governed…

THOSE WHO PROCLAIM DIVERSITY™ TO be our strength — our greatest strength — possess a superhuman skill for over-looking the consequences of mass migration. The contempt an increasing number of working-class communities have for third-world immigrants arriving into Europe remains a complete, racist mystery to much of the political and media establishment, including the award-winning journalist and former Home Office press officer, Nicola Kelly. In her first book, Anywhere But Here, Kelly digs into the uneasy topic of the small-boat crisis, a crisis she claims to be “manufactured” with “seeds of division sown for political gain”. She “explores the asylum process through the eyes of those who arrived through that route”, directing her focus upon “the complex, notoriously hostile” system. I had high hopes that in pronouncing “how Britain’s broken asylum…

WHAT IS THERE LEFT TO BE SAID about The Beatles? The most successful pop band the world has ever seen has generated an incalculable level of coverage since their first single, Love Me Do, was released in 1962. It is not only their music which is ubiquitous, but also their influence. There seems to be a Beatles song for every event whether it is a funeral, christening, F.A. Cup final or jubilee. And our fascination shows little sign of fading: their latest Number 1 single, Now and Then, reached the top of the charts 60 years after their first. It is perhaps because of this astonishing level of success that we have long since lost any real perspective on The Beatles. Ever since John Lennon claimed that the band was…

Reboot the Bard WHILE COMMENTATORS foam at the mouth following reports the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is “decolonising” his native Stratford-upon-Avon amid “white supremacy” fears, surely a workable solution awaits? The root of this ongoing problem for many, not least in the modern-day theatrical fraternity, lies in still having to contend with a troublesome 461-year-old Midlander, who happens to have believed in said white supremacy to boot. What with AI advancements moving at breakneck speed, one wonders whether he still really needs to be from Stratford at all? Or a reluctantly balding white male from the 16th/17th century? Hasn’t the latest Doctor Who (officially “over 900”) proved age is no barrier to progress? Regardless of the end result? We can be confident technological forces beyond our control shall soon enough ensure…

AN ENJOYABLE DETAIL AROUND THE release of Lady Gaga’s new album, Mayhem, was people trying to work out just how many albums she’s made. Gaga trailed it last year as “LG7” — that is, her seventh album. But when fans such as Justin Curto (a writer at New York Magazine) started to tally her discography, with its tangle of re-releases, they quickly found that “the Lady Gaga math does not add up”. If you only counted solo studio albums, Mayhem was actually LG6. Including her two collaborations with Tony Bennett pushed the number higher — but too high, making Mayhem LG8. And if you counted soundtracks, remix albums and expanded versions, the number quickly spiralled out of control. LG10? LG15? The normal rules of arithmetic could not help you here.…

NATIONS ARE BORN IN BLOOD. ITALY’S Risorgimento, its uprising against its foreign rulers and their local allies, finally ended in 1871 after Rome was declared the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. It came at high cost — a series of savage intermittent civil wars over many years. The Leopard, Netflix’s enthralling new period drama, opens in Sicily in 1860 as the Italian volunteers, led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, advance on the island. The six-part series is adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel of the same name, now a classic of Italian literature. Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, is awaiting the arrival of Garibaldi’s red-shirted revolutionaries as they sweep through the towns and villages. Respected and feared by the local peasants, Don Fabrizio and his family live…

ARTISTS’ ESTATES AND LAWSUITS are never too far apart. Money, particularly when there is oodles of it, turns art and the control of art, febrile. In the case of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), the great American modernist who made the hardscrabble landscape of New Mexico her subject and her home, the scrapping started while she was still alive. In 1978, O’Keeffe fired her long-time agent Doris Bry, the woman who had helped her run the estate of her former husband Joseph Stieglitz and who was executor of O’Keeffe’s own estate. The artist followed this up by suing Bry for the return of paintings and money she still held in her now ex-client’s name. The cause of the rift seems to have been O’Keeffe’s relationship with an up-and-coming potter named Juan Hamilton.…

I SLIT THE ENVELOPE WITH NO sense of foreboding. It was my first day as a visiting professor in the United States and I expected the slip to say, “Welcome to Brown University,” or something equally innocuous. The effect of reading “Under no circumstances are you to offer an alcoholic beverage to a student who is under the age of 21” was alarming. No one in Oxford had been able to get through a tutorial with me without a sustaining or consolatory glass of sherry. Now I could poison undergraduates with lurid orangeade or chemical cola, yet I could not help them with a healthful glass of wine. Consistent with what was then Spanish normality, I was raised on wine and taught to regard it as a civilising influence at…

AS WELL AS A HUMORIST AND ABSURDIST, THE great dipsomaniac Robert Benchley was also a professional slumberist. Not content with his essays for the Harvard Lampoon, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, nor with his mastery of the Algonquin Round Table, Benchley won an Oscar for kipping. In 1935, his comedy How To Sleep secured the Academy statuette for Best live-action short film. MGM and cinemagoers loved it, and the Simmons Mattress Company that commissioned it saw sales skyrocket. Only the Mellon Institute was miffed to see its sleep study mocked. Benchley himself said it was not much of a strain for he spent most of the time sparked out. Anyone who has seen the film will recall four things about the figure curled up in a “kitten coil”: the…

I WILL NEVER NOT LOVE A SPOT. Sartorial OCD being what it is, I can lay claim to 19 polka pieces. Were we to include accessories, matters would easily cavort beyond 30, beyond 40 were every last scarf inventoried. And, this season, there are bound to be more because dots are everywhere — be it catwalk or sidewalk — and we lifers must seize opportunity where we can. Said polka pash has been bubbling up for a while. For the last couple of years, whether muted (Burberry) or flamenco (Proenza Schouler), the spot has dominated, with Marni, Prada, Miu Miu, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch and Sacai all gone dotty. BACK IN SPRING 2023, THE NONAGEnarian artist Yayoi Kusama exemplified her axiom, “With just one polka…