Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i The Critic

“BREXIT DIDN’T WORK” IS NOW close to being a consensus. It suits the people who failed to do it and Brexit’s unreconciled critics equally. The former have their excuses for squandering their chance: Covid, the courts, Remainers, even their colleagues “who never believed in it”. But never them. The fumblers claimed they wanted Brexit done. Yet it is what these failures — Theresa May, Boris Johnson and their successors, did — which is why the Conservative party is in the state it finds itself. Brexit was the chance to leave the EU. Nothing more, nothing less. As D.H. Robinson notes in this issue, and as so many others miss, far from the Referendum being some irresistible happening politicians couldn’t avoid, it was an elective dodge that went wrong. What did…

ENGLAND’S CRIMINAL appeals system has not covered itself in glory of late. In July, the Supreme Court overturned former City trader Tom Hayes’s conviction for rigging Libor, after the Court of Appeal Criminal Division (CACD) summarily rejected the arguments which ended up prevailing. Lord Leggatt, writing for a unanimous court, said that the case “raises concerns about the effectiveness of the criminal appeal system in England and Wales in confronting legal error”. Having spent five and half years in prison, he is unlikely to receive any compensation because relevant guidelines require the person’s innocence to be shown “beyond reasonable doubt” by newly discovered facts. This was nonetheless a rare positive headline for the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the statutory body which has the power to refer cases it considers to…

MAURICE COWLING DIED IN 2005. He has not changed much since except, perhaps, in becoming more so. Gen Z has never heard of him. The Guardian, if provoked, would invoke cancellation by placing him among its favourite confection of “Far Right” historians. Conservative politics no longer resembles the environment within which Cowling functioned and one could plausibly say that he has nothing to offer — least of all “lessons” — to remedy our predicaments. Two things suggest a reconsideration if not a renewal. The anniversary of his death prompts a retrospect but also a posthumous prospect. Next year, he would have been a hundred years old and it seems natural to wonder how he would have reacted to the world he never saw but in which he would have taken a…

IT IS A COMMONLY ACCEPTED VIEW THAT LEFTwing governments are friendlier towards the arts than those on the right. When giving talks about my new book on British operatic culture over the last century, I have been asked by audience members to confirm their assumption that the rot set in with Thatcher. History, however, is almost never quite as neat as people would like. There have been periods, my research shows, when the Labour Party has been generous and encouraging towards the opera world and times when it has been distinctly hostile. The same goes for the Conservatives. We need to be equal opportunities critics when it comes to judging the two main British parties on their arts record. A century ago, with no state funding for the arts in…

“Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?” — Rosencrantz, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967 I HAVE MET TOM STOPPARD TWICE. THE FIRST time was as a teenager when he came to address my school drama society. I can’t recall what he talked about, save that he was very funny, and I was surprised to hear him speak in a Czech accent that remained reasonably strong despite the decades he had spent living in Britain. Queuing for an autograph, I made some anodyne remark about how much I was looking forward to seeing Shakespeare in Love, due for release the following year. I remember that Stoppard grimaced, as if I had reminded him of something unpleasant, and said “God, don’t mention it. I’ve got to do…

‘‘ALL CRETANS ARE LIARS,” SAID THE PROPHET Epimenedes, himself a Cretan, more than 2,500 years ago. Ever since, philosophers have puzzled over his paradox. Now, however, the paradox has been solved: for in Georgios Varouxakis we have a Cretan who, beyond any shadow of doubt, tells us the truth. It is, moreover, a truth we need to know: the truth about the story we have told ourselves, the story of our civilisation, the story of the West. Growing up in the 1970s on an offshore island close to three continents, Varouxakis learned early in life that Western civilisation was a problematic concept. In 1974 Turkey, a Nato member, invaded nearby Cyprus and his father was mobilised. Opinion was divided between those who insisted that Greece was a Western nation and those…

BEAUTY HAS ALWAYS BEEN COVETED, AS the rapture of Helen by Paris of Troy makes plain. From Napoleon’s wagonloads of Italian spoils to the polite wrangling of curators over the Elgin Marbles, art’s fate is entangled with possession. To own beauty, or to contest the right of others to do so, is to wrestle with history and morality. The issue of ownership is not particularly modern. But recent treatments, shaped by predictable academic fashions, circle around quarrels about theft, justice, and desire, suggesting that beauty is no longer absolute but contingent. It is less a truth to be recognised than a claim to be disputed, whose meaning shifts with politics, geography, or grievance. Thus the transcendence once claimed for art in Europe has become flattened into sermons on guilt. It…

IF IT’S OCTOBER, IT MUST BE NOBEL PRIZE season, so how better to mark the occasion than with the new book by a Nobel literature laureate? Norwegian writer Jon Fosse took the prize in 2023, the third European to win since the chair of the literature committee had promised to make the award less Eurocentric four years earlier. Fosse is a typical Nobel man in another sense: he writes in a high modernist style, his prose taking a circular path rather than a linear one. It repeats, reviews, interrogates, not so much nailing down a topic as pricking it with a thousand needles. And it has no full stops, which sounds like a gimmick and to some extent is: the commas in his sentences do the work of full stops, and…

BORN WITH TEETH, THE NEW TWO-hander play offering a fictionalised account of the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe, certainly opens with a bang. Daniel Evans’s production starts with Ncuti Gatwa’s Marlowe and Edward Bluemel’s Shakespeare suspended from ropes, prior to some kind of dreadful torture. Marlowe shouts “I’m a servant of Her Majesty!” just as a panicked Shakespeare yells “I’m only a poet!” Intriguing names are dropped — Southampton, Lord Burghley, Tom Kyd — and for a moment, the play promises to be an electrifying Jacobean thriller, bringing something wildly and excitingly new to the well-worn sub-genre of Shakespeare the man. Then Bluemel’s suave Will strolls upstage and punctures the excitement by saying “Yeah, that didn’t happen.” It is this tension between historical fact and dramatic liberty that gives…

OVER THE SUMMER, I HAVE BEEN preoccupied not so much by architecture per se as by shops — the essential role they play in creating and sustaining an urban environment, not just a convenient source of things to buy. This is because the best of our local food stores, Leila’s Shop, at the heart of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, originally established by Leila McAlister at no.17 Calvert Avenue (now also at no.15 with a café next door), has been threatened with closure owing to a threefold increase in its rent, originally on 1 October with three months’ notice, now postponed to 31 January to see if Tower Hamlets can come up with a better solution. The Boundary Estate was designed in the early 1890s by Owen Fleming, a young…

I HOPE ALL CRITIC READERS ARE feeling suitably refreshed after a summer at their villas in Umbria or cottages in Southwold. We had a week in Normandy, as we’ve done for the past couple of years. Where we live in Kent, it’s quicker to get to France than visit my parents around the M25. There are many things I love about Northern France: the empty, well-maintained roads, the way the architecture feels at once familiar and strange, the omnipresence of the Second World War. But perhaps the thing I look forward to most is going to the supermarket. I know I should be haggling over moules just landed by Gauloises-smoking fishermen like Rick Stein or Keith Floyd would do, but my French isn’t up to it. So instead we go…

IN 1975, GEOFFREY JELLICOE — surely the most influential British landscape architect of the twentieth century — made an audacious claim: “The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognised as the most comprehensive of the arts.” His pioneering Landscape of Man, published 50 years ago, was a manifesto masquerading as a historical tour d’horizon. Landscape design, Jellicoe insisted, was no mere ornamental diversion, but the one art form capable of mediating between humanity and nature, reason and intuition, science and myth. It was, he said, society’s only true necessity. Half a century later, where does his vision stand? Walking through the opening night of the Design Museum’s More Than Human exhibition this summer, I wondered what Jellicoe would think now. On one level, he…

Literally no man is deranged enough that the BBC balks at his demand to be called a woman and she/her VISIT BBC BROADCASTING HOUSE IN CENTRAL London and you’ll pass a statue of George Orwell accompanied by a quote from an unpublished preface to Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” When the statue was erected in 2017, the head of BBC history said it would serve as a reminder of “the value of journalism in holding authority to account”. If only. The statue isn’t a symbol of the BBC’s journalistic excellence, but a standing reproach for its failure. The BBC is statutorily required to remain politically and ideologically impartial while fulfilling its mission to “inform,…

Dei ex machinae ‘‘ITALY HAS THE WORST MUSEUMS IN THE WORLD. The best collections, but the worst museums.” The source must remain anonymous, but the statement is spot on — many of the state-run museums here are incompetently run, beset by union issues and seemingly uninterested in preventing the public from enjoying art. Given Italy’s unparalleled artistic heritage, they are the curatorial equivalent of sending Rodri onto the pitch in lead boots. An exception is the Centrale Montemartini in Rome, housed in a former power plant, which I visited for the first time this summer. It’s the second repository for the Capitoline collection of sculpture and artefacts, and the juxtaposition of monumental industrial machinery and exquisitely imperious Roman deities unforgettably transforms the way one considers both. The space also houses…

BARRY HUGGINS WAS ELECTED Conservative MP for the Black Country constituency of Grimethorpe Central in 2017. At the General Election of 2019 he tripled his majority. Five years later, the ease with which he saw off a strong challenge from the Reform Party was attributed to both the inflexibility of his opinions — as the political spondent of The Times pointed out, he was “far more right-wing than his principal opponent” — and his status as a local man. corre- As his campaign literature put it, “Barry is Grimethorpe through-and-through. Born here, bred here and staying here.” As well as being an indefatigable local champion, Barry, unusually for a Tory MP, has literary leanings. He read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy long before its author took to politics and, no partisan…

‘‘WHAT WAS IT LIKE IN THE referendum?” The question came from a lower sixth form student — Key Stage 5 in new money — when I visited a school earlier this year. The pupils studying A-level politics weren’t even ten when the EU referendum took place in June 2016. The 2008 global financial crisis, which did so much to exacerbate the “us and them” mentality in the UK, was ripping through the economy as they celebrated their first birthdays. The biggest single enlargement of the EU, taking in many East European countries, happened in 2004, when they were still a twinkle in their parents’ eyes. And Black Wednesday — when the UK exited the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the “European issue” defenestrated its second Conservative prime minister — took place on 16…

THE YEAR WAS 2020, AND A GROUP OF activists were campaigning to rename a street. It was “disgusting”, declared one, that it should bear the name of a slave trader. “We demand a change,” said another, demanding an apology to boot. Such “reckonings” were all the rage in Britain around this time: no more Colston Street in Bristol; even the Beatles’s very own Penny Lane wasn’t safe. But this drama was playing out 5,000 miles away. The city was Khartoum, and the street in question bore the name of the nineteenth-century warlord Zubayr Pasha. The street kept its name, and no apology was forthcoming.oming. If we are not accustomed to thinking about the legacies of slavery in Africa and the Middle East, it is because our received history of slavery is…

MARCH 21, 2006, IS THE DAY THAT marks the beginning of the end of “the news”, journalist Jonathan Miller claims. That’s when Jack Dorsey posted the first ever tweet: “just setting up my twttr”. From that moment, argues Miller, “journalists were no longer competing just against each other, but against everyone”. And they seem to be losing. The Sun sold 3.6 million copies in 1990 but sells less than a third of that now. The Daily Mail has gone from 2.3 million to little more than 600,000. In the United States, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have all lost more than half their circulation. At the outset, Miller proclaims his book is “a biography of the news”. But it’s actually a somewhat scattergun memoir of his…

GOOD TO SEE COVENT GARDEN, that vast maw for the disposal of public funds, finally stepping up to its attendant duties as mass entertainer with the amusing spectacle of the flouncy functionary being “beaten off” on camera by the queer dance-artist with the naughty flag; then zillions of column-inches prompted by the joint’s discovery that the evil pariah Russian diva Anna Netrebko was actually 150 per cent employable after all. But all good things must end, and the place returned to its area of lesser competency — putting on shows — in September with the usual variable outcomes, though Netrebko’s return in Tosca was top old-skool fun as the stately 50-something soprano impersonated Puccini’s skittish teenybopper religious wack/sex kitten. More interestingly, between now and Christmas the place is dishing up…

MY SECRET SHAME AS A SATIRIST who also writes about film is that I’ve always admired This Is Spinal Tap more than I’ve actually enjoyed it. The mock-rockumentary following Britain’s loudest band on a failing tour of America is perfectly constructed, with every frame a knowing nod to one awful moment of music history or another. It is an inspired idea, brilliantly executed, and occupies a crucial space in the history of comedy. And yet. Watching it again ahead of the sequel, I could see once again that it was note-perfect but I still didn’t actually laugh very much. Teenagers in the room wandered away. Perhaps, having been a little too young when it came out in 1984, I simply missed the moment. I say all this so that you…

SEX SELLS. SO DO SECOND-HAND CAR salesmen. What is it selling? And what are we buying? The monstrous success of Alex Cooper’s sex and relationships-based advice and comedy podcast Call Her Daddy was as sure to inspire imitators as Coca-Cola was to inspire sweet carbonated drinks. Nick Cannon at Night is a fascinating new example of the genre. Cannon, an American comedian, has fathered 12 children with six different women. Only Elon Musk and the most prodigious Amish swordsmen rival him when it comes to the sheer weight of numbers. This might make Cannon something of an authority when it comes to solving the fertility crisis. On the other hand, it makes him a strange person to approach for relationship advice. I checked out an episode featuring Cannon’s fellow podcaster…

LONDON’S “FRIEZE WEEK” EACH October marks the most important time for many contemporary art galleries. The global art market focuses its attention on London for a few glamorous days. Frieze (far right) started in 2001 as a fair for contemporary art galleries in a large tent in Regents Park. Since then, on the back of the enormous growth in appetite for contemporary art over the past three decades, it has added a second tent for exhibitors from more traditional areas of the art market, called Frieze Masters. Not all contemporary art galleries today are struggling, but the costs of doing business in this previously booming sector are beginning to bite. Some galleries, even the larger, well-funded ones like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner, are scaling back their…

In the arena of storytelling, there’s power in chronicling change. H.E. Bates, best known for writing The Darling Buds of May, does it brilliantly in The Poacher. The relatively compact novel, which Bates’s brother called “almost a family history”, tells the story of a village shoemaker-cum-poacher in a world that is fast fading. A New York Times review from 1935 reads: “Beautifully and without affectation Mr. Bates has expressed through the story of Luke Bishop’s life his deep feeling for the life of the English countryside, for the changes which have come over it in the last half century and his own nostalgic regret for the order which has passed.” Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie has something of a similar spirit, beginning with Lee as a toddler being set down…

AH, AUTUMN! HOW I TREASURE this time of year. Don’t worry. I’m not about to go off on a paean to freshly sharpened pencils, and the scent of Starbuck’s latest bonfire UPF milk monstrosity. No, my joy is entirely familial — i.e. the novelty of silence and solitude after a VERY long hot summer. Boy did I need it. How was your summer? Listen to mine, and weep. Our safari holiday was massively derailed by Will leaving his supply of Mounjaro in the minibar in our first hotel, and only realising after the six-hour drive to the second hotel. Not surprisingly his preferred meds-courier service Pharmacierge doesn’t operate in remote sub-Saharan Africa, so there was no chance of getting a new supply. My comment that the food wasn’t up to…

THE SELECTORS OF THE Archbishop of Canterbury are settling down to interview the shortlisted candidate at the end of September. As they work their way through the HR-heavy set of Person Specifications and Key Responsibilities, I would like them to hold in their mind the question of chocolate biscuits. Not just because they’re nice but because they have become a flashpoint in the ongoing struggle by the central authorities in the church to wrest independence of thought and action from the parishes on the ground. Last month an article in the New Statesman laid out the state of the Church of England as it comes to choose a new leader. In it, the battle over the way the national church is spending the £11.1 billion left to the church as…

THE ENGLISHMAN’S ROOM —THAT ENCHANTING, UNLIKELY, MUCH-IMITATED YET NEVER EQUALLED classic of interior design books — turns 40 next year. Even more so than with most of what happened in 1986, it would be impossible to replicate today. The idea behind it was simple. Thirty-one men — and they were all men, unabashedly and unproblematically so — each chose a room that was close to their hearts. Prompted by a questionnaire, they wrote a brief essay about it. The rooms and their proponents were photographed. The result, once edited, topped with an introductory essay and tailed with biographical précis, was laid out in a way that awarded each subject two or three pages, plus three photos at the very most. Like most books in the 1980s that required accurate offset photolithography,…

THE WORLD OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IS IN flux. On the one hand, translated fiction is getting more attention than ever on bookshop shelves and in prize coverage, helped by the reliable cool of publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions and its signature International Klein Blue covers. On the other hand, much of the translated fiction that sells big and spreads by word of mouth is identikit pap that “perms” any three from the following: Japan, cats, coffee shops, locked rooms, bookstores and detectives. The position of literary translators is similarly double-edged. They still struggle to be named on the cover of a book they have translated and are typically paid a flat fee rather than the share of royalties the author enjoys. But the translator of a new work of fiction does have…

IN THE ANNALS OF CELEBRITY clarifications, this one is a standout. “To try and sum everything up, no I am not a violent misogynist fetishizing the ‘female experience’,” wrote the feted singer-songwriter Ethel Cain in a 2,000-word statement this July. “No I am not the creator of child pornography, nor am I a pedophile, a zoophile, or a porn-addicted incest fetishist.” It is all very reminiscent of the “A Lot of Questions Already Answered by the Shirt” meme format — which in this case would go: “My ‘I am not a violent misogynist, creator of child pornography, pedophile, zoophile or porn-addicted incest fetishist shirt’ has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.” Cain, now 27, tried to fix the offences in the past by blaming them…

THERE ARE ESPIONAGE OPERATIONS and there are black espionage operations, or black-ops for short. Both are usually perilous but black ops have an extra layer of danger. They are off-the-books — officially, they never happened. If the operatives get caught or in trouble, their governments will not come to the rescue. But for some, such peril only adds to the appeal, sharpening the senses, amplifying the danger and triggering that addictive adrenaline rush. Terminal List: Dark Wolf is a prequel to Terminal List, and both series are available on Amazon Prime. The former has just premiered, the latter was first shown in 2022. I have not watched Terminal List yet, but the prequel, which also works as a stand-alone, is addictive enough to ensure that I will. Both are inspired…

IT IS NOT OFTEN THAT IN AN exhibition of video art, one wishes that there were more … content in it. Hilary Lloyd’s installation Very High Frequency brings together a dozen or so screens and projections of quasi-documentary footage reflecting on the life and work of the prolific dramatist Dennis Potter (1935-94), best remembered for his 1986 television drama The Singing Detective. Through interviews with Potter’s contemporaries, such as the veteran BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and collaborators, including the actor Richard E. Grant, who starred in Karaoke (1996) contemplating the playwright’s impending death, Lloyd conjures the atmosphere of the last time that Britain’s cultural institutions had the capacity for complexity and daring. In search of this complexity today, she makes Potter’s vast oeuvre mysterious itself. Potter is only a half-likely…

The shadows of summer grow longer, heralding autumn, and a chill leavens the air. To borrow from Tennyson, “in the fall an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of warmth”. And not the old, only. For, in truth, none of us really wants to shiver as we thread our way through the City’s thoroughfares, evading Khan’s muggers and Philp’s vigilantes, en route to some safe haven. Yet whilst we may not avoid shivering in fear, we can take precautions against the cold. Some years ago, I had a new covert coat made up by the House of Commons tailor, Alexandre. In charcoal grey with a velvet collar, it is both sleek and snug. Its design is particularly popular amongst those of a shorter stature as the flat front with…

ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, I SHARED A desk at The Times with the veteran sports reporter John Goodbody, who began most lunchtimes with the words “Just off for a paddle”. He would then go to the swimming baths to do a few dozen lengths while I headed to the pub for a few pints. That was why we both looked the way we did: Goodbody by name … In 1991, one of John’s “paddles” got him on to the front of the newspaper when he touched the sand at Cap Blanc Nez after swimming the Channel. John, then aged 48, had spent dozens of hours of training along the Kent coast before he felt ready to tackle the crossing. Even now, he says, the cry of a seagull will give…