Innehållsförteckning för August/September 2025 från The Critic

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE. Walking along a Georgian terrace in the West End of Edinburgh I have reached a brass plaque announcing the representative office of the European Commission. It is 1984. From their silos, Soviet SS20s have the coordinates to hit targets from Bari to Bonn. Our allies are in danger. And so, answering the call, I have turned up in uniform. School uniform. At the door I explain my mission. I may be too young to fight but I want to spread the truth about how the European Economic Community is a vital pillar of the Atlantic Alliance — cruise missiles may be our spear, but the Common Agricultural Policy is our shield. But rather than invite me in, the keeper of the inner door mutely gestures…

“ I’M AFRAID THE THING ABOUT MY family,” Jeremy will sometimes concede in his shy, self-deprecating way, “is that they really do have rather a lot of money.” Even this admission might be thought to understate the case. When the Dowager Countess of Wellbourne dropped dead on the Sovereign’s Lawn at Cowes in the summer of 1982 she was discovered to have left her favourite grandson the small matter of £300,000. With this the Honourable Jeremy, just down from Cambridge with a degree in modern history, bought a townhouse in Islington and set about realising his long-held dream of founding a small publishing firm called the Liberation Press. Liberation, shortly renamed Radical Action, began in a small way by issuing a collection of essays by a Marxist don who had…

I CAME TO THIS NEW BOOK WITH THE HOPE that a historian of the calibre of Sinclair McKay (who to my mind wrote the definitive narrative of Bletchley Park) would do justice to this great port city founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703. As a teenage student, I was fortunate to visit in 1981, when it bore the name of the Bolshevik leader Lenin. Back then, Leningrad still remained trapped in time from the great siege by Hitler’s armies in the Second World War four decades before. I recall the busy avenues and streets along the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, and the impressive Tsarist buildings sited in the more prestigious streets, such as Malaya Sadovaya. But what surprised me more than anything at that time were the many American-made…

MAX WEBER WROTE IN THE EARLYtwentieth century of the “disenchantment of the world”, his take on modernity’s expulsion of the old gods from collective practice and imagination. Out went the sacred, he argued, and in came the spirit of accumulation. Fast forward to the present, and the theme of re-enchantment is in vogue. Paul Kingsnorth’s essays, directed against what he calls “the Machine” of techno-capitalism, are a clarion call for a return to the sacred. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s work on the brain’s left and right hemispheres has major implications for our post-Enlightenment view of rationality and science. Philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book, Cosmic Connections, looks to Romantic poetry and music as a potential means of escape from our disenchanted troubles. Then there is Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, whose recent Living…

ON A SUNDAY IN NOVEMBER 1577, a vicar named Thomas White addressed a crowd in the churchyard outside St Paul’s Cathedral. His chosen topic was the moral danger posed by theatres, which he called: a continual monument of London’s prodigality and folly … the old world is matched, and Sodom overcome, for more horrible enormities … If thou be a father, thou losest thy child: if thou be a master, thou losest thy servant, and thou be what thou canst be, thou losest thy self that hauntest those schools of vice, dens of Thieves, & Theatres of all lewdness. And you thought Mary Whitehouse was bad. That said, a trip to the theatre in Elizabethan London was a rather different experience from today’s sanitised, bankruptcy-inducing experience. It wasn’t entirely certain, for…

POOR LAWRENCE DURRELL. A NOVELISTand poet nominated 11 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, who missed out to the likes of Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, his star has waned in recent decades. Meanwhile his younger brother, the naturalist Gerald Durrell, has only become more beloved, his legacy boosted by the ITV dramatisation of his 1956 memoir of life in Corfu, My Family and Other Animals. And yet, as Michael Haag’s new biography argues, it was Durrell the elder who masterminded the family’s move to Corfu; who led a glittering cosmopolitan existence filled with romance, adventure and wartime intrigue; and whose life and work offer a window into the British Empire’s final years. Haag died in 2020, leaving Larry, the culmination of almost four decades of work on Durrell,…

AS IS TRADITIONAL ROUND THESEparts, for this summer double issue we disdain the new and modish — and relieve you of the weight of hardbacks in your hand luggage — in favour of tried and tested literary treats. In a world where every publisher and his dog is unearthing out-of-print books for a new audience, even “modern classics” now need some triage. The theme this year is travel, and the first title comes from one of literature’s great travellers. Paul Bowles moved to Tangier, Morocco, in his late 30s and set all his major fiction in north Africa. He remains best known for his debut The Sheltering Sky (1949), but all his novels are worth visiting, and they share a dark quality: if, as Graham Greene said, a writer must…

Norman Lebrecht on Music A fruitcake rather than an egghead HE WORKED SO HARD TO APPEAR normal. A tall man, Alfred Brendel cultivated a stoop to meet people at their level. His suits never sat easily on his frame. His tie was dark, no pattern. His one notable accessory was a pair of black-rimmed glasses of the kind worn by Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. No comparison intended. Where Caine was slick, sexy and laconic, Brendel shambled into a room and spoke in discursive phrases. The publisher George Weidenfeld urged him to write an autobiography. Brendel declined. “I don’t find myself interesting,” he said. That, for psychoanalysts who lived either side of his Hampstead street, made him more than just interesting. He must be in denial, they said. The…

FOR ROCK FANS OF A CERTAIN vintage, Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours remains not only beloved but seminal. It contains many of the band’s best known and most popular songs, not least “Go Your Own Way” and “Dreams”, but the vibrancy of the music was belied by a tortuous recording process that saw the two key interpersonal relationships in the band — those of keyboardist Christine McVie and bassist John McVie, and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks — break down in acrimony. The Anglo-American composition of the band was unorthodox and led to culture clashes between two very different approaches to music, and the group’s eventual dissolution. Such artistic clashes make for fertile dramatic territory, and David Adjmi’s much-heralded new play Stereophonic deserves credit for its exploration of…

IT IS NEVER A HARDSHIP, INDEED IT is our bounden duty, to recall the bitter wisdom of Auberon Waugh. How we could do with his waspish tongue today and watch the grabbers at life’s table tremble. The peer of the realm, for instance, who committed a sexual indiscretion that landed him in the soup. “From now on,” wrote Waugh, “let us call him Lord Disgusting.” Future historians, he wrote, would look back at post-war British life and wonder why the middle class held such a morbid death wish. He might have been thinking of Radio 4, the natural habitat of small-c conservative, small-c concerned listeners, who can never quite clear the hurdle of moral purity designed by the people who make programmes on their behalf. Take Crossing the Line, for…

I HALF REGISTERED Craig Hamilton’s Chapel of Christ the Redeemer when it was completed in 2015; but as it is in the grounds of a country house south of Henley-on-Thames, it did not get much publicity and looked marginal to mainstream architectural practice, designed for a charity established to construct a new Catholic chapel, an uncommon requirement. But at a time when the country is trying to decide how best to commemorate the late Queen, it is worth looking closely at a project which is so totally confident about using the language of classicism for memorial purposes, rich in the traditional language of classicism, containing burial compartments in its crypt with the necessary equipment for winching the stone lid off to accommodate the coffin if required. A building which is…

FRENCH REGIONAL PROMOtional bodies aren’t noted for their dynamic marketing. I picture some of them as a room with a dusty telephone and an old man sleeping off his lunch surrounded by yellowing posters extolling the wines of the Loire or urging people to visit the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département. So it was unusual when Inter Rhône ran a series of striking adverts on the London Underground in the 2000s featuring a hedgehog with bushy red hair and a hippo with a red bandana with the line “Think Red, Think Côtes-du-Rhône”. Then some busybody complained that the cartoon animals might appeal to children and they had to be pulled. I still think of that cheery hedgehog when I’m looking for something affordable on a wine list — always the mark of…

I’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER WANDERing across the Isle of Scarba in the Gulf of the Corryvreckan with a young cattle farmer called Archie. We were there to shoot a wild boar, but weren’t having much luck and the conversation came round to farm subsidies. Archie told me he felt that in some ways subsidies haven’t done farming much good — they have created, he reckons, an environment where the farming world has become dependent and limp rather than standing on its own two muddy-booted feet. There’s no doubt that in many ways rural workers are up against it. The supermarkets are bastards when it comes to driving down farm gate prices, very few politicians seem to understand agriculture, and half the public reckon that what really motivates Big Farming is a…

SAVE 38% VISIT: thecritic.imbmsubscriptions.com/SUM25 OR CALL 01293 312250 quoting Sum25 5 issues of The Critic magazine Free delivery each month of the print edition Full access to digital editions 38% saving on the shop price T&CS: CLOSING DATE FOR ORDERS IS 1ST OCTOBER 2025. THE PRICE SHOWN IS A UK DIRECT DEBIT OFFER. YOUR SUBSCRIPTION WILL BEGIN WITH THE NEXT AVAILABLE ISSUE. IF YOU DO NOT CANCEL AT THE END OF THE PAYMENT TERM, THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL AUTO-RENEW BY DIRECT DEBIT FOR 5 ISSUES AT £25. ALL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE. THIS IS A LIMITED OFFER AND MAY BE WITHDRAWN AT ANY TIME. PLEASE NOTE: BY SUBSCRIBING WE WILL CONTACT YOU ABOUT YOUR SUBSCRIPTION FROM TIME TO TIME. THE CRITIC IS PUBLISHED 10 TIMES A YEAR, WITH 2 DOUBLE ISSUES IN THE…

SUPER-INJUNCTIONS ARE NO longer the preserve of footballers and wayward spouses. In mid-July, Westminster was rocked by the revelation that the government had obtained one such order — which prohibits not only the publication of information but the reporting of the fact that the injunction exists at all — to hide the fact that one of its employees had accidentally leaked a database of Afghans who had applied for resettlement in Britain. Two governments had meanwhile used the cloak of secrecy to put in place a massive (and extremely secret) resettlement programme for Afghans affected by the leaks, at enormous expense, which was not publicly scrutinised. In May 2024, Chamberlain J discharged the order, having expressed his incredulity about the whole business in closed court; but the Court of Appeal…

CRICKET IS A SPORT ALWAYS ON THE VERGE of disaster. As Tim Wigmore highlights in his excellent new history of Test cricket, commentators have been predicting the sport’s demise since shortly after the first ball was bowled. Simon Heffer writes the same article on it at least twice a week; Wisden Magazine has a whole column devoted to how climate change will render the entire sport unplayable. Cricket is a sport that revels in gloom. This works for me. I’m quite a gloomy man. England are always going to lose. If they don’t, it is a fluke, quickly to be written off. Brilliance is temporary. Collapse is imminent: 194-3 can become 220 all out in the blink of an eye. The young are never interested; the Hundred must be hated…

ROY STRONG WILL BE 90 ON 23 AUGUST. Now living in Ledbury in Herefordshire, having sold The Laskett, the house and garden south of Hereford which he and his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman created, he remains remarkably intellectually active, having recently published a book on seventeenth-century portraiture, still exercising furiously, keeping up with London artworld gossip and, although he comes to London less, he always seems to have seen all the latest exhibitions, including “Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party” at the Garden Museum before I did. So, it is a good moment to look back and salute his importance as much more than just a museum director — he has been a writer, gardener, dandy, cultural commentator, diarist — over 50 years since he stood down as director of the National…

NO SERIOUS ARTIST DREAMS OF BEING made “relevant” by bureaucratic fiat. One might aspire to a patron, a discerning society of peers, even the mild tyranny of a visionary impresario. But not a soft-palmed consultant with a metrics dashboard and a mandate to disperse public virtue along the grain of fashionable orthodoxy. Yet in Britain, this is a governing arrangement that now overwhelms artistic creation. Too many bodies charged with supporting the arts speak a post-aesthetic language that deftly caters to gatekeeping creators. It penalises those without the time, language, or temperament to play along. It also rewards a particular lexicon and worldview, fluently spoken by the ideologically house-trained. For instance, the Arts Council’s criteria — generously garnished with questions like “Is it groundbreaking? Is it relevant?” — read like…

I ONCE SPENT A GLORIOUS SUMMER AFTERNOON IN a Lincolnshire field sentried with poppies watching camouflaged Vulcan bombers rising from RAF Waddington. Stunning-looking, evidently powerful, and smoky, the aircraft nosed up over the field creating, at first, elongated delta-shaped shadows and then, as they passed over, a collective Jovian roar accompanied by a demonic chorus of unearthly howls. There was something strangely primeval about this sound. It was easy to imagine, 20 years earlier, what were then pure white Vulcans, howling over these Lincolnshire fields into combat in some last weird nuclear battle in the East, a cavalry of the sky thundering into the Valley of Death towards Soviet guns, facing a palisade of ground-to-air missile launch pads bristling from the Baltic to the Caspian Seas. Britain’s V-Force, a trio…

WRITING THE HISTORY OF ISLAMis, as John Tolan observes, a challenge not just because one has to address current sensitivities that date all the way back to the seventh century, such as the nature of the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims, but because it is never entirely clear where the boundaries of the subject lie. Aspects of Muslim life that tend to be regarded as standard prove to have had major exceptions, such as the portrayal of human figures or the drinking of wine. Then there is the question “Who is a Muslim?” The Alawites, from whom the Assad dynasty sprang, have been dismissed by other Muslims as pagans; and the Druze, who trace their origins back to the “Mad Caliph” al-Hakim in the early eleventh century, are equally…

JOAD RAYMOND WREN DOES NOT LIKEpress barons. This is his term for proprietors of newspapers and magazines, even though it only applies in Britain and even there only to a tiny minority of such proprietors. In his view, something went terribly wrong with “the ideal of a free press” in the mid-nineteenth century when the “international flow of news” was “privatised” and ownership concentrated “in the hands of a few”. For Wren, “economics have always constituted a mode of soft or indirect censorship.” These obiter dicta come at the end of The Great Exchange, a splendid survey of news in early modern Europe and beyond. In exhaustive detail, Wren describes the vast news network that traversed the Continent for roughly four centuries, from 1400 to 1800. Thousands of individuals participated…

IT HAS BECOME AN ALMOST UNAVOIDABLE journalistic cliché that an article on Oxford should open by quoting Matthew Arnold’s famous evocation of a “city of dreaming spires”. But, as Richard Ovenden points out in the preface to Geoffrey Tyack and Dan Paton’s magnificent book on the University’s libraries, it could perhaps be better described as a “city of books, which at times seems almost to have been built of books”. Books, and the libraries that house them, are at the heart of the University’s identity. Its heraldic emblem is a book adorned with the motto dominvs illvminatio mea, “The Lord is my light.” Indeed, perhaps the most distinctive of all the landmarks on the cityscape so admired by Arnold is not a church spire but the dome of a library, the…

THIS IS ONE OF GEOFF DYER’S LEAST interesting books, but that does not make it entirely uninteresting. The subject matter is almost stunningly dull: it is the autobiography of a lower-middle-class grammar-school boy who grew up in Cheltenham in the 1960s and 70s. Nothing unusual happens, and all of it is described, at times, in granular detail: we learn of the concerts that he didn’t attend (Hawkwind, East Glos Tennis Club, 1972), the places he may have visited (“I can’t remember the names though hopefully it will drift back into my head at some point”), the (many) Action Men he dressed before sending them off to war on the other side of his bedroom. The litany of dull suburban activities goes on, the familiar cultural reference points of those unforgotten…

TO ANY SENSIBLE PERSON, THE LIFE of the opera critic must seem a curious, etiolated one — poncing (or in more modest moods perhaps merely swanning) around a tiny number of highly controlled environments where no regular human would think of setting foot, seeing for the millionth time some bit of preserved-in-amber old fluff like La bohème or La traviata, merrily pointing out how badly they’ve done it and what a terrific scam the whole thing is, before waltzing off to the next one. You don’t know the half of it. There’s another life one barely dares speak of, spent skulking about a long way from the swank of Bow Street and those home-counties meadows, hand-clipped with nail-scissors by chain-gangs of local morlocks. A nicer, more genuine opera world is…

IT’S BLOCKBUSTER SEASON, WITH race cars, zombies and superheroes fighting for control of cinemas whose chief appeal may be that they have air conditioning. First up: F1, with Brad Pitt as — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — an aging racing driver tempted back for one last job. It’s written by Ehren Kruger and directed by Joseph Kosinski, who last worked together on Top Gun: Maverick, which starred Tom Cruise as an ageing fighter pilot tempted back for one last job. The similarities don’t end there. Both see an actor who was huge at the end of the last century mentoring a bunch of younger actors whose names you struggle to remember. Both feature sequences involving powerful machines moving very fast, made possible by small high-definition cameras,…

EX-CONS MAKE FOR GREAT PODCAST material. Not only do they have interesting stories but they have had years to reflect on them. Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, for example, who was John Gotti’s underboss before testifying against him, has said more about his life in the mafia than Richie Benaud said about cricket. So much for omertà. Cocaine Air, presented by the veteran journalist and commentator, Johnathan Walton, addresses the life and crimes of the prolific drug smuggler T. J. Dominguez. Dominguez, according to Cocaine Air, was a youthful victim of ice-cold corporate scammers who turned to drug smuggling to support a family business. He took suitcases full of cash to bulk-buy marijuana — a faintly charming step in its bold amateurishness — before slowly and sloppily establishing himself in…

CONCARNEAU, BRITTANY, 1991, August, 8am. The bleach suds in my bucket are as pure as the froth of the breakers I can hear on the beach. I’m on the early shift, scrubbing the restaurant terrace; back in the kitchen, Nicki the blond giant of a chef is shucking the first oysters of the day, the Breton cousin of the Camberwell Carrot clamped in the side of his mouth, left hand wrapped in a blue rag of ancient and indescribable filthiness. I’m seventeen and I have a wooden-shuttered room on the port with a bidet in the corner and a mattress on the floor and my own key, I’m learning disreputable sailors’ French and Bashung’s hit “Osez Joséphine” is never off the radio, the Wall has come down, I’m part of…

THE ART MARKET ENJOYED decades of growth, seemingly outpacing other sectors, especially in sales of contemporary art. Specific areas turned down, but one of the aspects of the current “correction” is the growth in value at the lower, sub-£20,000 objects market. There has also been something of a revival in Old Master paintings. So, given these mixed outcomes, has the market really dropped? Well, in overall value terms, yes, but that headline figure is skewed by the large prices achieved for modern and contemporary art in 2020-2022. And that part of the market (which gets the headlines) has dropped for two reasons. First: widespread speculation has been skewered by rising interest rates. Investors have at last realised that the financialisation of art is a risky, short-term bet, not a realistic…

HAVE WE ALWAYS NEEDED talismans? Why, yes, reader, we have. Until recently, the earliest known expression of this craving wasn’t even human, but Neanderthal: beads crafted from bijou seashells dating from 115,000 years back, discovered in a Spanish cave. Then, lo, something similar cropped up in the Moroccan desert that was the work of homo sap and put at between 142,000 and 150,000 years ago. Conclusion: rocks are, like, totally our rocks — always have been, always will be. The contemporary incarnation of this urge is the #neckmess: a faux insouciant assembly of danglers to convey one’s state of being. Consider it a baublebased means of addressing the questions: who am I? who was I? who might I become? — and what coruscating witchery will it take to get me…

THERE WAS ONE OF SIR HENRY Newbolt’s “BREATHLESS HUSHES” in the Long Room after lunch on the fifth day of the Lord’s Test. England had taken an eighth wicket that morning and, with India still needing 80 runs, a home victory and a 2-1 lead in the series was only a matter of time. No one expected it would take so much time. Dot-dot-dot. Jasprit Bumrah, with a batting average of 7, played out the rest of the over. Then the more accomplished Ravinder Jadeja began a rescue mission. Time wasn’t an issue: India needed little more than one run an over to win. Just survive and see how it goes was the plan. The last two partnerships lasted more than 35 overs — 212 balls, with Bumrah facing just…

DINOSAURS SEEKING TO HOARD RIGHTS: THAT’S how the foreign secretary, David Lammy, once characterised women who think being a woman is a matter of biology, not identity. Lammy is not one of Nature’s clearest thinkers — he has also said that men who identify as women can acquire a cervix after “various procedures and hormone treatment and all the rest of it”. But his dinosaur dig, however accidentally, neatly encapsulated a usually unspoken left-wing theory: that the left can win the culture wars by out-surviving its opponents. The thinking is that culture wars are long wars, won not by changing hearts and minds but by waiting until the hearts and minds that disagree with you have stopped beating and thinking. To misquote Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe…

Bangers with bite SUMMER IS FESTIVAL SEASON! SO OFF I HEADED TOBritish Summer Time in Hyde Park on a sunny Friday, where the crowd was a sea of purple in honour of the American singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo. At 22, Rodrigo has none of the sugariness you might expect from a former Disney child star — but also none of the try-hard “all grown up” energy of predecessors such as Miley Cyrus. No, Rodrigo is a proper rock star with two albums of solid bangers to pick from — Sour and last year’s phenomenal Guts — all with an unexpectedly strong flavour of 1980s New Wave. (Her intro music was a very welcome blast of the Go-Gos.) But if she wears her influences on her sleeve, she wears her heart there…

There is one word that seems to be increasingly applied to murder and unlawful killings, and that word is “senseless”. The application of this word to murder gives rise to the interesting concept of the sensible murder. I am sure that there are many people who, in their darker moments, could think of people whom it would be very sensible to murder, but this is not the type of ratiocination that we should encourage. Loose talk, as they used to say in the war, costs lives. The Evening Standard recently carried the following headline: “Man gets life for ‘senseless’ murder of talented footballer, 32, in south London car park”. No doubt the paper followed the line of a statement about the murderer on the Metropolitan Police website: “Morin-Briton murdered Theo…

I FEEL HOPE. FOR THE FIRST TIME in a long time I think I can honestly say that I feel hopeful about the Church of England and its future. I’m currently writing from the front line, from General Synod, and I can’t begin to tell you how different the mood feels. For a start people are discussing major issues with each other openly and publicly, and disagreeing with each other openly and publicly. For all that the C of E has a reputation for washing its dirty linen in public, in reality for about ten years this has only been true about those ever-exhausting issues of sexuality and the ordination of women. On everything else there has been the sense that to disagree with the centre is somehow unspeakably rude;…

BUT FOR AN ACCIDENT OF BUREAU-cracy Zbigniew Brzezinski might have gone to Oxford. This semi-stateless Pole could have become a British Sovietologist. Then, perhaps, have returned to Canada and become a big noise there. Instead, denied a visa here he ended up going to Harvard and eventually became Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, doomed forever to be in Henry Kissinger’s shadow. The FT’s US editor, Edward Luce, has written an exemplary biography of his sometime Washington lunching buddy, and has clearly fallen in love with Zbig. It was a big life and there was lots to enjoy. At Harvard, Luce notes that Zbig was rightly there to be ambitious, not to be a scholar. Yet the worst factional insult his own Democrat foreign policy peers could reach for was precisely…

DEPRESSINGLY FEW PEOPLE CARE about the right to free speech these days. Pressure groups, ranging from uncompromising Islamists through trans activists to Palestinian hardliners, relentlessly demand more and more curbs on our right to say what offends them; experts clamour for the right to censor what we see to save us from what they see as disinformation. Meanwhile the government, and the police, find this to be just fine. They are only too content to go for the quiet life, give in to demands of this kind and quietly back them with the force of the state. Intellectuals, for their part, are little better. For most of them it’s enough to say, with a shrug, that there’s nothing special about speech; that bad speech causes all sorts of harms, and it’s…

THE HEARTS OF PATRIOTS WILL SWELL at the title of Sceptred Isle, the words of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt ringing in their ears. Gaunt’s speech in Richard II has become familiar as a paean to British exceptionalism: a dying man’s counsel to his king for the good of “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”. In choosing her title, Helen Carr sets the tone of the book well, announcing that this is to be an unabashedly national history, nodding to one of the three monarchs who will dominate her narrative. Though there are brief forays into France, in the context of dynastic marriages and the hundred years war, the focus never strays far from the “sceptred isle”. Academic historians may cavil at this decision, but they are not the…

HERE’S ONE. A JEWISH GENTLEMAN crossing a busy road is hit by a car. As he is lifted onto the stretcher, the ambulance man asks “Are you comfortable?” He shrugs, winces and replies “I make a living.” If that tickles your fancy for a melafefon, you should unscrew the lid and dip in. What’s special about these jokes? The author Michel Wieviorka, of Polish-Jewish descent, sets down three strictures: they may only be created by Jews; only a Jew may tell them; the jokes must not be anti-Semitic (he drops the second of these early on in the book). The subject matter typically includes marriage, the materfamilias, money, death, and traditional livelihoods — e.g. tailoring, the synagogue, the deli. Jokes do the rounds about stingy Jews, just as they do about…

IN NOVEMBER 1995, I DRAGGED myOasis-loving friend to a record shop and instructed her to buy a 7” called “Wibbling Rivalry”. Why didn’t I buy it myself? Because we were 13, and dividing our music purchases was a way of eking our pocket money out. My job in the relationship was to cover the Blur discography, the better to inform our arguments about which band was better/fitter. But “Wibbling Rivalry” wasn’t a new Oasis song — my friend already had their current single, the sweet chamber pop song “Wonderwall”. It was a 14-minute recording of Noel and Liam Gallagher having an argument during an interview from the previous year. We went back to my friend’s house, stuck in on the turntable and marvelled at the spiralling invective. “I fuckin’ hate…

A guide to my top ten summer shows: four of the best new series to look out for and six old favourites that are still available. IN THE FUTURE, EVERY CITIZEN WILL be under continual surveillance and ranked according to their personal score. Those at the top will enjoy lives of comfort, privilege and access to the best healthcare. Those at the bottom may be expelled to the Outer World to fend for themselves in anarchy and violence. But what happens when a father is caught doctoring the points system to protect those he loves? Catastrophe ensues. He is arrested and deported. His family’s score plunges. A once tight-knit unit fractures: one daughter becomes an informant, another joins the resistance and a third signs up for the border patrol. The Belgian…

IT CAN TAKE DECADES FOR AN artistic project to stake its claim on art history. Connecting Thin Black Lines at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts reconstructs and reappraises a seminal exhibition which took place at the gallery forty years ago. The Thin Black Line was one of three shows organised by the artist Lubaina Himid in London institutions in the early 1980s that foregrounded (primarily) black female artists. These exhibitions proclaimed their significance even as they were being installed and, given that they took place alongside significant developments like the foundation of the BLK Art Group, are understood to be cornerstones of black British art. Himid’s work, as well as the practices of Sonia Boyce, Veronica Ryan, and Claudette Johnson who also participated in both exhibitions, is recognised today for…

“I LIKE YOUR SAUCE!” IS AN unlikely compliment nowadays, except perhaps in an old-fashioned drag act. Hundreds of sauces used to crowd the Répertoire de la cuisine and compete for column-space in Larousse gastronomique. Nowadays, they need a conservation society to save them from extinction. Home cooks eschew them or buy them in bottles. Even in restaurants, the range available is dwindling and predictable. By “sauce” I mean a liquid or viscous garnish, prepared apart from the dish it dresses. The juice food may exude in cooking is a proper accompaniment at the table. So is a drizzle or dollop of the liquid in which cooking happens — fat from the frying-pan or the liquor of braised or stewed concoctions. But they are not sauces, which take extra time and…

There is something quintessentially romantic about summer showers. Charles Perugini painted them; Emily Dickinson poeticised them; and we have all been caught in them, especially in England where “summer” is often more sentiment than season. In June, I was caught up in a rain shower — well it was more of a swift and silent storm — and was forced to take cover beneath the boughs in our nearby wood. Being only partially equipped to meet the occasion, by the time I reached home, I was Barbour-dry from head to hip, damp to the knee and drenched from the ankle down. Now I do not want you to imagine that I had plastic bags wrapped about the legs in the manner of the Withnail lads, but I was reminded of…

I MUST BE THE ONLY WOMAN in West London not to have “devoured” All Fours, but here we are. Too late to bother now. And much as I’d sometimes like to “blow up” my life with Will and leave for a younger model (see recent school camping trip), I’m a realist. For example, as long as I stay with Will, I always get to feel thin. And well dressed. And interesting. And athletic — ever since he buggered up his knee. Apparently he “definitely would have won” the father’s race, when “something just snapped”. Please God, erase the memory of him writhing on the grass in front of the entire school and parent body. Anyway, I bring this up because I thought everyone was just reading All Fours. As in, living…

THIS IS THE THIRD OF A THREE-PART SERIES MARKING THE SILVER JUBILEE OF THE 2000 SYDNEY OLYMPICS HARRY MAHON WAS PERHAPS THE greatest rowing coach in the world. He regarded the quest for the perfect stroke not just as a technical matter but as something deeper — the flow of existence, perhaps. Listen to the boat, he’d tell his charges. Hear the boat sing. He’d coached all over the world and at every level, from schoolkids to internationals, and his crews had won every prize going bar one. He’d never won an Olympic gold in the blue riband event, THE MEN’S EIGHT. Sydney was his last chance to put that right: not because he was retiring, but because he was dying. Only in his late fifties, he had colon cancer, and…