Robin Ashenden is founder and ex-editor of the Central and Eastern European London Review. His detailed accounts of the media attacks on Lionel Shriver and Toby Young can be read on his substack ‘Letting the Child Run Riot’.
Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube
Following the huge success of the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – from the book of the same name by John le Carré – there was much talk of a second movie, based on le Carré’s 1979 novel Smiley’s People. The possibility was floated by Tinker Tailor cast member Gary Oldman in 2012 and
For those of us not into Oasis in the 90s, the past month’s mania over their reunion has been baffling. Songs like ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ may have hit the spot but as individuals Oasis seemed far from engaging. As John Harris said in his book The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and
Shropshire is a strange county, little known by those beyond its border, and perhaps that’s part of its appeal. It not only has no coastline, but no city officially either. Phone cover is shaky and transport links sparse (at some times in the day, only one bus every two hours will leave my market town,
When the revolting news broke that Keir Starmer – whingeing lovechild of Oliver Cromwell and Captain Mainwaring – could be about to ban smoking in parks, public restaurants and beer gardens, I couldn’t help but think elegiacally of my own lifelong love/hate-affair with the pernicious weed, and to nicotine glories past. I was 13 when I started
Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a
If Labour is taking us back to the 1970s – and the recent strike-secured pay rises and mass rage about immigration suggest more than a nodding similarity between our own time and that one – anyone wanting a deeper insight could do no better than watch Bill Brand. This 11-part series, written by playwright Trevor
To finish or not to finish? The dilemma of whether to give up on books we aren’t enjoying or plough on to the end lasts a lifetime, but as we grow older it gets easier. We not only have less time, but also the increased confidence to decide that if a great novel isn’t engaging
The Tories are about to choose a leader once more, and this time cannot allow themselves any self-indulgence. In 2022, they sidelined Kemi Badenoch – far and away the most popular candidate with the party-membership – in favour of a choice between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Tory MPs resembled a football manager ‘fielding the
When you live abroad for long periods of time, you get accustomed to certain foods which, returning home, you can’t find anywhere, and the sense of a habit unwillingly broken is acute. If the foreign country is Thailand or Italy, you stand a good chance of finding dishes approximate to those you’ve left behind in
‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that
When I was a child I had a dream, as most kids do, of entering a toyshop and being told I could carry away with me as much as would fit in a large shopping trolley. In would go every kind of Action Man, every game of Buckaroo or Operation, and enough Star Wars figurines
If polls are anything to go by, Labour’s historic 1997 election win – 418 seats to the Tories’ 165 – is about to be dwarfed by this week’s vote. An exclusive survey for the Daily Telegraph recently predicted Labour would win 516 seats to the Tories’ 53. A political wipeout, in other words, seems to
Anyone over the age of 40 can scarcely help comparing this election, or the state of our two main parties, with those of the past. Though in 2024 it seems a choice between dumb and dumber (or grey and greyer), this wasn’t always the case. The government of Blair, Brown, Prescott and Cook seem like
Two days before leaving this country for Italy – where, defeated by southern British house prices, I planned to fight for a long-term visa and buy a home – I finally found the exact flat I’d been dreaming of, here in the UK. True, it wasn’t in East Anglia, where I grew up and most
With the news the Almeida Theatre is to stage John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger this Autumn as part of their double-bill ‘Angry and Young’ (its partner play being Arnold Wesker’s Roots), one can only wonder what today’s younger generation will make of it. Osborne’s first produced play, a portrait among other things
All my life I’ve wanted to take a narrow boat holiday down one of Britain’s canals but have never got round to it. There’s always been something easier and more pressing, perhaps even a touch more glamorous than a week spent floating around Britain – a trip to Andalusia, a city break, a train-ride round
I spent seven hours yesterday cutting up cardboard boxes into little square pieces with a Stanley knife and stuffing them into rubbish sacks. I’ve just moved house and my home is piled high with bulging black bags and looks like Leicester Square during the Winter of Discontent. Given that I don’t currently have the necessary
Following the introduction this Tuesday of Georgia’s notorious ‘foreign agent’ law by the ruling party Georgian Dream, there has been widespread popular protest in the capital Tbilisi. The law, proposed last year but postponed in the face of public resistance, demands that any non-governmental organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its funding from
To nearly any English tourist, the small southern Italian town I’m currently living in, half an hour from my daughter’s school, would seem idyllic. It has an old castle, a monastery and olive groves in all directions, but in Puglian guidebooks it barely rates a mention. It’s the scruffy, down-to-earth cousin of richer or bigger
