Innehållsförteckning för December/January 2026 från The Critic

My Italian stallion ITALY’S ANSWER TO ASCOT, THE GRAN PREMIO DI Merano takes place on the last weekend of September on what must be the most beautiful racecourse in the world, set in a valley of apple orchards and medieval castles encircled by the Tyrolean Alps. Merano became fashionable as a spa town when the Empress Sissi came to take the waters in 1870 and is still possessed of an unusual combination of wholesome sportiness and Belle Epoque glamour. I was lucky enough to be the guest of the family who still sponsor the Oreste de Strobel steeplechase in honour of their ancestor, who established the Merano races in the late nineteenth century. After a sumptuous lunch in the mellowest of autumn sunshine and an inspection of the trainers’ enclosure,…

BRITISH LIBERALISM HAS BECOME THE nation’s religion. It establishes the parameters for what may legitimately be said, and done, in public — and, increasingly, in private too. This is as true for the Conservative Party as it is for Labour, the civil service, the media class, the intelligentsia, the academy (which is not the same as the intelligentsia), the courts, the police, the trade unions, the Church of England (and Church of Scotland), the monarchy, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, the quango complex, the charities, the museums and others besides. Liberalism of this sort is not merely a political language, but a state of mind with strong totalising tendencies. It resembles what the reactionary Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling called a “public doctrine” — and an extraordinarily potent…

CRESTING A HILL AT SUNSET ON AN UNFAMILIAR DUAL CARRIAGEWAY SOUTH OF Nottingham, the stupendous view ahead was such that I wanted to stop there and then to take it in. A slip road under a cat’s cradle of high voltage wires allowing an escape from tailgating, rush-hour traffic, led through a knot of roundabouts to East Midlands Parkway, an isolated station on the Sheffield to St Pancras main line set cheek-by-jowl with eight colossal concrete cooling towers. These awe-inspiring structures, each taller than St Paul’s Cathedral and three times the diameter of its inner dome, were what had caught my eye. Now, I knew where I was. This was Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, closed in September 2024 and the last of its English coal-powered kind. King Coal may have been…

ON 15 JUNE 2014, A LONG ESSAY BY Ta-Nehesi Coates appeared in the Atlantic, presenting “The Case for Reparations”. Bloomberg’s Noah Smith raised some eyebrows last year for naming Coates as one of the five most important people of the 2010s. Reading “The Case for Reparations” today, one begins to see Smith’s point: it’s like that apocryphal lady who, watching Hamlet for the first time, complained “I don’t see why people admire that play so — it is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together”. All the ideas of 2020 are there, in embryo: America was founded on exploitation and brutality; the Civil War was fruitless, because slavery persisted under other guises; this explains all racial disparities today. Just as familiar to the post-Floydian reader is Coates’s cloying, therapeutic demeanour.…

LUKA IVAN JUKIC’S HISTORY OF CENTRAL Europe, first termed as such by the German geographer Georg Hassel in 1805, recounts its politics, culture and history from the election of the Habsburg Emperor Leopold II in 1790 through to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Though Ukraine was not commonly considered part of Central Europe, that Jukic should conclude his history as he does is indicative of the uncertainty surrounding how Central Europe should be defined. His book is as much about the concept of the region as its history. For Hassel, as for others, it was a bulwark between Napoleonic France and tsarist Russia — with the Habsburg Empire and Hohenzollern Prussia (rarely a united front) standing in their way. The term remained in use until 1918, “reflecting a unique…

‘‘A PERSONAL LIBRARY IS THE ARCHIVE of a life.” So claims the poet, academic, translator and former bookseller Ian Patterson in this memoir of a life spent in and around books. While libraries were once widely seen as the essential means by which a person could navigate and interpret the world, nowadays they are more typically deemed an optional supplement to good WiFi. This, for Patterson, is a crisis that must be addressed. In his captivating survey of his own library, he insists that our need for physical books is greater than ever. Patterson’s reasoning is by turns practical and ideological. He notes that, after the 2023 cyberattack on the British Library, “the advantage of the material object ought to be obvious, despite the space each book needs to occupy”.…

WHEN I READ THAT THE FRENCH travel writer Sylvain Tesson hoped that a high-altitude ski trek across the Alps would help him realise his “longtime dream of transforming travel into prayer”, I wondered if he had lost his marbles. “Travel would become a displacement devoid of purpose, suspended in monochrome,” he went on. “There would be sweat, silence and ski tracks. The gates would open. Diluted, I would enter a virgin realm.” This is a book about White — snow, fog, sky, snow, clouds, and more snow — but perhaps in this bizarre supernatural-alchemical experiment he had got lost somewhere altogether darker, in the deep recesses of his fundament. I needn’t have worried. Although the levels of pretension can be off the charts, this latest offering from Tesson is a…

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PRINCESS NOKIA SOUNDS ANGRY from the first track on her album Girls, released this October. “Blue Velvet” is a sinister, savage take on male violence and a feminine urge for vengeance that comes on like Nicki Minaj delivering Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. “Men are violent liars, Adam’s apples prove they’re thieves,” she raps. On the cover, she sits on the floor with red-stained underwear on show to the camera. Unsurprisingly, when I see her play Koko in Camden in November, there aren’t many men in the audience, and the ones who are there are nearly all either accompanying a girlfriend or chaperoning a teenage daughter. There’s also my 23-year-old son, who I’ve dragged along with me partly so I don’t feel completely alone in what I expect to be a…

WHO ARE WE REALLY? If we retend to be someone else do we become that person? And if we do, what price do we — and those who believe us to be a different person — pay? Such questions of identity have long been fertile ground for writers and directors. Donnie Brasco is generally regarded as the gold standard in the undercover cop genre. Johnny Depp gave the performance of a lifetime in the 1997 gangster film. It told the true story of an FBI agent, Joseph D. Pistone, who infiltrates the mafia as a jewel thief. Pistone spent six years deep inside one of the world’s most dangerous crime dynasties. His schizophrenic existence exacted a high price. He became inured to violence. His personality changed, putting a terrible strain…

FOR ALL ITS PROCLAIMED INTEREST in a global future, signalled by museums’ lip service to non-Western perspectives, contemporary art’s view of truly distant ideas is blinkered by some very narrow geopolitical interests. The early years of this century, for example, saw concerted efforts to extend art world infrastructures and ideologies to East Asia, giving rise to a small boom of Western art dealership offshoots in Beijing and a wave of overseas students arriving in European art schools. These attempts have since waned as the flows of art money and attention redirected to the Middle East. But what is art’s response if, as many commentators predict, the twenty-first century does turn out to be dominated by China? The critical reception to the 2016 video essay Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), made by the…

HERE’S A GOOD CHALLENGE for the Christmas quiz. Guess what this could be: in 1917 the US Navy ordered a new-fangled piece of machinery for three recently constructed battleships. Later, this indispensable contribution to the weapons of war became standard issue on all US Navy ships. Its presence eased work for those below decks, and enhanced life for those above. And it has continued to help, not just within the armed forces, but in civvy street, too. Its design has changed little through the years, and it is estimated that there are currently over 50 million of these contraptions in use worldwide. Guess no further: it is the KitchenAid food mixer. Born in the US of A. Reassuringly expensive — Fortnum’s have a nifty-looking bespoke copper and duck-egg blue number…

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED ON your local high street Clarendon Fine Art. This company sells twentieth-century and contemporary art for less than £1,000 up to £1m in more than 90 locations across the UK (and one in the USA). They describe themselves as offering “exclusive artwork in an inclusive atmosphere, and that is what makes us so different”. Clarendon Fine Art’s success flies in the face of the recent spate of gallery closures. In 2024 the company turned over £87m (and the year before, £94m). This puts it firmly in the mega gallery league. The widely respected US gallerist, Tim Blum, announced earlier this year that he was “sunsetting” (i.e. closing) his galleries, although he had worked extremely hard and, to many, had appeared to be making a success of…

A couple of miles inland from the north Norfolk coast, there is a small patch of water meadow with a stand of old beeches on its northern edge. The woodland understory beneath the trees is so dense that most spaniels look at it and decide to turn back. Any that do push through on cold January mornings put up extraordinary numbers of woodcock. For the past two years, I’ve rented that little meadow and have shot over it three or four times a year. There are hares, there are lapwings, and a small herd of native cattle graze in the summer months. It isn’t much more than 40 acres, but it’s where three farms come together. A couple of days ago, I set out with a few neighbours and their…

SOMETIME IN THE NEW YEAR, FORM and fitness permitting, JAMES MILNER will break Gareth Barry’s record of 653 Premier League appearances, and no one will deserve the accolade more. Statistics can obscure as much as they reveal, but even the briefest glance at Milner’s figures reveal the extent of his achievement. When he made his Premier League debut aged 16 for Leeds United in November 2002, Tony Blair was in Downing Street, Cole Palmer was six months old, and Jude Bellingham’s mother was in her first trimester. Milner is both the second-youngest and second-oldest Premier League goalscorer, he’s played for managers born 60 years apart (Bobby Robson and Fabian Hürzeler), and he’ll turn 40 on 4 January. Impressive as they are, these numbers are only a small part of Milner’s…

An influential American gender clinician brushed off parents’ concerns that transidentified teenage girls might later regret having their breasts removed YOUNG MEN, SAID ARISTOTLE, “ARE CHANGEable and fickle in their desires, which are violent when they last, but quickly over”. (He had little to say about women, regarding them as inferior because they couldn’t produce semen, which he attributed to their bodies being too cold.) Setting aside the cod science, most countries’ legal systems recognise, like Aristotle, that the desires of youth are strong but fleeting. With varying age cutoffs, laws protect young people from regret by banning activities that risk long-term harm, such as buying alcohol or cigarettes, taking on debt or getting tattooed. This insight that teenagers and young adults are impulsive and mercurial sits awkwardly with the…

FOR DECADES, VISITORS TO PARLIAMENT WERE TOLD THAT A PATCH OF MISMATCHED FLOOR TILES IN ST STEphen’s Hall, on the way to Central Lobby, marked where the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated in 1812. Two centuries later, these rogue tiles were lifted during restoration work and turned to fit the pattern of the rest, leading Robin Butler, the former cabinet secretary, to table a question asking why this quirky tribute had been erased. Reply came back that the mispatterned area never had anything to do with the late prime minister, who was shot at the other end of the room. It was simply a botched post-war repair job. No such error lies beneath the red carpet tile in a sea of grey on the floor of the tower…

WHEN MARTIN GRAHAM DIED IN April this year, a light went out in the world of opera. You might have read the obituaries: Graham was the Gloucestershire music-lover who staged Wagner’s Ring cycle in his chicken shed and created one of England’s most ambitious country house opera festivals in his back garden at Longborough. Except Longborough isn’t a country house, and Graham wasn’t some Glyndebourne-style landed toff. He was self-made; an autodidact who left school at 17 to labour on a building site and listened to the Third Programme on his transistor as he heaved bricks. “Building an opera house is easy,” he liked to say. “You just go into a field and start digging.” Martin Graham’s story doesn’t appear in Alexandra Wilson’s new book, but it doesn’t need to.…

IT’S THAT TIME WHEN WE ROUND UP THE best fiction of the year that wasn’t covered in this column. And there will be no repeats of the best books we did cover: that would include a trio of excellent works on aspects of modern masculinity: Cynan Jones’s Pulse, Benjamin Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, and David Szalay’s Flesh — the last justifiably won this year’s Booker Prize for fiction. Here are the ones that almost got away. Debut of the year IF THE BEST TIME TO PUBLISH A DEBUT NOVEL IS “not yet”, then this book is proof of the benefits of taking your time: the author is in his forties, and escapes the risk of growing up in public. Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain wears its influences clearly: the…

“OH, BEWARE MY LORD OF JEALOUSY! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” Iago’s (ironically intended) words to Othello nevertheless hit upon a universal dramatic truth, namely that plays revolving around envy — whether based on class, sex or money — often make for richly compelling viewing. Get it wrong, however, and the results can be tortuous. Two new productions, each of which touch on the theme in different ways, cannot be accused of lacking ambition. Walking into Jack Holden’s adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty, I was unsure what to expect. Hollinghurst’s book, in which a naïve but personally ambitious young gay man becomes the houseguest of a wealthy Tory MP and his family, is a languid fantasia on…

RADIO TIMES HAS A COMFORTING ring. People have been reading the weekly listings magazine for 102 years, which means it is only one year younger than the BBC, whose radio programmes it was set up to promote — though listeners would have said they were tuning into “the wireless”. People still read Radio Times; more than 400,000 every week, it is believed. But these days it is a different beast to the publication which put Valerie Singleton (and Shep) on the cover. At times it seems to be the mouthpiece of the BBC’s re-education unit, where offenders are liable to be punished strictly if they do not pay attention. One of the first editors, between 1927 and 1933, was Eric Maschwitz, who enjoyed a life of remarkable variety. He is…

THIS YEAR THE STIRLING PRIZE was won by Appleby Blue almshouse, a beautiful project designed by Witherford Watson Mann who also won the prize in 2013 for their intelligent reconstruction of Astley Castle for the Landmark Trust. Since the almshouse scooped three of the RIBA prizes, including Client of the Year, much less attention was paid to the rear extension to a tile-hung 1890s terrace house on West Hill in Hastings. Normally, such projects are below the notice of the judges of architectural awards, who are usually looking for large-scale ambition and bold invention. But times are changing and this year not one, but two houses made it to the shortlist, an indication that many architects only work at relatively small scale. It’s good that the jury acknowledged that many…

LAST MONTH JO BARTOSCH OF this parish asked my advice for a good sparkling wine that wouldn’t break the bank to serve at the launch of her new book Pornocracy, written with Robert Jessel. After consulting my extensive notes from all of this year’s wine merchant tastings, I was slightly surprised that the clear winner was a Cava: Joan Sarda Reserva Brut 2021 which Corney & Barrow is selling for £14.25 a bottle. Cava, Spain’s answer to Champagne, used to be awful. I spent six months in Barcelona in the 1990s trying without much success to learn Spanish. No occasion was too small for someone to crack out the Cava. I knocked back gallons of the stuff in special bars called xampanyeries, literally Champagne shops, “x” makes a “ch” sound…

“And from the castle in the water meadow and the castle on the hill, to the west and Caernarvon, castle of Wales. Wales, where music is mined from the deep ground, where Merlin prophesied and Arthur sleeps, and the sun melts at evening on the sands”. Christopher Fry, with help from Dylan Thomas and that chap from Stratford, conjured a vivid evocation of our ancient islands, delving deeply into myth to colour his script for the 1953 coronation. In swinging his verbal thurible, Fry gave a whiff of the old religion to the New Elizabethans. In doctrine even more ancient, in the time of the druids so legend has it, Merlin the magician dwelt at Dinas Emrys high in the mountains of Snowdonia. Here two dragons fought, one white the…

THERE’S NO NEED FOR FESTIVE fashion articles because Christmas isn’t about fashion, it’s about style. I say this less in the sense of its sartorial constituents being unchanging (jewel tones, metallics, velvet, sequins, sad-sack suburban sparkle), than that of styling it out, i.e. dragging oneself through the bloody thing while preserving some remnant of dignity. There’s been a shift in the last few months to guises that are more fitted, dressed and cartoonishly feminine than in recent years. Still, given that fashion has slowed to a planet-saving amble, this party season one can very much sport what one wore last Yule. I finally succumbed to my Christmas ’24 hot tip this autumn. Viz, Me+Em’s Forever Shawl Collar Tux Blazer in ivory (£350, meandem.com) with its Forever Relaxed Tux Man Pant…

WHEN RICHARD NIXON coined the “war on drugs” in 1971, he was speaking metaphorically, assimilating the fight against illegal narcotics to armed conflict. We live in an age where nuance is regarded as an affectation, so it was not entirely surprising that Donald Trump should have taken the expression at face value. Since September, United States’ armed forces have been destroying from the air small vessels, which are allegedly used to transport drugs, in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific. As I write these words, almost 100 people have been killed in those strikes. The Trump administration has gleefully posted footage of these strikes for social media brownie points. Unsurprisingly, the American left is enraged; but criticism has also emerged from less traditional quarters. John Yoo, the law professor who…

‘‘WHAT DOES IMPARTIALITY MEAN AND how should it look in practice?” were questions I had to constantly ask during my seven years in charge of Ofsted, a non-ministerial government department staffed by civil servants. I had to do so because of the civil service’s preference for adopting its own favoured agendas at the expense of impartiality. The first time I took a position on Ofsted’s own impartiality came early, when I was asked to continue Ofsted’s membership of Step Up to Serve, a thoroughly worthy campaign sponsored by Prince Charles (as he then was) to promote volunteering. Despite the campaign’s obvious merits, I felt it could undermine Ofsted’s perceived impartiality, for example when inspecting a school that was also active in the campaign. I therefore ended our participation, and with…

PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE A young Charles Dickens took the minutes of my church’s Vestry meetings, or perhaps because our government, sitting Scrooge-like in its offices, has gifted its people with eye-watering tax hikes for Christmas, but I feel the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come knocking at the door. Follow this ghost as it takes us to two winter holiday destinations: Venice and Dubai. Across the Alps we fly with our ghost, to the canals of Venice. As Wordsworth put it in his poem “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic” Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee; And was the safeguard of the west: the worth Of Venice did not fall below her birth, Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty. Beautiful, shimmering, romantic; dead. She was once…

WHEN THE AUTHOR, OFFICER and roué Simon Raven died in 2001 at the age of 73, his biographer Michael Barber wrote in the Guardian that he “combined elements of Flashman, Waugh’s Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester”, and accurately called him “this total one-off character”. A quarter-century after his death, Raven’s place in the literary firmament should, by rights, be negligible, if he is ever discussed at all. He was never a bestselling author, making more of the money he swiftly spent from television dramatisations. The books themselves, heavy on deeply un-PC content and unrepentant, if tongue-in-cheek, snobbery directed towards anyone who did not attend a leading public school and Oxbridge, seem as anachronistic in our current age as PG Wodehouse — or, for that matter, Flashman. Yet Raven,…

ALFRED TENNYSON WAS ONE OF ENGland’s finest poets, made Laureate of the British Empire after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, and also elevated to the peerage for his contributions to literature — an honour he twice refused (in 1865 and 1869), before finally accepting in 1884. With his full bardic-apostolic beard, he comes down to us as the very archetype of the Victorian patrician: a favourite of the Queen, his most remembered poem is “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, a panegyric for bluff courage in service of the Crown for which he was the well-plumed canary. Richard Holmes’s wonderful new biography opens by inviting us to ponder this man as he sits larger-than-life, emmarbled and immortal, in the antechapel of his alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge. Holmes would have us…

TIME WAS WHEN FILM MUSIC COMPOSERS weren’t taken very seriously. More than that: any classical composer whose music was deemed to have pre-empted film music was regarded with scholarly suspicion. Rachmaninov suffered posthumously from this “taint”; so did Puccini. How things change. Today musicology foregrounds popular repertories, and in some institutions students are more likely to study film music than the works of the now “suspect” classical canon. It is a sign of the times that John Williams, Hollywood’s most well-known tune-smith, should have Proms concerts dedicated to him, and now be the subject of a doorstopper of a biography from a major academic press. Born in Queens, New York, in 1932, the son of a session drummer, Williams was exposed early to the world of showbusiness. It was sitting in…

THIS HAS BEEN A YEAR OF THATCHER anniversaries. We marked the centenary of her birth in October, while February marked 50 years since she became Leader of the Opposition after the Tories had lost two elections in quick succession. Anyone who hasn’t read Charles Moore’s monumental three volumes can now enjoy his pellucid prose in more compact form. MARGARET THATCHER: THE AUTHORISED Biography (Allen Lane, £40) has been edited by Daniel Collings into a single chunky volume, but he has omitted little of substance apart from the scholarly apparatus. Strongly recommended for millennials and anyone tempted to confuse showmanship with statesmanship. Anyone looking for a life of Thatcher shorter than the 1,104 pages of Moore’s abridged tome, would be well advised to avoid Tina Gaudoin’s The Incidental Feminist (Swift, £22). Her thesis,…

A GLANCE AT ANY PASSING CLUTCH (or would bevy be a better word?) of critics, pasty, dead-eyed, Salvation Army teeth and hair, is enough to assure you that we are not a well or happy breed — but then how could we be, selflessly sitting there night after night in harm’s way, intercepting the very worst the dreaded “creative class” of curators and directors can throw at us — so that you don’t have to? In such circumstances one must take one’s pleasures where one may, and a happy standby in recent years has been the spectacle of audiences in revolt when they perceive they are being patronised, swindled, or at any rate not getting what they paid for. And sometimes it’s perfectly justified, a laudable reaction against weaselly directors…

CHRISTMAS, AND THE FAMILY gathers round the television for a little light murder. On Netflix, after a throat-clearing cinema release to establish that this is definitely a real film, we get a new Knives Out mystery. Rian Johnson’s first film in this series was a blast of fresh air in 2019. It felt like something completely new, even though it was recognisably doing something pretty old: a country house murder mystery for the 21st century. The formula was a complicated twistladen crime, a cast of A-listers enjoying themselves in loathable character roles, and Daniel Craig struggling with a New Orleans accent as master detective Benoit Blanc. The films are both funnier and nastier than Agatha Christie, and there is a constant danger of falling into pastiche. Blanc’s second outing, Glass…

THE THINGS THAT I WOULD LIKE TO be done to cybercriminals who prey upon the vulnerability of random citizens and small businesses are so brutal — so sadistic — that they would make the Inquisition look like social work. The consequences of their crimes are bad enough. But there is also a sliminess to their criminality. Say what you like about burglars — who I am definitely not attempting to excuse — but at least they will expose themselves to some physical risk. Cybercriminals will ruin your life — or your grandmother’s life — from the comfort of their homes. But the hatred contains an element of implicit respect. Beyond the most amateurish fraudsters claiming to be Nigerian princes or Taylor Swift, I couldn’t do what they do. In fact,…

WE FEEL A HUGE PRESSURE to buy new books as Christmas presents, yet like William Hazlitt, who famously declared “I hate reading new books” in his 1821 essay “On reading old books”, the most valuable books for garden design and landscape inspiration are often the classics. For the new owner of an old garden, some of the soundest construction advice and timeless taste can be found in Gertrude Jekyll’s original texts. The 1927 edition of Gardens for Small Country Houses by Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Lawrence Weaver, published by Country Life, (available on AbeBooks — avoid the less clear later reprint) or Wall and Water Gardens (1901), takes you back into the mind and manners of she who Vita Sackville-West called “Aunt Bumps”. Through these books the slightly blind and…

SPOKE TOO SOON. HECTOR very much not taking senior school in his stride. In fact I fear Penelope (the insane, borderline-witch tutor we used to coach him through Common Entrance) must put some kind of spell on her pupils to ensure success. I knew it was too good to be true when he got a non-waiting-list offer. The fog of cigarette smoke and cat food every time I dropped Hector off at her house should have warned me. But everyone said Penelope worked miracles, and so it came to pass. I know, I know. I should have gone with Amanda — equally insane but a younger, sexier tutor whose USP is getting boys into UCS/City/Highgate (no others). Seriously, she’s made the study of this Holy Trinity into some kind of…