Culture

This academic study of idleness is very deep, way deep, so deep in fact as to be virtually unreadable.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the President praising a book or a person or an idea, or really anything, that hasn’t been approved by a lot of people.

She’s a master of light summery pop songs.

The president may be averse to the arts, but he’s hardly shaking the republic to its core.

You know the feeling. One minute, you’re an oversexed adman, strolling the streets of Paris and propositioning every woman you pass. The next, you’ve walked into a lamp post, and knocked yourself unconscious. You wake up in the same Paris, but now the sex roles are reversed, and the hierarchies of power and values too. … Read more

You’ve probably heard that we’re in a boom time for the art business, breaking sales records as fast as we can make them. This might seem strange, in a time of such political uncertainty, but look closer: the art world is a fascinating canary in our cultural/social/economic coal mine, an odd liminal zone where profound … Read more

The director recognises Trump’s startling originality and willingness to look beyond the taken-for-granted modus operandi of the Washington Establishment.

This is a golden age for documentaries, if you have time to view them. Digital film and editing have reduced the cost of making a documentary, and online streaming has resolved the problem of distribution. The result is a glut of documentaries, generally well-made, and generally too long. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist comes … Read more

Dear 2016 WriteNow mentees, Thanks so much for your open letter to me. It seems only good manners for me to write back. You’re rightly proud of having been admitted to a challenging programme at Penguin Random House that mentors gifted young minority authors and helps to cultivate their talents. My own publisher, HarperCollins, runs … Read more

For all his reputation as one of England’s defining pop songwriters, America was Davies’ inspiration, and it is to the subject of America that he has been drawn these past few years.

Conrad Black explains how the President consistently and hilariously outplays his enemies, provoking and then exploiting the friction between him and them to raise himself to ever greater heights.

Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack … Read more

Niall Ferguson’s decision to disengage with students and their politics is wrong. While such a statement may bring glee to those on the left and may displease Ferguson himself, Ferguson’s reaction to his admitted bad judgement involving Stanford students is deeply problematic. Specifically, after being caught suggesting some fairly unethical behaviour regarding his engagement with … Read more

Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing … Read more

Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good … Read more

Clancy Sigal’s posthumous autobiography is sex, guns and celebrity from start to finish.

The movement calls for a change in culture as impossible as it is counterproductive.

Couldn’t ABC have reminded people that Roseanne Barr is mentally ill, and more in need of treatment than degradation?

Birds in the Ancient World is a consummation of all of Jeremy Mynott’s accomplishments

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and … Read more

The ‘Hollywood prince who torched the castle’ is to this decade what Samantha Power was to the last