The hipster art-incest of Private Life
Private Life reviewed
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
October 3, 2018
The glory that was the Low Countries, the disaster that is the European Union
Jan van Eyck at the Frick Collection
October 2, 2018
Frame by frame, Gosnell tears apart everything America has told itself about abortion
Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer reviewed
October 1, 2018
Can Ye win with black economic nationalism?
Kanye West’s message could do for black America what Trump’s did for the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin
September 30, 2018
Ye he Kan! Why Kanye West’s SNL stunt showed real courage
His rant against Democrats was more fun and interesting than the celebrity-endorsed jokes against Kavanaugh that took up the rest of the show
September 28, 2018
Puritanism vs Pornography, and the agony of America
‘Tell ‘em Lindsey sent you!’ he squeaked, offering himself up like a human sacrifice on the altar of entertainment
September 27, 2018
Mr Trump goes to the movies
What might an evening at the flicks with the 45th President look like?
September 26, 2018
The real Durrells of Corfu
The family drama behind the PBS show
September 25, 2018
The very public review of the New York Review of Books
Surely supposed editorial issues at the NYRB could have been addressed without taking the step of dismissing Buruma
September 22, 2018
The coddling of American journalism
The snowflakes aren’t melting as they get older and wiser. They now have jobs in publishing and media and are marching through the institutions they work for
September 20, 2018
No-one comes off well in the Allen-Farrow family drama
We could believe either Allen’s version or Farrow’s, but that would get us no closer to the truth, because neither is trustworthy and both are proven fantasists
Ian Buruma and the age of sexual McCarthyism
The New York Review of Books editor is the latest casualty of the identitarian mob
September 19, 2018
Big Jay McNeely brought joy to millions with his music
The legendary tenor saxophonist died last weekend aged 91
September 18, 2018
It’s the blood that gets you
Delacroix in the flesh, at the Met
September 7, 2018
2001: A Space Odyssey still gets better as it goes along, 50 years on
The critics who disliked 2001 on its initial release found the characters empty and the plot thin — but it’s their criticism that has dated badly
Hank Mobley, the greatest sax player you never heard
Jazz may be an egalitarian, collaborative music, but jazz musicians honor their best with the laurels of hierarchy. Everyone knows the royal monikers of ‘Duke’ Ellington and ‘Count’ Basie, and most people know that Billie Holiday was ‘Lady Day’. But there’s also a whole aristocracy of hip name-drops: ‘The Baron’ (Charles Mingus), ‘Pres’ (Lester Young),
September 6, 2018
Sensation seeking
This adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play is handsomely mounted, as they say, and features a stellar cast (including Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss and Saoirse Ronan), but it won’t be setting the world alight. It is not a waste of 90 minutes, and Bening is superb, as if you even needed me to tell you that.
The scramble for the Middle East: Britain and America fall out
One of the many pleasures offered by Lords of the Desert, which narrates the rivalry between Britain and the United States in the Middle East from the end of the second world war through to 1967, is the quotations that are liberally strewn across its pages. They have been culled from memoirs or official documents
How a faulty map led to the discovery of America
Reflecting on the genesis of Treasure Island, the adventure yarn that grew from a map of an exotic isle he had drawn to amuse a bored schoolboy on a rainy day, Robert Louis Stevenson observed: ‘I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find that hard to believe.’ It’s
The personality test that conned the world
The other day in the Guardian’s Blind Date column, two participants, or victims, finished off an account of their frightful encounter by dismissing any chance of a future relationship: ‘I’m sure two ENFPs might wear each other out.’ The acronym is perhaps not familiar to everyone, but that, coming from a couple of young people
Hoping to find happiness
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon makes it clear that it has several. It’s about the shifting nature of history and the mysterious footprints of the past in the present. It’s also concerned with the myriad and biased interpretations that we
September 3, 2018
Any storm in a port
Reports of the death of bookstores are fiction. In 1931, there were about 4,000 bookstores in the United States. Almost all of them were gift stores, selling a limited stock of paperbacks. Only about 500 of them were specialist bookstores, and almost all of them were in major cities. True, between 1995 and 2000, the
August 30, 2018
Idris Elba’s directorial debut is a patchy disappointment
Yardie is Idris Elba’s first film as a director and what I have to say isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I love Elba and wanted this to be terrific. I wanted him to be as good from behind as he is from the front, so to speak. I wanted this to absolutely
A date with Venus in Tahiti
There is something about the Transit of Venus that touches the imagination in ways that are not all to do with astronomy. The last Transit occurred in 2012, and if nobody who watched it will ever see another, the sight of that small black dot, making its almost imperceptible progress across the disc of the
The old man and his muse: Hemingway’s toe-curling infatuation with Adriana Ivancich
One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village of Latisana and picked up an Italian girl — 18, jet black wet hair, slender legs — who had been waiting for hours at the crossroads. In the car, on his way to a duck
August 27, 2018
The Precisionist Impulse: in search of the first American art movement
The group melded the materialism of the urban landscape with what was idealistic and essentially Romantic about the city
August 25, 2018
Handling Pooh with kid gloves
Christopher Robin reviewed
August 23, 2018
The translator and spy: two sides of the same coin
Translators are like bumblebees. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible, and though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424. Meanwhile, bees,
How scary is dairy?
For tens of thousands of years, humans have been domesticating other mammals — cows, buffaloes, sheep, goats, camels, llamas, donkeys, yaks, horses — and keeping them for their milk. This has generated myriad products, from yoghurt and buttermilk through butter and cheese to toffee and ice cream, in many varied, culturally specific and resourceful forms.