The teeth were the detail that stuck with me. A friend had gone to the sentencing of the woman who stalked me — I can’t really call her “my stalker”, because she turned out to have many victims and I …
Kandinsky was betrayed by Left and Right
Expressionism, Nikolaus Pevsner snootily pronounced, was “the art of the ugly, an heroic stylisation of the hideous”. Wassily Kandinsky, its most exemplary adherent, was taxed with the charge of producing “art for art’s sake”. There is, admittedly, some truth to …
Dungeness is England’s last hope
I spent St George’s Day watching Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. The film is an apocalypse of sorts. It reveals what is to come. More importantly, it reveals what is already here. An opening monologue tries to pin down …
How Parklife skewered the Nineties
If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival …
Liberalism didn’t protect Salman Rushdie
Why did he do it? Hadi Matar, 24 — dim, lugubrious, incel-y — had by his own admission “read, like, two pages” of The Satanic Verses. Judging by his slacker patter, one wonders whether he fully understood them. Yet there …
The problem with Byron’s debauchery
In 1798, a lame, rough-mannered 10-year-old boy from Aberdeen called George Gordon Byron inherited a peerage, along with an abbey in Nottinghamshire, and grew up to be one of the most notorious Romantic poets of all time. He died two …
The metaverse of Fernando Pessoa
At the beginning of this year, I visited Lisbon for the first time, and thought I’d enhance the experience by reading some books set in Portugal’s capital. First, I read Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo …
The war for Sydney Sweeney’s breasts
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was the time of breasts.
By now, you will surely have seen the video of actress Sydney Sweeney at the end of her Saturday Night Live hosting …
Why we need more Kurt Cobains
It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain blew his own head off with a shotgun. It’s impossible to imagine mainstream rock success in bed with that kind of despondency in this day and age. Rap might harbour that kind of …
Has Beyoncé killed Jolene?
Not long ago, a post crossed my timeline featuring a black-and-white, heart-stoppingly gorgeous photo of Dolly Parton in the Sixties. The caption read, simply: “What the hell did Jolene look like?” One can only wonder.
As a musical artefact, “Jolene” …
Netanyahu’s regime is built on censorship
In the city of Haifa, in northwest Israel, the sounds of Arabic, Hebrew and Russian chatter fill the streets. In the Arab-Christian neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas lies Beit Hagefen, an Arab-Jewish cultural centre set in gleaming white stone. For 60 …
This book will send you to Hell
Last autumn, I finally read a book I’d put off reading for years because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that it would be uniquely harrowing. Jonathan Littell’s notorious, extremely long novel of the Second World War, The Kindly Ones, …
Britain needs to deploy Warhammer
If the BBC is the cultural expression of the British state, then the omens are surely unfavourable. Its funding contested and overstretched, bogged down in interminable culture war disputes, the BBC does not know what it is for. Every few …
America’s censors have committed their Guernica
America’s cultural mood calls to mind a bunch of people tentatively peering out from their hiding places in the aftermath of a torrential hailstorm. Is it over? Can we come out now? Are we still cancelling each other to death, …
The TV show that liberated Britain
To cheers, comedian Leslie Crowther strides into a studio and peers down at a gold-coloured card. “Wendy Partridge, come on down!” The camera cuts to a 300-strong audience that’s rowdier than normal for mid-Eighties ITV on a Saturday evening. Thrusting …
