If Oxford’s needlessly infamous sex-party scene (think the Piers Gav, or termly ketamine-fuelled fumblings in someone’s Cowley living room) is anything to go by, it’s a wonder anyone at all takes kink culture seriously. My sources assure me that spending …
Keir Starmer is haunted by England
How do you know you’re in a ghost story? It isn’t always obvious. The ghost, after all, usually doesn’t appear until the very end. But there are signs. Perhaps it’s the time of year, or the Ulster rain pawing at …
The tortured fame of Liam Payne
On TikTok, the BBC is running a livestream of a vigil in Buenos Aires; women in their mid-twenties gather with candles and side-fringes, singing One Direction ballads in heavy accents. News of Liam Payne’s sudden death aged 31 has broken …
Why Robin Hood was outlawed
Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s a famous outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin …
The tragedy of American blues
After President Biden’s farewell debate I had a problem. It was evident that Donald Trump would win. I fantasised that he would offer me the post of Poet Laureate, and I wondered if I would accept. Washington DC is hot …
Jilly Cooper knows what women want
How do you solve a problem like Rupert Campbell-Black? Since 1986, Jilly Cooper’s fictional show jumper has been mounting his way across the wives and daughters of her invented (but awfully familiar) county of Rutshire. Through 11 novels, the most …
Saudi Arabia is stealing snooker’s soul
By now, snooker should have died out. The game seems squarely at odds with a modern world ruled by speed — where facts are onscreen at our fingertips, and the patience required for slow-moving stories is increasingly on the wane. …
The moral weakness of Britain’s ruling class
Elite misbehaviour is the Ariadne’s thread, the unifying theme, running through Alan Hollinghurst’s oeuvre. From his debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, to his latest work, Our Evenings, his characters tend to be entitled toffs — or bourgeois parvenus with a …
Wuthering Heights isn’t a love story
Not many films are panned even before they’ve gone into production. Such has been the fate, though, of yet another version of Wuthering Heights. Already derided as melodramatic trash, some reviewers are wondering whether the director, Emerald Fennell, has …
The absurd optimism of Megalopolis
I attended a very special, and very strange, preview screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a few days ahead of its official release. Before the film ran, the screening audience was treated to what was surely meant to be a …
Antisemitism stains the art world
Venice during the opening week of the Biennale is the epicentre of the art world. Dealers rub shoulders with artists, sharing champagne and taking speedboats to after-parties in decaying palazzos. It is, at once, glamorous and intoxicating.
In theory, this …
Female ageing is the ultimate horror story
Contains spoilers.
When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More …
Inside the dangerous world of papyrus dealing
On 7 May 2018, Kim Kardashian made her annual appearance at the Met Gala. During the evening she posed for a photograph next to one of the museum’s newest acquisitions, a gold Egyptian coffin dated to the 1st century BC. …
Michel Houellebecq is literature’s Lucifer
According to folklore, somewhere in the Southern Carpathians there’s a university called Scholomance that’s run by the devil. Students are taught how to conjure spells, command the weather and ride dragons. What, though, might be on the devil’s curriculum? What …
Beware the weather gods
I drove home at midnight on Saturday through thunder and lightning, that stretched from horizon to horizon like a scene from the end of the world. The mood was made eerier by having eaten dinner outdoors, a scant few miles …