“I feel like fame is just abusive,” Chappell Roan admits in a recent interview. “The vibe of this — stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public — is the vibe of an …
How to read like a man
A strange and telling bit of literary trivia is that two of the greatest English-language novelists of the last half-century — Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo — were not big readers when they were boys. Both took up reading as …
The tragic life of Brian Clough
The winter of 1962-63 was bitter. So many football matches were postponed that the FA Cup final had to be put back three weeks. In Sunderland, Boxing Day was raw and cold, “the kind of day when seagulls flew backwards …
William Dalrymple’s colonial complex
There was a time, still hovering on the limits of living memory, when Britain specialised in the manufacture of William Dalrymples. Eton and Harrow squabbled annually over who had produced the most William Dalrymples; Oxbridge was little more than a …
Bad omens for Neil Gaiman
“Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box; with art; by listening, and change this world for the …
How Fritz Lang invented fantasy
It’s one of the sad facts of our miserable climate of miserable prognostications about the state of the cinema that it continually obscures a simple truth: movies are very young. Compared to most artforms, the cinema is still in its …
How culture warriors exploited Creative Scotland
Those London theatre lovers living south of Watford might not have noticed, but Scotland’s small but lively cultural sphere has recently become the latest contested territory in the UK’s unrelenting culture wars. It was revealed last week that a part-time …
The annihilation of Michel Houellebecq
In Michel Houellebecq’s startlingly long new novel, the 735-page Anéantir, our Everyman protagonist Paul Raison is returned by family illness to his childhood bedroom. There, in typical Houellbecqian fashion, he jabs us with a completely heterodox, completely confident provocation: Matrix …
What incels get wrong about Fight Club
Everyone knows the famous exchange in The Wild One (1953) even if they haven’t seen the movie — a brassy dame in a blonde beehive asking Marlon Brando “What are you rebelling against?”, a slightly pouty-looking Marlon Brando answering, “Whattaya …
Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?
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. After all, Washington D.C. …
Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland
If you were to judge a country by the grim piety of its journalistic depictions, you’d swear Northern Ireland were one big funeral, begetting nothing but more funerals and all of us professional keeners. It’s not that the region isn’t …
The tragedy of body entrepreneurs
Katie Price is, ostensibly, in the news because of her finances. But Price has rarely been out of the news since the Nineties, when she became famous as a Page 3 girl. Determinedly, assiduously, she crafted herself into the perfect …
The worst novelist in the world
Budding novelists are always instructed to start their books in an arresting fashion. L.P. Hartley knew exactly what he was doing in The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” As did Anthony Burgess …
The dark heart of Joseph Conrad
Only once, in four decades before the mast of journalism, has an editor ever asked me to go anywhere in the world that I chose and damn (or at least file) the expense. A newspaper’s weekend magazine planned a special …
Nick Cave’s doctrine of doubt
Strange are the thoughts that steal upon you, a thousand feet underground in a Polish salt mine. Under the glow of chandeliers, surrounded by samizdat saints and kings, entire chapels carved in rock salt by generations of miners, I found …