‘If anybody had made a film of my year,’ says John Tomlinson, our latest musical knight, as he lolls on a sofa on the top floor of the Royal Opera House and enjoys a gentle chuckle, ‘I suppose it would have been called My Left Knee!’ It has been a memorable year for the world’s
The ideology of multiculturalism is theoretically meant to build a more tolerant, inclusive Britain. But in practice it is a deeply racist concept, one that judges people by their ethnic origin and thereby promotes division in our society. The very basis of multiculturalism is a contradiction of the democratic principle that everyone should be treated
About halfway through our interview, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, lets out a snort of exasperation. It had been building up for quite a while, I think; every time I quoted some good old leftie shibboleth about race relations I sensed a hidden snort or a stifled guffaw. Eventually the
Michael Henderson talks to the sporting hero who is set to lift England’s hearts at the Oval ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ But when it comes, as it has this summer, what joys fly upon its wings. As the fifth and final cricket Test against Australia takes place at the Oval this weekend,
The peculiar and very bitter New Labour vendetta against the BBC presenter, John Humphrys, has at last drawn blood. Our government really, really hates the man and it is being aided in its campaign by one or two sycophantic News International journalists and one or two naive or envious souls from within the BBC itself.
In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even
Paul Theroux’s new novel finds Slade Steadman, the 50-year-old author of a celebrated travel book, on the trail to darkest Ecuador in the company of some deeply unpleasant American tourists and his disillusioned doctor girlfriend Ava. The object of his quest is a rare hallucinogen, shyly administered by the local shaman, with which our man
This week’s disgusting attack on London will naturally be seized upon by politicians of all hues to advance their various agendas. Opponents of the war in Iraq have lost no time in blaming Tony Blair and British engagement for the bombs that hit London and killed dozens and injured many hundreds. They have a point.
When the poems of Philip Larkin came to the fore in the late Fifties, I admired his graceful colloquialism but was dismayed by his almost proselytising gloom; life wasn’t given much of a chance. So I decided that he was a great Comic poet — stretching the idea of Comedy to almost Renaissance widths and
New Hampshire There’s a moment in the new Batman (reviewed elsewhere in these pages) that made my ears prick up almost as much as those on top of the dark knight’s cute little Bat-mask. Bruce Wayne has just bumped into his childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes in the lobby of some Gotham City hotel. Unfortunately, he’s
What is the point of William Cobbett? Richard Ingrams claims that Cobbett was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived, yet his life is largely forgotten. He is remembered, if he is known at all, as the author of Rural Rides, a classic account of his travels around the English countryside in the 1820s.
Normally in racing you place the successful horse’s connections in the winner’s enclosure. After Motivator won this year’s Vodafone Derby at Epsom, it was a case of finding the winner’s enclosure amid the connections, the 230 members of the Royal Ascot Racing Club. I have not seen the Flat racing crowd in a happier mood
Damian Thompson says that the new Pope wants to promote the Latin Mass — and radical purification Benedict XVI is the first pope in history to have gone about his daily life as a Catholic priest wearing a collar and tie. In this country, the practice is almost unknown; in Europe, it is the mark
Lord Rosebery was the great lost leader of Victorian politics. Today he is a forgotten figure, but in his time he was the most famous man in Britain. Precociously talented and a star orator, he could draw vast crowds and keep them spellbound. He was the heir apparent to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal
To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he
It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes
Following his previous three novels — the work upon which much of Winton’s international acclaim rests — the 17 interconnected stories of The Turning come as something of a revelation. Those previous works, to this reviewer’s mind, have tended towards being overwritten and over-embellished (give-away epithets such as ‘lyrical’, ‘exuberant’, ‘inventive’ and ‘gutsy’ commonly recur).
The initial reaction to this solid little book must be ‘Oh no, not another!’ As Claire Tomalin says on the jacket, ‘A new approach seemed impossible.’ But ‘Susannah Fuller- ton, the President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, has brilliantly hit on one.’ Her theme is crime and punishment and it has yielded up
Certain concepts send even the least reputable historian scuttling for cover. The Holy Grail heads the list. The Knights Templar inspire grave suspicion; so do Atlantis and the Round Table. The Ark of the Covenant is up there with the best — or worst — of them. The Ark was the repository for the two
The people of the world are moving on, says Mark Steyn, and leaving Western Europeans — and Canadians — far behind New Hampshire I was stunned to hear they were closing the Rover plant at Longbridge. Mainly I was stunned because I had no idea they still made cars at Longbridge. I was vaguely following